ABSTRACT
Since Pakistan appeared to have become inevitable only in the 1940s, most historians consider the preceding decades as the prehistory of the Partition. Class and communal conflicts between Hindu and Muslim Bengalis predated the 1940s. The widening of the franchise down to the well-to-do peasants (1919), and the Khilafat Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–1922) by politicising the grassroots further communalised the Hindu-Muslim class conflicts and paved the way for the ‘Great Divide.’ This study demonstrates how religion and ethnicity played more important roles than did class differences in the ‘Politics of Partition’ in East Bengal, as peasants, traders, professionals and aristocrats were primarily mobilised along communal, not class, lines. While the British government, apprehensive of the Hindu nationalists, helped develop the Muslim/Peasant cause to counteract ‘Hindu Nationalism,’ Muslim elites supported the government’s efforts because of their own conflicting interests with ‘Hindu Nationalism,’ which became synonymous with united India. In sum, Muslim elites and rich peasant,s by arousing a ‘false consciousness’ among the poorer Muslim peasants in East Bengal successfully weakened the class struggle and paved the way for peasants’ support for Pakistan. In a way, for Bengali Muslim peasants, Pakistan was a utopia, the culmination of their ‘peasant nationalism’ – as Chalmers Johnson has used the expression with regard to China – in East Bengal.
