History of Bengal, and how Budhhism, Hindusim and Islam played their part in its evolution

JSTOR has been a wonderful source, but, nothing yet can take away proper books. One day, such proper books too will be available as E-Books, either free of charge for those whose royalty has expired, or for a price. Meanwhile, there remains a market for printed books, and among them, those that are hard to find, and yet, invaluable for some of us.

One such is the book “History of the Bengali Speaking People” by Nitish Sengupta. I have spoken about the book on a podcast, and written about it on the Khata web site. And yet, here I am, referring to this book all over again.

The thing is this - I have realized, late in life, that my knowledge of the history of Bengal is poor. Not only that, I have come to understand that this knowledge is poor for a whole strata of people that speak this language, or languages closely related to Bengali, such as Assamese, Oriya, Mithili, and some dialects of the adivasis.

Why so? Well, I do not know for certain, but can offer a few guesses. Two most plausible reasons come to mind, and someone please correct me if I am wrong. These are:

1. Bengal got divided in 1905 and completely separated into two different countries in 1947. Thus, the very idea of a “Bengali” entity, became vague, and somewhat contradictory, with half the people not to sure about the other half.
2. Religion must have played a very big role in the segregation. It was the basis of the partition of the province, as it was the basis of being on two different sides of an international border.

I did not have such views ten years ago. In fact, I did not know many people from Bangladesh, to have any idea on what the issues were across the border. This has changed since I came to Canada. So, I guess, Canada has provided a platform that neither India nor Bangladesh could do - offer an ambience of neutrality and civility, where language can trump other identification marks, and people can come together just to enjoy their linguistic heritage. This also opened the door to discussion of more sensitive issues - religion and religious differences.

The other thing that really sparked my curiosity was this book by Nitish Sengupta. I did not have to buy this book. It was presented to me in 2008 at Toronto. In fact, every attendee of the North India Bengali Conference of 2008 got a free copy of this 550 page book.

I remember a comment made by Farook, our friend and neighbor in Canada, and originally from Bangladesh. He too had attended the conference, and had been reading the book. He was marveling about it to me - stating that he realized how little he knew about the history of his land, till he started reading the book. This has been, more or less, my feeling too.

I write this blog because, I should be going back to chapters and references in this book, along with other articles and journals, to show my gradually improving understanding of how and why Bengal ended being so different than the rest of northern India. While the seat of power was firmed up around Delhi and the religion of power remained in the hands of Muslim rulers from different ethnicities and cultures, the population around northern India remained primarily a Hindu majority at peace with the rulers.

But that is not how things went in far away Bengal. In a course of about two or three centuries, the inaccessible water logged heartland of Bengal changed over from loosely practicing sects of Hindu, Saiva, Vaishnavs and other systems into almsot uniformly Islamic. The way the change happened, organically and with high input of local customs, practices and beliefs, was markedly different than elsewhere on the Indian subcontinent.

Thinking about it, and listening to my new friends from Bangladesh, I now realize that the issue has been a tortuous one for the people there for a very long time - a conflict of a kind - and an issue of identity. There is still debate if the people are to be Muslim first or Bengali first. This was likely not an issue at the time when the faith was expanding in Bengal - unquestionably, being Bengali and local was more important, and Islam was flexible enough to incorporate local strains.

It is my understanding that centralization of power within the Islamic block, and a wish to adhere to a uniform interpretation of the practices of the religion is a more recent phenomena, historically speaking. And this phenomena has released tectonic forces within Bangladesh, and the issue is far from settled.

On the other end of the border, the Bengali consciousness went through a recent two hundred year revival kick started by reformers like Ram Mohan Roy, on to a phase which is recognized by historians today as Bengals Renaissance, which peaked perhaps at the end of the nineteenth century, of which Rabindranath Tagore was perhaps the best product, albeit out of hundreds of others. It was from this movement, that the national consciousness of India emerged, along with the movement for Swaraj and independence. Both Pakistan and India owe the root of its independence movement to an undivided Bengal, although the message is more or less forgotten today. The catalyst for the Bengal renaissance was the very item that nationalism protested against - British involvement in Bengal for trade and commerce, along with spread of English education, revival of the sciences and eradication of age old bad practices of society and the caste bound Hindu religion.

From the next century, the 20th, started a long slide downward of the Bengali culture, for the twin reasons given above, and helped along in no uncertain terms in the desire for a growing clan of newly educated high cast hindu babu class to import a foreign vision of universal equality - communism. While a more accommodating version of socialism and social welfare system was already the guideline of the rest of the country and its ruling Congress party, West Bengal went further extreme left by influence it borrowed from the London college days of the affluent newly emerged babu clan. While that brand of communism died out in western Europe, it took root in a virulent fashion in Bengal, doing some good but an enormous amount of harm on a society already teetering on lack of self confidence and self belief. After Chittaranjan Das and Subhas Bose, the land stopped producing political leaders of national and international stature. After Rabindranath, it produced no other visionary of that calibre, though bengal continued to produce a diminishing number of writers of diminishing calibre for the next few generations.

Bengal on the Indian side literally ran out of steam, and started assimilating more into a hindi speaking (albeit badly speaking) followers of Delhi and Bombay.

But, one thing that my long life of introspection has taught me, is that things always change, and whatever appears to be the trend in the recent past, or today, is likely to also change very soon.
So, the long saga of Bengal, starting around the 12th century and continuing today, is perhaps worthy enough for me to write on, time to time. Starting with this one - saluting Nitish Sengupta.