‘The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration’ fills what is missing in existing Partition Studies and speaks to our times.

The migration of Muslims to East Bengal after Partition has largely been ignored. Representative image of contemporary Bangladesh: Ahron de Leeuw/Flickr CC BY 2.0

Rituparna Roy

“Our focus on Muslim migration is deliberate. It addresses a glaring lacuna in Partition Studies, of course. But it also challenges essentialised accounts of ‘Muslim identity’ in a global climate of Islamophobia” – so declare the authors Joya Chatterjee, Claire Alexander and Annu Jalais in the introduction to their book, The Bengal Diaspora.

It’s rare to find an academic book that not only stretches disciplinary boundaries (here, history has been brought into conversation with sociology and anthropology), but more remarkably, aligns disciplinary agendas with contemporary issues of great import. The Bengal Diaspora is that rare work.

Consequently, it has the ability to speak to people beyond the rarefied world of academia. And it definitely speaks to the West Bengal of today, which has seen a marked increase in Islamophobia even as, ironically, its chief minister has sought to woo Muslim voters. There is a deep fear of “demographic imbalance”, of Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh – a fear that the the BJP tapped into during its election campaign earlier in 2019, and triumphantly promised to bring in the National Register of Citizens to West Bengal (should it win).

Islamophobia, however, is not new to Bengal – after all, it is one of the reasons why Bengal was partitioned in 1947 in the first place. As Chatterjee memorably put it in her pioneering work, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932-1947:

Bengalis were not passive bystanders in the politics of their province; nor were they victims of circumstances entirely out of their control, forced reluctantly to accept the division of their ‘motherland’. On the contrary, a large number of Hindus of Bengal, backed up by the provincial branches of the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, campaigned intensively in 1947 for the partition of Bengal and for the creation of a separate Hindu province that would remain inside an Indian union.

Muslims have unfortunately remained the “other” in postcolonial India: in West Bengal, we find proof of that not only in realities like the Muslim ghettoes of Kolkata (Rajabajar, Park Circus) or the Muslim-majority districts like Murshidabad (erstwhile capital of Mughal Bengal) where Muslim refugees fleed at various times after 1947 to be close to their co-religionists, but also in the under-representation of Muslim experiences in history and literature.

more:

https://thewire.in/history/partition-studies-muslim-migration-bengal