ABSTRACT
One of the most celebrated Bengali Muslim intellectuals of the late colonial period, Abul Mansur Ahmed would often experience ridicule in Calcutta’s streets because of his Muslim identity. His name, patterns of speech, and clothing choices would prompt Calcutta’s literary and educational circles to question his credentials, education, and abilities. A Muslim social identity – being labelled a Muslim in public – was for Ahmed a major point of contention in the Hindu-dominated world of Bengali literature and publishing in inter-war Calcutta. By the late 1930s, as a journalist and writer working in both Calcutta and his east Bengali home town of Mymensingh, he came to identify with ‘religion’ not in the sense of ritual, faith or belief, but as a political strategy in the service of fighting social inequities.2 One such identification with religion arrived for Bengali Muslim writers through the embrace of a specifically Bengali Muslim variant of Bengali literature.
