Identity of a Muslim Family in Colonial Bengal

←viii | ix→

In the light of Benedict Anderson, identity lies in the realm of imagination; not always built on tangible realities, the distinctiveness is more about the ways people perceive themselves, and also about who got what in the course of history. ←ix | x→Notwithstanding the religiosity ascribed to it, Muslim identity has a relaxed posture here—Muslimness, as demonstrated through lived experiences, was not a monolithic countenance in rural Bengal of the interval delineated here. Chapter 7 (Muslim Identity Imaginations: “Never Apologize for Being a Muslim!”), more focused on the subject, steers with a quotation from A.K. Fazlul Huq (Fazlul Huq) in its sub-title: he was indeed an illustrious Muslim leader, the first elected premier of Colonial Bengal in 1937. The Bengali Muslims were, in their identity imagination, more likely inspired by such impulses than any academically fashioned theory. As a result, the account, at times, blurs the lines between personal recollections and the prevailing discourses on Muslim history, religiosity, and politics in South Asia.

Not a hagiographical account here, I relied heavily on what my father and family elders reflected upon their experiences and their historical recalls. Countless of my father’s verbal observations were not the neatly spelled hypotheses ordinarily preferred by historians and social scientists. Added to the Preface and the Introductory wedge, there are nine major chapters in this volume. Chapter 1 matched personal and family reminiscences with parallel memories including select autobiographies; other chapters too hosted the key premises with their motley underpinning. Further than the events and individual experiences covered here, I also scanned a few diaries, old letters, and the timeworn books from the extended family. Likewise, I surfed magazine articles, old political pamphlets, and a few exclusive books to get a feel of the time and society I entrenched here. Dispersed resources too included several Bengali fictions, non-fictions, classic Bengali movies, folklore, devotional songs, ghost/Jinn stories, art and architecture, morally infused rural parables, Sufi shrines, Hindu temples and puja festivals, punthi literature, allegorical tales, humorous anecdotes, informal adda (gossip), old coins and family wares, Sufi/sadhu discourses, and, occasionally, also family cuisine to trace how it reflected the Muslim lifestyle and traditions in rural Bengal from the past.

A precious slice of this account came from my old interviews with several senior political leaders in Dhaka in the 1960s; they were active in Bengal’s Muslim politics in the 1930s and 1940s, which stretched into the early years of Pakistan. This was part of my post-doctoral research, later carried at Columbia University from 1970 to 1973. Those informants in the late 1960s included Maulana Akram Khan, a senior Muslim League leader and a prominent/writer/editor in Colonial Bengal and East Pakistan; Nurul Amin, former chief minister of East Pakistan; Yusuf Ali Chowdhury and Azizul Huq, both former provincial minsters; Kamruddin Ahmed, political writer, social thinker and a diplomat; and Tajuddin Ahmed, then a prominent Awami League leader who, later in 1971, pioneered the ←x | xi→independence struggle for Bangladesh. A couple of them gave me a few political pamphlets and unpublished materials from the 1940s. This volume additionally carries the snippets of my prior study on the Muslim League’s demise and the rise of the opposition parties in former East Pakistan. Sections of those post-doctoral research projects were published in Asian survey and Pacific Affairs; this narrative is indeed enriched by those relaxed but rare voices decades ago—now they are lost forever as those information-providers deceased over the years.

My father’s invigorating idea that originally inspired this work —“if you add your own memories with those of your father’s, you get one hundred years’ of history,” is further enhanced in my Introduction. Added to that bracing, the sprawling story has four essential affirmations: (a) the village based recount here was, in several ways, a microcosm in the bigger panorama of undivided Bengal and British India (See Introduction, Chapters 1, 8 & 9); (b) the ancestral recalls including the supernatural tales and family nostalgia that seeped into identity formulation deserved a niche in the domains of history and social sciences (see Introduction, Chapters 1, 7–9); (c) the Muslims largely identified with the Jinn-stories, embedded in Islamic theological discourses (see Introduction and Chapter 3); and (d) the housewives like my grandmother and later my mother had their own voices in their respective families, but their historical contributions in social development were generally overlooked by the acknowledged chroniclers (see Introduction and Chapters 1 & 3).

Two interweaving reflections in this recount are: (i) a broad Muslim identity vision dappled the Muslim community of Colonial Bengal’s villages that possibly had regional and theological diversities (see Preface, Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, 4, 7 & 8), and (ii) the marginalized rural Muslim ryots were in the midst of the pioneers of the educated Muslim middle class in old Bengal; later, they flourished even more in post-independent East Pakistan/ Bangladesh (for details of this issue see Chapters 2, 3, 6, 7 & 8).

Virtual Hypotheses of This Narrative

Sufi eclecticism largely stamped my father’s interactions with his friends, colleagues, and occasional visitors (see Chapter 5 for a friend who came to learn ←xi | xii→from my father’s Sufi dispositions: the mystic inclinations are inferred in a couple of other chapters as well). Not in any strict sequence though, a few of my key assumptions, substantively gathered from diverse sources, are resurrected below: