The Political History Of Muslim Bengal

Bangladesh, the eastern half of earth’s largest delta, Bengal, is today an independent country of 163 million people. Among the 98% ethnic Bengali population, above 90 percent practice Islam. Surprisingly, Buddhism was the predominant religion of the region until the beginning of the 2nd millennium. In the midst of a long and fierce Brahman-Buddhist conflict, political Islam arrived in Bengal in the very early 13th century. Against the background of the above history, this book tells the story of successive religious and political transformations, touching upon the sensitive subject of Bengali Muslim identity. Encompassing a period of more than a millennium, it narrates a political history beginning with the independent Muslim Sultanate and closing with the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh. The book concludes by discussing the present day, here termed “Authoritarian Secularism”.

This book examines the impact of British education policies on the Muslims of Colonial Bengal. It evaluates the student composition and curriculum of various educational institutions for Muslims in Calcutta and Dacca to show how they produced the educated Muslim middle class. The author studies the role of Muslim leaders such as Abdul Latif and Fazlul Huq in the spread of education among Muslims and looks at how segregation in education supported by the British fueled Muslim anxiety and separatism. The book analyzes the conflict of interest between Hindus and Muslims over education and employment which strengthened growing Muslim solidarity and anti- Hindu feeling, eventually leading to the demand for a separate nation. It also discusses the experiences of Muslim women at Sakhawat Memorial School, Lady Brabourne College, Eden College, Calcutta, and Dacca Universities at a time when several Brahmo and Hindu schools did not admit them. An important contribution to the study of colonial education in India, the book highlights the role of discriminatory colonial education policies and pedagogy in amplifying religious separatism. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, religion, education, Partition studies, minority studies, imperialism, colonialism, and South Asian history.

In all of the South Asian subcontinent, Bengal was the region most receptive to the Islamic faith. This area today is home to the world's second-largest Muslim ethnic population. How and why did such a large Muslim population emerge there? And how does such a religious conversion take place? Richard Eaton uses archaeological evidence, monuments, narrative histories, poetry, and Mughal administrative documents to trace the long historical encounter between Islamic and Indic civilizations. Moving from the year 1204, when Persianized Turks from North India annexed the former Hindu states of the lower Ganges delta, to 1760, when the British East India Company rose to political dominance there, Eaton explores these moving frontiers, focusing especially on agrarian growth and religious change.

This work explores some of the constitutive elements in the life and mind of Bengal in the twentieth century. The author addresses some frequently unasked questions about the history of modern Bengal. In what way was twentieth-century Bengal different from 'Renaissance' Bengal of the late-nineteenth century? How was a regional identity consciousness redefined? Did the lineaments of politics in Bengal differ from the pattern in the rest of India? What social experiences drove the Muslim community's identity perception? How did Bengal cope with such crises as the impact of World War II, the famine of 1943 and the communal clashes that climaxed with the Calcutta riots of 1946? The author has chosen a significant period in the history of the region and draws on a wealth of sources archival and published documents, mainstream dailies, a host of rare Bengali magazines, memoirs and the literature of the time to tell his story. Looking closely at the momentous changes taking place in the region's economy, politics and socio-cultural milieu in the historically transformative years 1920-47, this book highlights myriad issues that cast a shadow on the decades that followed, arguably till our times.

Presents an analysis of Muslim political mobilization in the late 20th century, arguing that it emerged out of a sustained engagement with Bengali intellectual and literary traditions rather than from north Indian calls for a separatist Muslim state.

Presents an analysis of Muslim political mobilization in the late 20th century, arguing that it emerged out of a sustained engagement with Bengali intellectual and literary traditions rather than from north Indian calls for a separatist Muslim state.

"Sponsored by the Inter-Faculty Committee for South Asian Studies, University of Oxford."