Amartya Sen is from East Bengal. We may well ask what was so special about the place that his people chose to run away from there to West Bengal? The answer is that it is Muslim majority. Non-Muslims are being ethnically cleansed from it. That's what's very special about it.
Writing for the Daily Star, a Bangladeshi paper, Sen takes a different view.
What's so special about Bengal?
The answer is that it was the seat of the British Raj- the biggest and most successful Empire the Sub-continent had every seen. Viceroys in Calcutta, controlled Aden and the Gulf as well as Singapore and Hong Kong. India had never before projected force to the battlefields of Europe and the MENA and the ports of far Cathay.
Curzon, an important British politician, wanted to partition Bengal. The educated Hindu gentry- very foolishly- objected. The Brits yielded but the seeds of partition had been sown. Since then the Hindu 'bildungsburgertum' (i.e. the class which has risen through education) has never failed to clamor vociferously for their own throats to be slit. Bose actually joined Hitler and Tojo to conquer and enslave his own people. Later, the bhadralok brayed for Mao or the Naxals to come chop off their heads. Since the rise of Islamic terrorism, they have turned with great venom against 'Hindutva'. They take pride in the increasing Muslim population of West Bengal and the fact that Hindus are having to run away from Muslim majority areas there.
Sen was born under that Raj albeit some years after the Imperial Capital had shifted to New Delhi. Calcutta was no longer the 'second city of the greatest Empire the world had every known'. Still, it was producing internationally respected Scientists and Artists and hosted a large expatriate business community.
Since then, of course, it has declined a great deal. From the point of view of economics, what makes Bengal special is that the transition from rule by foreigners, or the military, to democratically elected rule by Bengali Muslims, led to massive excessive mortality following exogenous shocks creating food availability deficit on two separate occasions. The first was in 1943 and the second, which was confined to the East, was in 1974. In both cases there was massive corruption.
Bengal has also produced 2 Econ Nobel Prize winners. One is Sen- who says there can't be famine under a democracy- and the other is Abhijit Bannerjee who has nothing whatsoever to say but seems a nice boy.
If you are looking for ancient history, Bengal's achievements are clearly limited.
America's are much more limited. Bengal's ancient history is comparable to that of Britain. It is likely, that there will be increasing appreciation of its importance as a place where Khmer and Dravidian and Aryan and other such groups exchanged technologies and established a flourishing economy.
The Indus Valley Civilization that immensely enriched the sub-continent in the third and second millennia BC hardly reached Bengal. No part of the Vedas and the Upanishads is known to have been composed in Bengal.
Bangladesh is an Islamic Republic. It is sufficient for its people to know that it received Islam from saintly and scholarly lineages and that it rose by its own hard work and piety.
The great advances of mathematics in the first millennium that came from the works of Aryabhata and his successors covered a huge span of the country — from Kerala to Bihar — but Bengal was out of it all.
So what? America was even more out of it all. But everybody wants to emigrate to America, not Egypt even though it probably had great mathematicians thousands of years ago.
When al-Beruni, the great Iranian mathematician, roamed around the sub-continent in the early eleventh century in pursuit of the current state of Indian mathematics, he did not bother to visit Bengal.
He accompanied a conqueror who didn't reach that far.
There is nothing in Bengal's history to match the ancient glory of Patna or Ujjain or Benares, or the medieval splendour of Agra or Delhi or Jaipur.
More to the point, Hindus dominate those Cities. They, quite naturally, take a great interest in their own history.
Yet it is possible that being somewhat left behind over a long stretch of history has made it that much easier for Bengal to develop its peculiar combination of open-minded receptivity and cultural pride.
If East Bengal was so 'open-minded' how come Sen's folk ran away from Dacca?
To cut a long story short, the pride that is taken in Bengali culture, which is very strong — sometimes distressingly so — is like that of a cook about the excellence of what she has cooked, not at all about the indigenous origin of every element of the cooking style or ingredient.
No cook prides herself on the origin of the ingredients. Either her food is tasty or else she is a shitty cook.
Rabindranath Tagore presented a spirited defence of receptivity
his ancestors had made money working for the Brits. Receptivity is one word for it. Greed is another. Dwarkanath Tagore lobbied Westminster to permit unrestricted White immigration. Why? Only Whites could destroy Muslim power without letting in the rapacious Marathas or Gurkhas.
in a letter to Charlie Andrews:
"Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours,
Clearly, this 'Pir Ali' Brahmin didn't enjoy Islam. He didn't make it his own. The British were better paymasters and didn't require you to convert.
wherever they might have their origin. I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own.
No doubt, Sen's people were feeling very proud of their humanity as they ran the fuck away from their homes in East Bengal.
Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine."
To be fair, Tagore did warn his people to either unite against the Muslims or else give up the demand for Independence. Nationalism is all very well, but if you are shit at defending yourself, maybe you shouldn't be a nation.
The Hindutva movement that stormed over a huge part of India over the last couple of decades did not get any serious popular response at all in West Bengal.
Why would there be a Hindutva movement in a place where most Hindus hate their own religion? After all, the Communists ruled for 30 years- which suggests that the atheistic philosophy has great appeal to the average Bengali- and Mamta only came to power because the Left Front was trying to transfer agricultural land to industrial usage.
There are many different reasons for this (including the burying of the sectarian hatchet by the force of contemporary — intensely secular — Bengali politics), but the Hindutva movement's "localist" passion for claiming and glorifying indigenous roots of all Indian achievements had no significant resonance in Bengal.
This suggests that the majority of Bengalis were never greatly taken with Hinduism. Those who did not convert to Christianity may have disliked Islam equally. But, clearly, in East Bengal, Islam was enthusiastically embraced and, after the Brits left, got rid of a lot of the 'kaffirs'. Perhaps something similar will begin to happen, if it hasn't already, in Muslim majority areas of West Bengal.
It should also be remembered that many Bengalis supported Chairman Mao over Pundit Nehru in '62 and later during the Naxal uprising. Some Bengalis may be Indian Nationalists but, it may be, the majority of the population hate the Hindu majority of the sub-continent.
Catholicity in this sense also has a bearing on the acceptance of people of many faiths,
which the Islamic Republic of Bangladesh does not do.
with varying backgrounds, some with religious ancestry in other countries.
The Tagores certainly served the Brits with great enthusiasm.
When Rabindranath Tagore told his Oxford audience, with some evident pride, at his Hibbert Lectures in the early 1930s that he came from "a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan, and British,"
soon East Bengal would be solely Mohammedan
this was both an explicit negation of any sectarian identification, and an implicit celebration of the dignity of being broad-based, rather than narrowly confined.
Sadly, the Brits- like other Indians- had a low opinion of the manliness and martial ability of the Bengalis. The dignity of a supine and starving people is not broad-based. It is non-existent.
A similar catholicity can, of course, be seen, among other traditions, in the history of the entire sub-continent, as I have discussed in my book The Argumentative Indian.
Sen thinks Pakistan and Bangladesh are very 'catholic' in their approach. Sadly, his own family wasn't catholic at all. It ran the fuck away from the East.
I suppose underemployment does militate for loquacity. Talk is cheap and arguing enables even cowards and weaklings to taste the pleasures of battle.
Plural tendencies have been widely present everywhere in the sub-continent. And yet the relative force and the propensity to use the respective tendencies have varied between different regions.
Bengal became a bit special because it was where the Brits set up their capital. Then they moved it and, quite soon after, packed up their baggage and left. Bengal was partitioned. It ceased to be plural.
When Buddhism disappeared as a practice from much of India after a thousand years of dominance,
because of Islamic invaders
it continued to flourish in Bengal up to the late eleventh century,
till Islamic invaders turned up
with the Buddhist Pala kings representing the last bastion of Buddhist regal power in India. Between the end of the Buddhist rule and the Muslim conquest of Bengal — by the Pathans and the Turks — in the early thirteenth century there is only a thin slice of revivalist Hindu rule for less than two centuries.
Hinduism and Buddhism were complementary. Buddhist Kings had- indeed some still have- Brahmin priests.
As it happens, the early Muslim kings of Bengal, who had learned Bengali
having forgotten their ancestral language and not wishing to have no language at all
despite coming from elsewhere, were sufficiently impressed by the multi-cultural history of the region to commission good Bengali translations of the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
How very kind of them! I suppose the Bengalis who said 'Chairman Mao is our Chairman!' hoped that the Chinese would commission even better translations of Sanskrit epics.
This was in the fourteenth century. There are moving accounts of how one of these Muslim kings wanted to hear those old Sanskrit stories again and again every evening.
Now, if only the Taliban would take over and enslave all the kaffirs and then, after a couple of hundred years, commission a translation of Tagore, the Bengali's cup of joy will overflow.
They were not, of course, abandoning Islam in any way whatever,
More so when forcibly converting or killing or ethnically cleansing non-Muslims
but they were also establishing non-religious affiliations in addition to their own religiosity,
No. European Christians weren't establishing any non-religious affiliations when they read the Arabian nights. Indeed, they held a highly demeaning view of Arab Muslims. Edward Lane, quite ludicrously, criticized the Egyptians (whom even he had to admit were a gracious and cultivated people) for sometimes having an alcoholic drink. Back in England, half the population was off its head on cheap Gin while the other half was off its head on Port and Madeira and Burgundy.
The French were worse. They conquered Algeria and forcibly settled millions of their own people on Arab land.
showing — seven hundred years ago — that a person's religious identity need not squeeze out every other aspect of a person's life and attachments.
Sen's people's identity is what squeezed them out of their ancestral homes in East Bengal. This did not mean Bangladeshi Muslims stopped reading Tagore. Books by infidels are not 'haram', but there may be a duty of jihad against Kaffirs.
The issue of multiple identity is quite central to understanding contemporary Bengal
Sadly, no. While the Brits were around, multiple identities were cool. You could be a rack-renting zamindar while also pretending to be a Maharishi. When the Brits left, that ended. Emigration was what you did if you wanted a second passport or Green Card carrying hyphenated identity.
— on both sides of the border. Bengal did have its own share of terrible communal violence between Hindus and Muslims during the 1940s immediately before the partition. But within very few years of separation, Bangladesh, with its overwhelmingly Muslim population, burst into the celebration of Bengali language and culture, which would unite Muslims and Hindus, rather than putting them in warring camps.
This is what happened to the percentage of the population which was Hindu while East Bengal was celebrating Bengali language and culture.
| 1931 | 29.40 | |||
| 1941 | 28.00 | |||
| 1951 | 22.05 | |||
| 1961 | 18.50 | |||
| 1974 | 13.50 | |||
| 1981 | 12.13 | |||
| 1991 | 10.51 | |||
| 2001 | 9.60 | |||
| 2011 | 8.54 | |||
| 2022 | 7.95 |
By contrast, the Muslim percentage of West Bengal has risen even though the majority population there has never shown any inclination to celebrate Islamic culture.
| 1951 | 15.85 | ||
| 1961 | 19.79 | ||
| 1971 | 20.46 | ||
| 1981 | 21.51 | ||
| 1991 | 23.61 | ||
| 2001 | 25.25 | ||
| 2011 | 27.01 |
If one reads the large circulation newspapers in Bangladesh today, like Prothom Alo or The Daily Star or Sangbad, one can see how the concerns of the ordinary Bangladeshis
who don't read those newspapers. Eighty percent of the population over the age of 15 does not read any newspaper or magazine on a regular basis.
go far beyond religion into language, politics, secularism, and also embrace a kind of affirmation of borderless global identities that live side by side with Bengali, Muslim, and Bangladeshi identities.
They may believe that they are welcome across their borders with India and Myanmar. Such is not in fact the case.
In West Bengal in India, too, the recognition of multiple identities has been strong,
this is true. Many people have multiple ration cards and vote more than once in elections.
but given the dominance there of parties on the left (West Bengal has the longest history of democratically elected communist government in the world),
which is why it turned to shit.
class and inequality have played the leading part in making religious politics look oddly dilapidated and medieval.
While the State as a whole has turned to shit. Medieval would be a welcome change. It would represent progress.
When Bengal's history is discussed, it is possible to point both to great records of multi-cultural tolerance and pride and to outbursts of bigotry and sectarianism.
No. We can point to non-Muslims being ethnically cleansed from the East and we will soon be able to point to this happening on an increasing scale in West Bengal. To be fair, Bangladesh is rising up faster in terms of per capita Income.
But the invoking of history is never quite independent of its contemporary relevance. The modern European or American looks for sources of the "Western tradition" in, for example, ancient Greece and Rome, and rather than searching "Western" ancient in the much longer history and larger spatial coverage of the rules of Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vikings, and others.
Nonsense! The Common Law tradition- which is what the Brits gave Bengal- is not based on Roman Law. It developed out of Teutonic and perhaps Celtic law. On the other hand, Europe had no difficulty accepting a Semitic religion.
The choice from history is, in this sense, always selective, when the focus is on its contemporary relevance (rather than attempting to portray some kind of an aggregate picture of "what is was like then," or, for that matter, what would emerge from random selections from history).
No. We look to history for data-sets. Where they exist, we must check if our 'Structural Causal Model' is a good fit with that data. That's what is relevant to actual Social Scientists as opposed to Sen-tentious cretins.
(1) What is relevant, therefore, is to see what was there that is of interest today, and this is the way the present secularist and tolerant culture in Bengal, on both sides of the border, has tended to draw on Bengal's long history.
Was expelling non-Muslims a tradition in 'Bengal's long history'? Was Communism? No. Sen is a cretin. The question facing Hindus in West Bengal is whether they will be expelled from more and more of their own State.
And that history does indeed offer a huge store of multi-identity interactions and creativity.
No it doesn't. One could either pretend to be an Aryan Maharishi, like Tagore's daddy, or an Islamic savant from Arabia, like the religious leaders who organized the ethnic cleansing of Sen's people, or one could pretend to be an Oxbridge don- which was Sen's shtick- or a Nazi, like Bose, or a Maoist or whatever.
You couldn't be a Maharishi and a Maulana and a Maoist as well as Mamta's younger, hotter, sister. Sad.
Alternatively, you could just work hard and save money and start up a business and rise up economically and socially- which is what everybody wants to do, Bengali or not.
Before I end, let me refer quickly to one particular evidence of living multi-cultural integration, which is largely forgotten now, but has, in fact, a remarkably long history, in the form of the Bengali calendar, called the "San."
Sen doesn't understand this subject at all. He is repeating some stupid shit he wrote long ago.
It is the only extant calendar in India in which a remnant influence of Emperor Akbar's abortive attempt at establishing an all-India non-denominational calendar, the Tarikh-Ilahi, survives.
No. Every extant calendar bears some influence from arbitrary events with fiscal consequences. Don't forget sidereal, tropical, and mixed solar/lunar calendars have had arbitrary elisions or intercalations. These aren't the 'remnant' of any grand tradition. They are merely arbitrary events of an ideographic type.
Why mention Akbar? His successors rejected his innovations.
As the end of the first millennium in the lunar Muslim calendar, Hijri, approached in the late sixteenth century, Akbar wanted a multi-cultural calendar for India,
No. The Fasli calendar- as its name suggests- has to do with the Harvest and thus Revenue collection. Some Southern states still use it for judicial and land revenue purposes. Akbar ordered an Iranian savant, Syed Mir Fateh Ullah Siraj, to draw up a calendar for Bengal- fosholi shon- because of its increasing fiscal importance.
that would be solar, like the Hindu or Jain or Parsee calendars, combined with some features of the Hijri in it. The zero year was fixed at 1556 (the year of Akbar's ascendance to the throne), which corresponded to 1478 in Hindu Saka calendar and to 963 in the Muslim Hijri.
What he wanted is irrelevant. While people feared him they would perform sajda to the throne. But that is not compatible with Islam. Hindus and Jains and Sikhs and Parsees have no burning desire to prostrate themselves to some rando descendant of Genghis or Timur. Sen is welcome to do so but why pretend Bengal- which has been partitioned- is special because it is actually following Din Illahi?
The Tarikh-Ilahi never caught on, despite its use in Akbar's own court.
Some States still use the Fasli calendar for specific purposes. It is obvious that in an agricultural country, a solar calendar is useful.
But it influenced the traditional Bengali calendar which got renumbered at the zero year of Akbar's Tarikh-Ilahi, putting the clock back from the Hindu 1478 to the Muslim 963.
Akbar was asked to introduce a solar calendar to improve revenue collection and make administration easier. He gave an order and the thing was done. All solar calendars are much of a muchness. From time to time a few days are added or subtracted but that is an arbitrary procedure of undoubted utility. It has no deeper significance.
However it remained solar as in the earlier Bengali calendar, so in the years since that time, the slow-moving Bengali San (as slow as the Hindu Saka calendar and the Christian Gregorian calendar) has moved rather less forward than the Muslim lunar Hijri calendar (with its year of 354 days, 8 hours, and 45 minutes in solar reckoning).(2)
It is obvious that a lunar calendar will have fewer days than a solar calendar. The question to ask is whether the two Bengali calendars are sidereal or tropical. The answer is, Bangladesh has a tropical or Georgian type calendar. West Bengal has a Hindu, sidereal, calendar. Hence the mismatch.
It is year 1413 in Bengali San now. How do we interpret it, then?
this is about 14 years out from the Islamic calendar for an obvious reason-viz solar years are longer.
The answer is that it commemorates, in effect, Prophet Mohammad's move from Mecca to Medina, the origin of the Hijri calendar, in a mixed lunar-solar system of counting — Muslim lunar until 963 and Hindu solar since then to 1413 today.
In 2023, it is 1430. But this doesn't mean anything whatsoever. The thing is purely arbitrary.
A religious Hindu may or may not be aware of this link with the Prophet when he or she invokes this date in a Hindu ceremony (the San is important inter alia for these ceremonies as well), but this is inescapable given the integrated nature of Bengali traditions, going back many centuries.
Hindus don't invoke any date in a Hindu ceremony. They give the position of the Sun amongst the constellations. Astrologers calculate the date for festivities and publishers of calendars incorporate this information for the convenience of their customers.
I leave the large community of followers of Samuel Huntington's thesis of "the Clash of Civilizations" to figure out whether the Bengali San is a part of what he calls the "Hindu civilization" or of the "Muslim civilization," between which such a sharp dissonance is seen.
Pakistan hasn't bothered to adopt a national calendar. The Hijri calendar is part of 'Muslim civilization' there just as it is in Bangladesh. Still, because it is useful for Indians to have six seasons, Pakistanis have 'desi' calendars'. Apparently they celebrate Mohurram twice because it falls on different dates in the two different calendars. Sen, no doubt, fervently observes both festivals.
Sen is wrong. Huntingdon is right. Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan are Islamic States. They belong to Muslim civilization. Similarly, though Manhattan in New York represents the place where the Lenape used to gather bows from, it is not the case that America belongs to the civilization of the Red Indians. On the contrary, it belongs to Western, Christian, civilization.
History is, often enough, not as confrontational as it looks to cultural separatists.
East Bengali history, during Sen's lifetime has been highly confrontational. That is why his people had to separate themselves from their ancestral home or else risk separation from life itself.
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