Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of maps and figures
- Acknowledgements
- Timeline
- Introduction
- PART I THE LONG VIEW
- PART II COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS
- 5 From the Mughal empire to the British empire
- 6 The British impact
- 7 A closing agrarian frontier
- 8 Colonial conflicts
- 9 Towards Partition
- 10 Partition
- PART III BECOMING EAST PAKISTAN
- PART IV WAR AND THE BIRTH OF BANGLADESH
- PART V INDEPENDENT BANGLADESH
- Conclusion
- Bangladesh district maps
- Key political figures since 1947
- Glossary of Bengali terms
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Towards Partition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of maps and figures
- Acknowledgements
- Timeline
- Introduction
- PART I THE LONG VIEW
- PART II COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS
- 5 From the Mughal empire to the British empire
- 6 The British impact
- 7 A closing agrarian frontier
- 8 Colonial conflicts
- 9 Towards Partition
- 10 Partition
- PART III BECOMING EAST PAKISTAN
- PART IV WAR AND THE BIRTH OF BANGLADESH
- PART V INDEPENDENT BANGLADESH
- Conclusion
- Bangladesh district maps
- Key political figures since 1947
- Glossary of Bengali terms
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the 1940s the Bengal delta went through breathtaking change. World War II shook the established order as the Japanese advanced and the terrible famine of 1943/4 struck. Soon afterwards the social and political system began to crack up. Among the many factors involved, three are of particular importance for the subsequent development of Bangladesh: a rapidly increasing rivalry between the political categories of ‘Muslims’ and ‘Hindus’, a countryside overcome by class-based revolts and the British overlords' decision to extricate themselves from their long-held colony.
HINDU–MUSLIM RIVALRY
In the late 1930s various politicians and intellectuals in India had been toying with the idea of safeguarding the rights of Indian Muslims by means of some sort of territorial division between Muslim-majority zones and the rest. These ideas crystallised in a resolution that the Muslim League adopted in 1940. It stated:
it is the considered view of this Session of the All India Muslim League that no constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to the Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principles, viz., that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions … [and] that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the North Western and Eastern Zones of (British) India should be grouped to constitute ‘independent states’ in which the constituent units should be autonomous and sovereign.
This Lahore (or Pakistan) Resolution caught the imagination of many Muslims in British India.
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- Information
- A History of Bangladesh , pp. 88 - 95Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009