Desh or Ummah: Bengali Muslim Literary Enigma in Anisuzzaman’s Muslim-manas O Bangla Sahitya, 1757–1918

Abstract

While the 1947 Partition has contributed to a large-scale migration of Hindus from east Bengal to India, it allowed the delta’s Bengali Muslims to avail Pakistan’s citizenry. Pakistan remained an experiment at best, however, for the Bengali Muslim intelligentsia, who between 1947 and 1971 conceived an ethnolinguistic nationalism. Contributing to Bangladesh’s creation and the progressive constitution of 1972, the new nation rehabilitated the Hindus to redress the wrongs of the Partition. Conceptualizations of Hindu-Muslim autonomy and linguistic self-determination are the theoretical underpinnings of Anisuzzaman’s Muslim-manas O Bangla Sahitya, 1757–1918. First published in 1964, this seminal study of Bengali Muslim literature, from the end of the Nawabi rule (1757) to the completion of the Great War (1918), measures Muslim contribution to Bengali literary culture. For Anisuzzaman, the Bengal Renaissance literary boom is the centripetal Bengali culture that is foundational to the secular ethnolinguistic vision in Bengali Muslim literature. It also exhibits the syncretism of a pre-colonial literary culture molded by Saiyid Sultan, Syed Alaol and Shah Muhammad Saghir. Subsequently, sociocultural inertia is blamed for the sectarianism in Musulmani Bangla or dobhashi literature and the pan-Islamic turn in fin de siècle literature is identified as a form of cultural mobility. My analysis suggests that Anisuzzaman’s Muslim-manas illuminates the richness of Bengali Muslim literary culture, while it also offers critical commentary on Bengal’s political faultlines that precipitated the 1947 Partition.