Bangladeshi Culture in both Pre and Post Partition

Bangladeshi Culture
Prior to the year 1947, the region that now makes up the People’s Republic of Bangladesh came under the eastern portion of Bengal – one of the provinces of British India. Owing to its river boundaries and fringe location, this region was largely culturally and politically set apart from the remaining parts of India across numerous eras of the nation’s history. With the dawn of Islamic rule in the subcontinent during the 12th century, under the Turco-Afghans, a large Muslim pocket was created in the Bengal region. In the year 1576, Bengal became a part of the vast and famous Mughal Empire. Only in the year 1757 was it integrated into British India (Cheema, 2013).
The Muslims of British India remained politically and economically backward. But Bengal’s Muslim population comprised a small community of aristocrats; a huge cluster of uneducated, poverty-ridden peasants; and a small though steadily increasing English-speaking bourgeois population. Bengal’s Muslim upper-class contributed significantly to the nationwide freedom struggle alongside fellow Muslim brethren, particularly after the Muslim League was created. In the 1930s-40s, they advocated a nationwide Islamic separatist movement. The Muslims of Bengal wholeheartedly supported the Muslim League’s adoption of the 1940 Lahore Resolution which demanded the establishment of an independent Muslim state (Cheema, 2013).
After the August 1947 partition of India into two distinct states (namely India and Pakistan), East Bengal (as it was then called) became the Pakistani province, East Pakistan. While the province was a mere 1/6th of West Pakistan’s size, it comprised of more than half the Pakistani nation's population. Further, it was linguistically and culturally more homogeneous in comparison to West Pakistan (Cheema, 2013).
The start of the Bangladeshi independence drive goes back to 1947, after Pakistan was created and the Muslim League acquired provincial and central power. East Pakistan’s Awami League (the Muslim League’s East Pakistan arm) failed to acquire the membership of a number of key Bengal Muslim leaders including H.S. Suhrawardy, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, and A.K. Fazlul Haq. Moreover, it focused on ensuring Bengalis’ cultural and political rights were realized (Guhathakurta & Schendel, 2013). However, in contrast to this division’s efforts, the central Pakistani Muslim League concentrated on reducing the Bengali majority margin in the government, suggesting equal governmental representation for every regional unit. Additionally, it aimed at imposing Urdu- a language spoken by not even 8% of the entire East Pakistani population. Awami League, the associated student wing, other cultural and political units and a number of other organizations protested against the aforementioned measures through the organization of mass rallies, demonstrations, processions, and meetings between 1948 and 1952. These efforts resulted in a widespread demand for independence across the East Pakistani province by the year 1954. Following the 1954 provincial elections, Bengali opposition parties (including the Awami League and the Krishak Sramik Party) formed a unified front (Cheema, 2013).
East Pakistan maintained close ties with West Bengal, an adjoining Indian state also largely comprising of Bengalis. As Pakistan’s relationship with India was already very poor after the partition, West Pakistan held an unfavorable view of the above friendly link between West Bengal and East Pakistan. In the year 1948, in the East Pakistani province’s capital, Dhaka, Mohammad Ali Jinnah proclaimed that “Urdu, and only Urdu,” which was the language of the Eastern Biharis and Western Muhajirs alone, would be the entire Pakistani nation’s only official language, despite Bangla being spoken by most East Pakistanis. The people of East Pakistan rebelled, causing the deaths of numerous civilians and students on 21st February, 1952. This day came to be revered across the Bangladeshi nation and even in the Indian state of West Bengal as ‘Language Martyrs’ Day’. The East Pakistanis’ animosity never stopped growing, particularly when military rulers kept arriving. Later, to commemorate the 1952 deaths, the UNESCO declared 21st February as the ‘International Mother Language Day’ (Bangladesh War of Independence, 2016).
References
Bangladesh War of Independence (2016). Retrieved 27 April 2018 from http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Bangladesh_War_of_Independence.
Cheema, T. S. (2013). Pakistan Bangladesh Relations. Unistar Books.
Guhathakurta, M., & van Schendel, W. (Eds.). (2013). The Bangladesh reader: History, culture, politics. Duke University Press.