Hindu-Muslim Relations during the Long Partition of Bengal: The Case of Noakhali, 1946-65

Abstract

Just before the British Empire relinquished its Indian colony in 1947, riots swept across India’s Hindu-Muslim territories. On October 10, 1946, riots erupted in Noakhali, a Muslim-majority district of East Bengal where some Muslims targeted, and other Muslims protected, the Hindu minority. Mohandas Gandhi visited soon after the riots, but his mission of peace was not enough to stop the splitting apart of this community before, during, and after the official Partitioning of India in August 1947. The primary questions my dissertation seeks to answer are: What were Hindu-Muslim relationships like when the world around them was being torn apart by religious violence and Partition? What transpired when their socio-agricultural relationships and ways of being were transformed by riots, displacement, and the establishment of separate nation-states?

I examine these questions about how the riots, Gandhi’s visit, and the larger processes set in motion by Partition reshaped the social and intellectual life of Bengali Hindus and Muslims in Noakhali, beginning with the 1946 riots and ending with the 1965 India-Pakistan War—which led to the permanent separation of Muslims from their workplaces in Calcutta. I argue that Noakhali’s Hindus and Muslims had a shared history and shared material interests (e.g., with respect to abandoned properties) that enabled them to transcend their religious differences during Partition and after. Using oral interviews, artifacts, and archival research, I show that the experiences of the common people were far more complex than narratives of simple, inevitable religious hatred suggest. Questioning the dominant notion that religious differences inevitably produced animosity between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, my research demonstrates how displaced Hindus often retained deep ties to the Noakhali community, even when conditions deteriorated. I further demonstrate that the permanence of Partition – and the severing of communal ties – was not fully evident until 1965, nearly two decades after Bengal was officially split in two.