Author: Meenakshi Jain
Publication: Organiser
Date: June 26, 2005
URL: http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=84&page=19
Three months before the Partition
of Bengal came into effect, two leaflets began to circulate in the province.
Both appealed to Bengali Muslims to rise alongside Hindus in defence of
the mother country. The first entitled, 'Who is our King?' exhorted: "Brother
Hindus, in the name of Kali, Durga, Mahadev, Sri Krishna; brother Mohammedans,
in the name of Khudatala, circulate from village to village, that we Hindus
and Mohammedans jointly worship the feet of the mother native country.
We shall give life and take life. We shall not use foreign articles. We
must run our own country."
The second leaflet, 'Golden Bengal,'
believed in government circles to be the handiwork of Bipan Chandra Pal,
also called for Hindu-Muslim joint action against the British venture:
".We will form into bands and run in all directions, from village to village,
field to field, market to market, town to town, taking with us those who
are ready to die, and who know their mother, the golden Bengal, and being
united, we will beat and drive away Sahibs of the town and govern our own
country. We will do our duty somehow.
Mussalmans, Mother, entertain high
hopes in you. Strong as you are, broad as your chests are. say once 'Din!
Din! Allah ho Akbar,' and take possession of the towns by whatever means
you find at hand-lathi or sword, sticks or guns, or anything. You Hindus,
for thousands and thousands of years you have been talking high of your
Arya Dharma. Show to the people of the world your self-sacrificing manners."
Beginning with the swadeshi movement
of 1905, a predominant feature of the freedom struggle was its dogged determination
to enlist Muslim participation. As the Karmayogin argued, though Indian
nationalism was "largely Hindu in its spirit and tradition," it was "wide
enough also to include the Moslem and his culture and tradition and absorb
them into itself."
But in 1905, and for the entire
duration of the freedom struggle, Muslim cooperation proved difficult to
ensure. Resentful at being cut off from the colonial capital, Calcutta,
the Bengali Muslim elite briefly endorsed the swadeshi movement. However,
in July 1905 itself, the Mohammedan Provincial Union was founded to champion
Muslim interests, followed in 1906 with the Mohammedan Vigilance Association,
to collect evidence of Muslim oppression by swadeshi agitators. In December
the same year, came the All India Muslim League which hailed the Partition
as beneficial to the Mussalmans of eastern Bengal and condemned the swadeshi
movement as 'a Hindu agitation'.
In a calculated move to obstruct,
indeed torpedo, the 'Hindu agitation,' an intra-class alliance was struck
between the urban, educated Muslim elite and Muslim religious leaders operating
in the East Bengal countryside. The Mullahs were in fact pivotal in arousing
the Muslim peasantry against the swadeshi movement. For several decades
prior to the Bengal Partition, beginning at least with Hajji Shariatullah,
they had assiduously attempted to Islamise the lifestyle of Muslim peasants
and purge it of customs and practices shared with Hindu neighbours. Shariatullah,
on his return from pilgrimage to Mecca, endeavoured particularly to end
the veneration of Hindu deities and the celebration of Hindu festivals
by Bengali Muslims.
His son, Dadu Miyan, added to his
agenda a virulent economic campaign against Hindu landlords. Muslim peasantry
were instigated to abstain from paying taxes, on the plea that the money
could be used for Hindu festivities. The attacks Dadu Miyan organised on
Hindu temples and property were the first significant attempts to link
Muslim identity to resistance against Hindu landlords.
The Mullahs also organised anjumans
(associations) throughout rural Bengal to organise the Muslim community
around religious discussions and landlord-tenant disputes. Together Mullahs
and anjumans popularised religious reform and resistance through a literary
genre known as puthis. A typical puthi, Krishak Bilap (Lament of the Peasant)
described the key figures of rural society-zamindars, moneylenders, and
the police-as Congress Party members and urged Muslims to remember their
own community and religion, study Islam and not mix with other religions,
and rally behind the Muslim League.
British official communiqués
of the period record the 'new consciousness' among Bengali Muslims and
identify 'itinerant Mullahs' as the principal catalysts in stirring religious
passions and mobilising rural Muslims to 'violence and communal politics'.
On-the-spot verifications confirmed the extent of Mullah complicity. In
his report on the Melanda hut riots, the sub-divisional officer of Jamalpur,
Mr Barneville, observed: "It has been reported from various places that
Mohammedan Mullahs are going about amongst illiterate Mohammedans and exhorting
them to rise against the Hindus."
H.W. Nevinson, a visiting journalist,
noted the inflammatory role of Maulvis. "Priestly Mullahs went through
the country preaching the revival of Islam and proclaiming to the villagers
that the British government was on the Mohammedan side, that the law courts
had been specially suspended for three months, and no penalty would be
exacted for violence done to Hindus, or for the loot of Hindu shops, or
the abduction of Hindu widows. A Red Pamphlet was everywhere circulated,
maintaining the same wild doctrines."
The Red Pamphlet (Lal Ishtahar),
first came to light at the time of the establishment of the Muslim League
in Dacca. It circulated widely with government connivance. Written by one
Ibrahim Khan of Mymensingh district, its objective was to dissuade Muslims
from joining the swadeshi movement and to involve them in a swajati movement
(to promote the interests of one's own race), a forerunner of the two-nation
theory. In a strident note, it decreed: 'Ye Mussalmans arise, awake! Do
not read in the same schools with Hindus. Do not buy anything from a Hindu
shop. Do not touch any article manufactured by Hindu hands. Do not give
any employment to a Hindu. Do not accept any degrading office under a Hindu.
You form the majority of the population of this province. Among the cultivators
also, you form the majority. It is agriculture that is the source of wealth.
The Hindu has no wealth of his own and has made himself rich only by despoiling
you of your wealth. If you become sufficiently enlightened, then the Hindus
will starve and soon become Mohammedans'.
Thus, while heralding the commencement
of the freedom struggle, the Bengal Partition also marked the beginning
of modern communalism.
