Several years after publication of the book, Empire's Last S Casualty: Indian Subcontinent's Vanishing Hindu and Other Minorities, by Firma KLM of India, I faced a dilemma of whether or not to update the book. I received numerous requests from researchers in the U.S., Europe and the Subcontinent, as peoples' consciousness rose as extended families in Bangladesh kept on missing, even after the installation of a pro-secular government in Bangladesh. Hindu minority was still being cleansed from Bangladesh, (and Pakistan and Afghanistan). Yet, no Muslim was fleeing either from India, or more specifically, from the partitioned West Bengal for Bangladesh or Pakistan. Do East Bengalis or Bangladeshis have a different DNA than West Bengalis? Or, have Muslim-Bengali-Bangladeshis developed a different DNA than neighbors, stories of violation and protection, identities of villages, thanas (police stations), subdivisions, districts and more; and current contact information. Please check YouTube's ispad1947 channel for some interviews. Please also indicate if one wants to be anonymous. We are also interested to preserve selective items and objects from our ancestral homes, hearths, morts, ashrams, masjids, viharas, girjas, mandirs (temples) in our Partition Documentation Center Museum. Please indicate if one has any physical objects that one may want to share with others. We are also interested to hear from refugees, collect their stories and artifacts, fleeing from East Pakistan/Bangladesh to India and vice versa.
I realize Initially, I was not sure how to present the data as the topic is vast, painful one, yet denied by both communal left and right of the divided Bengal border. Bur after many books and dozens of articles and presentations related to the subject matter, the present form emerged. Here, I have presented the data with relevant sources of information but without personal comments, except for occasional explanation needed for Western and non-Bengal readers. Judgement is left to the readers. It is a product of at least 25 years of fieldwork, being published 60 years after second partition, and 100 years from Banga-Vanga, the first Partition of Bengal; and 35 years after independence of Bangladesh. I that I could easily go on for another 25 years, and still information will trickle in, and new Census will be published. I had to stop somewhere. I decided to stop at 2001 Census year. A companion book of English short stories, Living Among the Believer: Stories from the Holy Land Down the Ganges (Firma KLM Publishers, Kolkata, India) based on my intimate contact with victims and survivors, protectors and tormentors was published in 2006. Bengal's Hindu Holocaust... also draws strength from two of my Bengali story books: Ai Bangla, Oi Bangla (This Bengal, That Bengal; 1991) and A Aamar Desh (This is My Home; 1998), and dozens of Bengali and English essays, short stories and articles.
What That happens to an area, to its people, to its economy, to its age-old social-cultural group relation, thus the society in general, when the area gets politically divided? This study tries to understand the dynamics unleashed by such an emotionally-divisive and politically-charged course in one of the first experiments of divide-and-rule imperial policy in colonized nations. This study is focused on Bengal, sixth largest linguistic group of the world, inhabiting one of the most densely settled areas on the planet; linguistically-culturally homogeneous, yet religiously divided. To check the pan-Indian nationalism and to derail the Indian independence struggle in which Bengal Province of India was playing a leading role in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the colonial British Administration chose to partition Bengal Province into 'Muslim' East Bengal and 'Hindu' (West) Bengal provinces in 1905 in British India when there was no demand from either Muslims or Hindus for such a religious partition. This experiment of divide-and-rule and the use of religion to create a political-social-cultural division where there was none, preceded the well-known partition of Ireland, a few years later. Prior to this 1905 action, there was no demand from either of the Muslim or Hindu communities for division. In every village lived both Hindus and Muslims. British administration initiated the action and then used a section of Indian Muslims towards anti-united India, anti-Hindu and anti-kefir (non-Muslim) sentiments to check the nationalist movement then comprising Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jain, Parsee, Buddhist, Brahmo religious groups and dozens of intensely diverse linguistic nationalities of India. One cannot be sure if the British colonial administration foresaw the far-reaching consequences of their action, but Britain has been known to use divide-and-rule policy in their colonies. Forces unleashed by their action could not even be controlled by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's pacifism and secular activism. Although the study is focused on Bengal and the Bengali population of the Indian Sub-continent, the last half of twentieth century has witnessed a rise in demands for ethnic and regional separatism throughout the world. There have been demands for partition in a number of countries. Some of those demands for independence, to autonomy, to self-rule have succeeded, others have not. Examples of such demands may be cited from Asia (Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Malaysia, Myanmar, then Burma, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Turkey), Africa (Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Chad, Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, and the Sudan), the Americas (Bolivia, Canada, Mexico), Europe (The Balkans, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Romania, Spain, Cyprus and Yugoslavia) and in the nations of the former Soviet Union. To this list, one may add the rising nationalistic demands from the Muslim populations in many Muslim minority areas of the nations of Asia, Africa and Europe. Many of the ethnic and separatist issues are the result of internal contradictions within the nation states and of uneven social, economic and political developments no doubt. Sometimes these conflicts are helped, nurtured and exacerbated by external forces. In case of Bengal and India, the colonial British administration played a crucial role in creating the division, especially in the imaginary idea of dar-ul-Islam, the Land of the Muslim-majority, Islam-ruled nation or ummah, among many of the Muslims of Bengal, and later of India, where there was no such sentiment earlier.
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