Bengal Undivided: Language and the Limits of Nationalism in South Asia
(In progress)
Can language (as a principle) act as a moral force in modern politics, such that it transcends religion and nation?
In 1947, Bengal was partitioned into two regions: Hindu-majority West Bengal, which remained in the Indian union, and Muslim-majority East Pakistan. This book studies the culmination of a long historical process whereby Bengali Muslims articulated political claims via the Bengali language, especially through a dialectical relationship with Bengali Hindus, and asserted forms of linguistic nationalism that ultimately played a role in the establishment of Bangladesh in 1971. My focus on linguistic nationalism shows that the Bengali language represented a shared space in which Hindus and Muslims found common ground and purpose despite political and territorial ruptures. It thereby challenges us to rethink the Hindu-Muslim relationship in South Asia, which has almost exclusively been studied through the lens of competing religious nationalisms. Further, what I call the language communitas not only poses a serious challenge to methodologies that foreground religious nationalism, but also to those that assume a narrow and parochial ethnolinguistic nationalism. By studying a diverse range of archives belonging to language academies, publishing houses, literary societies, legislative assemblies, small press periodicals, private papers, organized political parties, and visual and oral histories, Bengal Undivided explores the mutual construction of a shared sense of community and a shared language—Bengali—that together generated new political possibilities across three nation-states (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) over the course of the twentieth century.