Bengali Muslim Research Articles

The Pakistan Movement and the Bangla Poetry of the Islamic Trend:

The Pakistan Movement was a political movement that took place during the dying stage of the British colonial rule and demanded for a separate homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Some of the Bengali Muslim poets saw this Movement as a great opportunity to overcome the servitude of colonization. They thought a separate homeland for the Muslims would enable them to establish an ideal state based on Islamic nationalism. Moreover, the prospect of developing a distinct literary tradition for the Muslims also motivated them to support the Movement. This is why they regarded it their holyduty to uphold the ideologies of the Pakistan Movement in their poetry. This effort had become so pervasive that it led to the emergence of a distinct poetic trend in Bangla literature, that is, the Islamic trend. The poets of this trend, in the process of disseminating the ideologies of the Movement, showed strong resistance against the oppressive colonial rule by expressing tremendous concern for freedom in their poetry. Butthey emphasized Islamic nationalism and culture so much that, sometimes, they could not avoid being communal in their attitude. And all these issues are very significant from a postcolonial perspective. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to examine the poetry of this trend in the historical context of the Pakistan Movement and British colonization to addressits postcolonial significance by focusing on its themes of resistance, independence, culture, nationalism, and communalism.

A Cosmopolitan Reading

A Cosmopolitan Reading W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) The Lowland Jhumpa Lahiri Vintage Contemporaries www.upenn.edu/pennpress 415 Pages; Print, $15.95 The Cosmopolitan Novel Berthold Schoene Edinburgh University Press www.upenn.edu/pennpress 200 Pages; Print, $35.95 In “Declaration of Independence” in the June 23, 1997 issue of The New Yorker, Bill Buford, commemorating the Indian novel and the 50th anniversary of India’s independence from Great Britain, discusses a photograph of eleven international Indian writers who write in English. The picture was taken in London, with Arundhati Roy coming in from Amsterdam, Vikram Seth, who lives in Washington, D.C., coming in from Vienna, and others coming in from Toronto, Boston, New York, and Cambridge, with only Roy living full time in India. These migrant Indian writers transgress national boundaries, as they move from India, to Europe, and to North America, experiencing different languages and social and cultural norms and being an integral part of a globalized world. Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in London, grew up in Rhode Island, and went to college in India, belongs to this group of international, migrant Indian writers. Because of their globalized experience, and the subsequent intermingling with other cultures, these migrant writers belong to what Berthold Schoene in The Cosmopolitan Novel calls “cosmopolitan writers,” (writers who write novels not about the nation state but about “global culture”). They imagine the world rather than the nation. In this sense, Lahiri’s The Lowland is a brilliant illustration of the cosmopolitan novel. Told as a “complex and complicated sense of the present, which is multi-causal and multi-perspective,” The Lowland, with the Partition, the Naxalite movement, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency law, and Bengali Hindu culture and traditions as historical backdrops, moves between India and the United States and across several generations, telling the story of a family caught up in the intricate drama of globalization. As its focal point, it chronicles the story of two Bengali Hindu brothers, Udayan and Subhash, who grow up middle class (the class enemy of the Indian subaltern) in the Tollygunge section of Calcutta, with the marsh lowland, the Tolly Club, and a mosque near their home, signaling British colonialism and the exodus of Bengali Muslims to East Pakistan/Bangladesh. The brothers grow up in the 1950s and 1960s listening to Radio Moscow, the Voice of America, Radio Peking, and the BBC and reading Marx and Fanon. Although the two brothers are very close, they are different and they follow different paths. After college, the passionate and outgoing Udayan remains in India, becoming a revolutionary, worshipping Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Mao, fighting for an economically and socially just society, rejecting arranged marriage, and becoming affiliated with the Naxalite movement, whose objective is to overthrow the Indian government. With changes in U.S. Immigration laws in 1965, the passive and more conventional Subhash comes to the United States (Rhode Island) to pursue graduate work in marine chemistry. When the police find Udayan, who participates in the killing of a policeman, hiding in one of the ponds in the lowland and execute him, Subhash returns to India, marries Udayan’s pregnant wife, Gauri, returns with her to the US, and raises his brother’s daughter Bela as his own. When Bela is twelve years old and is visiting her grandparents in India with Subhash, the independent Gauri, who has just received her Ph.D. in philosophy, leaves an unhappy and unfulfilled marriage for a job in California. The saga of this complicated, international family drama is told from many points of views and perspectives, across two continents. Each major character tells his or her own story, with the novel intersecting, clarifying, amplifying, and juxtaposing the various perspectives against each other, without “a starry-eyed utopian or defeatist jeremiad.” What is particularly interesting and quite original in this well-written novel about Bengali Hindus is that, in the United States, they are not defined and do not define themselves as others or as minorities, with all of the psychological baggage of victimization and self-hatred, which can become the problematic of the text. Rather, they are presented as borderless migrants who...

Intimacies, Relationships and Socialities: South Asians and Racialist America in the Early Twentieth Century

Intimacies, Relationships and Socialities:South Asians and Racialist America in the Early Twentieth Century Ahmed Afzal (bio) STRANGER INTIMACY: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West. By Nayan Shah. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2011. BENGALI HARLEM AND THE LOST HISTORIES OF SOUTH ASIAN AMERICA. By Vivek Bald. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013. COOLIE WOMAN: The Odyssey of Indenture. By Gaiutra Bahadur. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2014. Much of the scholarly research on South Asian Americans has focused on the post-1965 period. The landmark U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act of [End Page 59] 1965 abandoned prior legislation that had used race as the basis of immigration to the United States. The 1965 legislation also discarded the national origins quota system that had favored European immigration and severely restricted Asian immigration to the United States until the end of World War II. Following the passage of the 1965 Act, Asia became a major source of immigration to the United States.1 Interdisciplinary studies about the South Asian experience have documented diasporic and transnational community formations and illuminated issues such as racism, class, gender roles, sexuality, and religious and national belonging. Pre-1965 South Asian immigration to North America has received comparatively little attention. Anthropologist and historian Karen Leonard’s Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Temple University Press, 1992), historian Joan M. Jensen’s Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (Harvard University Press, 1988) and anthropologists Norman Buchignani and Doreen M. Indra’s Continuous Journey: A Social History of South Asians in Canada (McClelland and Stewart, 1985) are among the few book-length studies that have documented the South Asian immigrant experience in North America in the early twentieth century. This scholarship has focused on the mostly Punjabi agricultural workers in rural California, the U.S. Southwest, and Canada. The three books reviewed in this essay build on the above pioneering scholarship and also greatly expand our understanding of the diversity and breadth of pre-1965 South Asian immigrant experiences. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013) by comparative media studies scholar Vivek Bald elaborates the experiences of the mostly Bengali Muslim men who were peddlers and merchants in New Orleans and ex-seamen in New York during the early decades of the twentieth century. In Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (2011), historian Nayan Shah explores the everyday life of South Asian farm workers in Canada, California, and the American Southwest. Journalist Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2014) documents the experiences of male and female indentured laborers who traveled to the Caribbean and South America for work on sugar and rubber plantations. These three exemplary and eminently readable books are essential contributions to the literature on South Asians in the Americas, critical race and gender theory, and early twentieth century American history. The meticulous research yields a multitude of surprises and rewards for the reader. These books provide important insights into the political economy of international population movements in the shadow of severely restrictive, if not prohibitive, racialized immigration policies.2 Indeed, the two empires—Great Britain and the United States—provide a critical historical backdrop for understanding the economic circuits that structured South Asian migration. This scholarship shows how race, gender, sexuality, and the law were complexly intertwined in shaping pre-1965 South Asian immigrant experiences. [End Page 60] In spite of such important interventions, it is the exploration of intimacies, relationships, and socialities that makes these books deeply compelling, thoroughly engaging, and richly textured. In this review, I focus on this troika found in the three books as a lens for illuminating South Asian immigrant experiences in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. In so doing, the discussion here focuses on the production, transgression, and contestations of attachments, engagements, and community interactions that developed among mobile populations, and were shaped by a range of “verbal and gestural cues, ethnical codes, and cultural frames” (Shah 55). As Nayan Shah notes in Stranger Intimacy, “migratory work and transportation crossroads produced environments of compulsory sociality, but...

Domestic Politics of Bangladesh and India–Bangladesh Relations

The foreign policy of a country generally changes incrementally but in the case of Bangladesh it changes dramatically towards India depending upon which political party or alliance is in power. The ideological cleavage prevailing in the country affects not only its domestic politics but also its relationship with its neighbour India. In this article an attempt has been made to explain why and how the domestic politics of Bangladesh affects India–Bangladesh relations. It explores some of the historical processes that resulted in the formation of community consciousness among the Bengali Muslims. It also discusses the interests of different sections of society, such as the army and traders, who influenced the country’s foreign policy in the post-liberation period as well as those who actively participated in the Liberation War of Bangladesh and who are pro-peasant and friendly to minorities. In this article the focus is on the domestic politics of Bangladesh. The main argument is that since there is no consensus in Bangladesh over how to best serve its national interest, the foreign policies of the two major political parties are completely different and allow the domestic politics of Bangladesh to affect the bilateral relationship with India in a way that is mostly independent of India’s actions. It also suggests that India can only be insulated from Bangladeshi domestic politics after the delegitimisation of anti-liberation forces in Bangladesh, which could happen with the successful completion of the war crime trials.

Remapping Muslim literary culture: folklore, Bulbul, and world-making in late colonial Bengal

Bengali Muslim literary culture comprises a conspicuously under-researched domain of colonial Indian history. That Muslims formed the majority of Bengal’s population by the early twentieth century has been recognized in a variety of sources, but the comprehension of this fact within the cultural and literary histories of colonial India has eluded modern historians. Late colonial Bengal saw the rise of a Muslim literary culture that included intense engagements with Hindus, Muslims of other parts of India, and Urdu linguistic and cultural references. These engagements, detailed in this article, include the rise of folklore collection, the creation of a new literary criticism, and critical engagement with pan-Indian Muslim thought in the 1930s. A visible forum for this engagement was the journal Bulbul (Nightingale), a 1930s magazine that showcased a specifically Bengali Muslim language, literature, and culture that would draw from both Hindu and Muslim elements and aim to situate Bengali Muslim writing and thought into a ‘world-making literature’. In line with recent developments in global intellectual history, this essay argues that Bengali Muslim writers and critics of the inter-war period cultivated ‘world-making’ practices that sought not to create a separate Muslim nation, but to integrate Bengali Muslim writing into a ‘world literature’.

Language, literature, education and community: The Bengali Muslim woman in the early twentieth century

Synopsis The issue of women's empowerment has a long history. This article intends to trace the issue of women's empowerment in the area that now forms contemporary Bangladesh. In this regard, we have delved into the early part of the twentieth century to look into women's writing in numerous journals that were beginning to be published in that era. Looking into Muslim-edited journals, we look into how issues of women's education, writing and the place of women in society were being debated. In this process, we have laid special emphasis on women's writing, using the examples that we have cited as part of a new form of women's voices. What we discover about women's empowerment in this process is that it is a fraught issue, and there is no clear-cut or direct path that can be easily delineated. Early twentieth-century anti-colonial nation-making processes were indeed complex, and in the Bengal region, veered between emphasizing a Bengali as well as a Muslim identity. It is interesting to see how issues of language and the position of women coalesce to form a very exciting arena for researchers.

ABO Blood Group Incompatibility among the Bengali Muslims of Cachar District, Assam

Present study is an attempt to investigate the fertility performance with reference to ABO incompatibility among 89 Bengali Muslim fertile couples of Cachar District, Assam. The findings of the present study reveal that mean conception and mean live birth are more among the compatible couples but mean pregnancy wastage, particularly miscarriage, is high among the incompatible couples.

Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal by Parna Sengupta (review)

Reviewed by: Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal by Parna Sengupta Kelly Elliott Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. By Parna Sengupta. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 222 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper and e-book). How might a pluralistic society—one historically fractured by tensions across differences of religion, culture, and political privilege—create a modern, unified national identity, while maintaining the integrity of communal religious identity? Both the Bengali Hindu bhadralok and the Muslim ashraf contemplated this question in the early twentieth century as Indians imagined a postcolonial future. As Parna Sengupta demonstrates in Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, nineteenth-century Indian religious leaders had already begun to explore answers to this question as they lobbied the colonial state on behalf of local vernacular primary education that included religious instruction. Ultimately, Sengupta finds, the efforts of both Hindu and Muslim leaders in Bengal to craft a modern religious subjectivity through education in their communities made it possible “to imagine how separate religious curricula (and religious communities) could be folded into a single school system or nation”—in other words, Indians had already begun to forge a “pedagogy for tolerance” (p. 152) in a plural society. Pedagogy for Religion challenges the assumption that religion and religious education are “backward-looking” or antimodern, and also counters the common belief that the Western imperial project in India had a primarily secularizing influence. Instead, Parna Sengupta comes to the surprising conclusion that nineteenth century Western Protestant mission schools in Bengal provided a model of education designed [End Page 721] to create a distinctively modern religious subject—a model that was then taken up by both Hindu and Muslim advocates for religious instruction in vernacular schools. As both bhadralok and ashraf sought to define modern Hindu and Muslim identities in the late nineteenth century, Bengalis “had to learn to possess and inhabit their religiosity in recognizable and acceptable ways” (p. 151). Their adoption of a modern religiosity played a key role, first, in obtaining the funding and support of the colonial government, and, second, in the formation and policing of community identities. Following the example of Western mission schools that privileged written over oral education, emphasized the creation of a moral, “civilized” individual, and embedded specific gender expectations into the curriculum, often with separate teaching for girls and boys, Bengali leaders sought to create vernacular schools that—far from inculcating reactionary loyalty to a static faith—taught Hindu and Muslim children how to behave as modern, “civilized” religious subjects who would themselves function as cultural emissaries, missionaries to their own cultures. Thus “religion and religious identity, rather than secularism,” came to define modern education in Bengal (p. 148). In Pedagogy for Religion, Sengupta, who is associate director of Stanford Introductory Studies at Stanford University, brings together three fields of study that are rarely placed in conversation with one another: the history of Western missions, imperialism, and education. She draws source material from all of these areas, reading English-language colonial government sources, especially the reports and records of the Department of Public Instruction, pedagogical manuals like David Stow’s 1860 Object Teaching and Oral Lessons, and mission accounts from the Church Missionary Society, Baptist Missionary Society, and Scottish Free Church mission, among others, alongside the Bengali and English publications of teachers and education reformers like Gopal Chunder Bandhopadhyay and Abdul Karim. The sources range in time from English missionary William Carey’s 1792 Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen, to the 1942 Report of the Kamal Yar Jung Education Committee, a document written by Bengali Muslim leaders in the context of coming Indian independence. The book thus covers a wide swath of Bengal’s colonial history, though Sengupta spends most of her time in the late nineteenth century. Occasionally, the broad scope of the monograph does make its overarching argument less clear. It is difficult to pin down in early chapters exactly what Sengupta understands as constitutive of “modern religious subjectivity”—a list of characteristics of...

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America by Vivek Bald (review)

Reviewed by: Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America by Vivek Bald Karen Leonard Vivek Bald. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013. 320 pp. $35.00. Vivek Bald has produced a masterful history of pioneer South Asian men and their women and children, mostly Bengali Muslim men who were peddlers in New Orleans and ex-seamen in New York. His painstaking research and fine writing gives us finely grained pictures of everyday life in those settings and others linked to them by these men’s patterns of trade and work. There is no bibliography, but the footnotes and especially the list of abbreviations at the back show the range of sources that Bald managed to locate and consult. He has drawn on birth, marriage, death, and naturalization records, ship passenger lists, and most impressively, the United States censuses from 1880 through 1930. Four tables and two maps, not listed in the table of contents, locate the men and their families in place and time. But the impetus for the book and much of the material comes from oral history, from descendants of the men and Bald’s interviews with them, so that we have their voices as well as we have statistical patterns. Bald and his chief informant, Alaudin Ullah, are producing a film as well, one eagerly awaited by the many, including this reviewer, who have seen working prints of it. With this book, lost histories are recovered, and Bald uses them to argue for the importance of working-class histories that linked South Asian men to African American and Puerto Rican women in urban locations, histories that drew together chiefly immigrants from Bengal, the American South, and Puerto Rico across the lines of race and language. Bald points to the significant roles of women at both ends of the migrations: Bengali Muslim women who maintained households and fashioned products sold by the peddlers in America, and women in America with whom the peddlers and seamen partnered, women who facilitated their integration into multiethnic urban neighborhoods, bore them children, and sometimes worked with them in businesses. This book also contributes to world history, as Bald investigates the economy in Bengal that sent men abroad; working conditions and competition in the shipping industry, as sail gave way to steam; and the immigrant-seeking factories and enterprises in the American hinterland that drew some of these men beyond New Orleans and New York. Bald shows many of the men supporting international movements for freedom from racialized power in both the United States and the colonized world, as well as participating in the drive for India’s independence, and then supporting Pakistan, and ultimately, Bangladesh. Some of these men also worked with other South Asian immigrants for American citizenship and helped develop early African American Muslim movements. The histories recovered here point to significant intertwinings of class, race, and gender, and not just locally but also at many levels of political solidarity and inclusion. These significant pasts, with those of Punjabi Mexican rural families in California written about by Karen Leonard (Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans), and South Asian men seeking intimacies with men as well as women, explored by Nayan Shah (Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West), give us a much more exciting and multifaceted picture of the pioneer immigrants from South Asia who arrived before the 1960s. While Shah argues that integration into the new country through heterosexual marriages was a goal of government rather than that of the men, and while Leonard shows that bi-ethnic families of the American West produced conflict as well as cooperation among family members, Bald argues that for the Bengali Muslim peddlers and ex-seamen alike, women of color and urban communities of color were crucial to their lives in [End Page 548] America. African American women and neighborhoods are emphasized in these stories of work and settlement, but the fascinating individual and family histories lead in many directions; the random first encounters of seamen jumping ship and gaining jobs and accommodations are notably diverse. Bald emphasizes the cosmopolitan identities of these...

New Cosmopolitanisms of Forgotten Diasporas

New Cosmopolitanisms of Forgotten Diasporas J. Daniel Elam (bio) Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. By Vivek Bald. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 320 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West. By Nayan Shah. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 358 pages. $65.00 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. By Nico Slate. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 344 pages. $39.95 (cloth). In a Georgia courtroom in 1909, Calcutta-born Abba Dolla pulled up his sleeve to show the underside of his forearm to the judge. Although the judge noted that Dolla was "dark," the skin on his forearms "was sufficiently transparent for the blue color of the veins to show very clearly." This allowed Dolla to prove "Caucasian" status and, consequently, gain US citizenship. Dolla had purchased a lot in a "whites only" cemetery, which strengthened his application for citizenship. But Dolla lived in a black neighborhood in Savannah and had suggested two black friends as character witnesses. Dolla's ability to navigate the arbitrary racial politics of the US court system runs parallel to his ability to navigate networks of support in Savannah's black neighborhoods as well as global networks of trade that stretched from Georgia to Bengal. Like Dolla, South Asian laborers and thinkers in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century left few traces of their lives, but they participated quite centrally in networks that stretched across the United States and the world. Three notable recent books chart this early diaspora: Vivek Bald's Bengali Harlem, Nayan Shah's Stranger Intimacy, and Nico Slate's Colored Cosmopolitanism. Bald focuses on Bengali Muslims in black neighborhoods in New York, New Orleans, and Detroit; Shah tracks the relationships that develop between [End Page 425] Punjabi migrant labor, poor white labor, and indigenous labor forces on the North American west coast; and Slate illuminates a shared struggle between black American and Indian anticolonial thinkers across the twentieth century. Though the three writers approach the period via different archival materials, all three reveal a history of a shared and global struggle against racial, imperial, sexual, and class injustice. These new histories of early South Asian migration and circulation give a thick description of itinerant lives in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. On three different scales—from the intimate to the global—these histories trace communities' attempts to support one another beyond or underneath the American and British Empires, and sketch alternative ethical and political projects enacted by those who have been neglected by the nation. The three texts under consideration advance the transnational turn that Janice Radway, in her presidential address at the 1998 American Studies Association meeting,1 noted as the most significant development in the field's recent history. These works join, on the one hand, the critiques of national homogeneity made under the rubrics of identity politics and, on the other, the critiques of US homogeneity highlighted by the nation's twentieth-century imperial practices. Such critiques make it difficult, Radway argued, to imagine a field of American studies that was loyal to any single imagined community. The figures under analysis in Slate, Shah, and Bald were active members in multiple affective communities, some of which stretch around the globe and some of which are within arm's reach. If these three texts challenge our assumptions about the homogeneity of migrant identity and neighborhoods of color, they should also challenge our assumptions about the conformity of experiences of transnationalism. Refuting simple celebrations of transnationalism (as well as daft critiques of globalization), these books focus instead on the discordant and inconsonant effects of global migration, dialogue, and travel. Transnationalism's twentieth-century history emerges as a complicated relationship of people not across states but within the fissures of borders. Slate's Colored Cosmopolitanism constructs a long history of activism beneath the color line, and catalogs the black Americans writing about, corresponding with, and acting with Indians from the turn of the century to the 1960s. "Colored cosmopolitanism," in Slate's...

Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America

In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

Dispositions and Destinations: Refugee Agency and “Mobility Capital” in the Bengal Diaspora, 1947–2007

AbstractThis study seeks to illuminate patterns of refugee settlement in the Bengali Muslim diaspora since 1947, which replicate global trends identified by Aristide Zolberg in new nation-states. Based on historical research and oral testimony gathered from over two hundred migrants in different settings in India, Bangladesh, and Britain, it suggests why some Muslims crossed borders after India's partition and others did not; why most moved only short distances within the delta; and why so many huddled in the shadow of the new national borders and so few traveled to the West. I uncover the subtle interplay between migrants' agency and structures of coercion, and between histories of mobility and of affect, in the shaping of migration choices, and explain how the recurrent patterns identified by Zolberg were produced in a regional context of critical but unexplored significance. The essay explores the impact of nation-state formation on older forms of mobility in the region, and the continuing interconnections between local micro-mobilities and regional, national, international, and trans-oceanic migrations. I suggest that the concept of “mobility capital” can help to explain not only patterns of migration, but also patterns of staying on. I conclude by questioning “cumulative causation theory,” which has inadvertently lent credence to fears that the developed countries of the West will be “swamped” by immigrants drawn from ever-expanding migratory networks based in the “third world.”

Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions of Pakistan, 1940–1947

AbstractThis paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali intellectuals and literary critics from 1940–1947. Historians of late colonial South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with colonial Indian ‘Muslim minority’ provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come into focus, the spotlight has centred on politicians like Fazlul Huq or Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy. This paper aims to provide a corrective to this lacuna by analyzing Bengali Muslim conceptualizations of the idea of Pakistan. Bengali Muslim thinkers, such as Abul Mansur Ahmed, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, and Farrukh Ahmed, blended concepts of Pakistan inside locally grounded histories of the Bengali language and literature and worked within disciplines of geography and political economy. Many Bengali Muslim writers from 1940 to 1947 creatively integrated concepts of Pakistan in poetry, updating an older Bengali literary tradition begun in earlier generations. Through a discussion of the social history of its emergence along with the role of geography, political thought, and poetry, this paper discusses the significance of ‘Pak-Bangla’ cultural nationalism within late colonial South Asian history.

Cultural Roots of Islam in Bangladesh and Islamisation

No culture can flourish without engaging with other cultures. As Gandhi stated, “No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.” The interaction of religion and culture intertwined in society nourishes each major civilisation and inspires and moulds human life. This is well exemplified in the emergence of Islam with its process of Islamisation in the Indian Subcontinent generally, and in Bengal (present day Bangladesh) in particular. Many Bengali Muslims who only several centuries ago may have been Hindus or Buddhists often feel uncertain about their national identity and search for a basis in Islamic faith, state nationalism, the spirituality of Sufism, or even ancient Hindu-Buddhist traditions.

Cultural Roots of Islam in Bangladesh and Islamisation

No culture can flourish without engaging with other cultures. As Gandhi stated, “No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.” The interaction of religion and culture intertwined in society nourishes each major civilisation and inspires and moulds human life. This is well exemplified in the emergence of Islam with its process of Islamisation in the Indian Subcontinent generally, and in Bengal (present day Bangladesh) in particular. Many Bengali Muslims who only several centuries ago may have been Hindus or Buddhists often feel uncertain about their national identity and search for a basis in Islamic faith, state nationalism, the spirituality of Sufism, or even ancient Hindu-Buddhist traditions.

Indigenization of Cinema in (Post)Colonial South Asia: From Transnational to Vernacular Public Spheres

This article investigates the indigenization of cinema, from production to reception, within the broader social, political, and cultural domain of early- to mid-twentieth-century East Bengal/Pakistan. As an attempt to fill certain gaps in South Asian film studies, Raju’s essay locates the early encounters of the East Bengal population with film through multiple public spheres. Raju demonstrates how cinema was a site of contest between various social groups from the 1900s through the 1960s in East Bengal. He challenges the dominant mode of nationalist, empirical-teleological historiography to interpret the absorption of cinema in the East Bengali cultural milieu. He further argues that the cultural adoption of the film medium may be seen through overlapping public spheres for different publics during the first six decades of the twentieth century in East Bengal, where and when the nationhood was always in mutation. This article thus elaborates how colonial rulers, non-Bengalis, as well as Bengali Muslims of colonial East Bengal appropriated cinema in different ways and later in postcolonial East Pakistan how both urban and rural Bengali Muslims indigenized film to construct their preferred identities. It identifies such events related to appropriation of cinema as and within various public spheres: from transnational and colonial to cultural-national and rural-vernacular. In this way Raju attempts to understand the specific processes of cultural appropriation of cinema, a Western technological medium in a largely Islamic and agrarian society of South Asia.

Between Craft and Method: Meaning and Inter‐subjectivity in Oral History Analysis

AbstractThis paper has three overarching aims: to contextualise oral history within larger debates over methods in the social sciences; to highlight the peculiar strengths as well as complexities of oral history as a method; and finally to elucidate some of these methodological issues through insights drawn from analysis of oral histories of two elderly Bengali Muslim women.

The absent piece of skin: Gendered, racialized and territorial inscriptions of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war

AbstractThis paper addresses how the wombs of women and the absent skin on the circumcised penises of men become the predominant sites on which racialized and gendered discourses operating during the Bangladesh War are inscribed. This is explored by examining instances of sexual violence by Pakistani soldiers and their local Bengali collaborators. The prevalence of these discourses in colonial documents about the Bengali Muslims underscores the role of history, the politics of identity and in the process, establishes its link with the rapes of Bangladeshi women and men. Through this, the relationship between sexual violence and historical contexts is highlighted. I locate the accounts of male violations by the West Pakistani army within the historical and colonial discourses relating to the construction of the Bengali Muslim and its intertextual, contemporary citational references in photographs and interviews.I draw on Judith Butler's and Marilyn Strathern's work on gendering and performativity to address the citational role of various practices of discourses of gender and race within colonial documents and its application in a newer context of colonization and sexual violence of women and men during wars. The role of photographs and image-making is intrinsic to these practices. The open semiotic of the photographs allows an exploration of the territorial identities within these images and leads to traces of the silence relating to male violations. Through an examination of the silence surrounding male sexual violencevis-à-visthe emphasis on the rape of women in independent Bangladesh, it is argued that these racialized and gendered discourses are intricately associated to the link between sexuality and the state in relation to masculinity.

NGOs, the Judiciary and Rights in Bangladesh: Just Another Face of Partisan Politics?

On 16 December 1971, Bangladesh emerged as an independent state after a 267-day war against Pakistan. The Bangladesh Liberation War is known as one of the worst genocides of the 20th century that killed, according to some estimates, 3 million Bengalis.1 Bangladesh’s independence came from a legacy of rights violations through internal colonization and against the backdrop of genocide. Formerly known as East Bengal and East Pakistan, Bangladesh operated under colonial rule for centuries: the loss of Nawab Sirajjudawllah’s throne to the British was followed by the exploitation of its eastern territory by West Pakistan. After living under the domination of the British, Bengali Hindus and West Pakistani Muslims, Bangladeshis became their own masters under the leadership of Bengali Muslims for the first time in 1971.2 Under British colonization and West Pakistani economic colonization, Bangladeshis experienced rights only as the subjects of an imperial ruler and had few opportunities for self-realization. Kamal Hossain, an eminent Bangladeshi jurist, notes that ``in a colonial society, a person was the subject of an imperial ruler, whose viceroys exercised executive authority without constitutional limits. They were thus under no constitutional obligation to respect the fundamental rights of their subjects, nor in these societies could the subjects seek judicial protection of their rights.’’3 1 Bangladesh Genocide Archive [last accessed on 2 May 2012]. 2 S. Ahmed, Bangladesh: Past and Present (APH, 2004) at 1. 3 K. Hossain, `The Role of the Judiciary as a Catalyst of Social Change’ [last accessed 27 October 2012]

Historical Developments of Political Islam with Reference to Bangladesh

This paper looks into the historic development of political Islam in Bangladesh, the third largest Muslim country of the world. Identifying origins and sociology of Bengali Muslims, this paper finds that development of political Islam took place in Bangladesh mainly in four phases: the Turkish war and the founding of the Khilafat movement during the First World War; the Oil crisis in the 1970s and the boost of Islamic institutions and practices in Bangladesh’s political discourse, mainly supported by the Middle Eastern countries; the Soviet–Afghanistan war and its linkage with Bangladeshi radicals in the 1990s; and by the globalization of war between Al-Qayeda and West and its implication on Bangladesh through the rise of extreme groups.