Rebuffing Bengali dominance: postcolonial India and Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

A vast literature analyzes how Bengali identities developed in colonial India. This article steps away from both celebratory approaches and a focus on the colonial period. Instead, it explores how non-Bengalis increasingly challenged Bengali superiority in more recent times. As the colonial incarnation of a genteel Bengaliness lost its bearings and split into competing territorial manifestations in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and India, it encountered rising hostility and developed both assertive and timid configurations. This article offers an exploratory overview of how various groups of non-Bengalis have been rebuffing Bengali dominance by means of cultural distancing, graphic resistance, the ideology of indigeneity, insurgency, and the legal and military force of postcolonial states.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity politics
• Bengaliness
• indigeneity
• script
• language
• Bengal
• Bangladesh
• India
• Myanmar

Introduction

Two centuries ago, a specific identity – “Bengaliness” – began to change the vast South Asian region of Bengal and the lands surrounding it. In this article, I look at efforts to contain and curb this identity. There is an extensive literature about Bengali identity, but it is sadly fragmented. We have distinct bodies of knowledge on the British and post-British eras, but few studies across the colonial/postcolonial divide. In addition, postcolonial studies of Bengaliness have been largely blinkered by national Bangladeshi and Indian perspectives. These obscure that today Bengaliness is a transnational identity in conversation with many other identities in Bengal and the wider region. Third, Bengaliness is often associated with upper-middle-class, educated, and urban understandings of that identity, marginalizing various lower-class, local, and rural understandings. Fourth, the cultural dimension of Bengaliness receives more attention than its political features. Finally, studies of Bengaliness tend to be self-absorbed; they generally fail to incorporate non-Bengali inputs, responses, and impacts. Thus, we remain largely ignorant of what non-Bengali neighbors have thought about Bengaliness, how they have acted on these insights, and how they have influenced Bengali identities. The existing historiography is Bengali-centric and presents only half the conversation.

Historians need to understand Bengaliness as a powerful, evolving, multifaceted, and transnational identity in constant dialogue with many others. This mission goes well beyond the reach of this article, which neither intends to be comprehensive nor aims at presenting a biography of postcolonial Bengaliness. I merely seek to encourage a comparative approach to postcolonial Bengaliness and to non-Bengali strategies to rebuff highhanded forms of it, across a region that is now divided by international borders.¹

What is Bengaliness? Some 270 million people speak the Bengali (or Bangla²) language, making it the world’s sixth largest in terms of native speakers. It is the national language of Bangladesh and the official language of two states in India (West Bengal and Tripura), and there are millions of native speakers beyond these administrative units.³ Bengali is clearly the dominant language in Bengal, but this large region has always been distinctly multilingual, and continues to be so.

It is important to realize that there is something programmatic about referring to “the Bengali language” as a historical formation. While there has been a written form of Bengali for some ten centuries, throughout this time spoken forms varied widely across the region and it was impossible to identify clear linguistic boundaries. Without a unifying state, a national army, schools, or other institutions to impose a standard language, and only a minute proportion of literate inhabitants, many speakers of what linguists later categorized as Bengali dialects did not identify with any standard language. Instead, they referred to their speech forms by local names (such as Jaintiapuri, Noakhailla, Siripuria, and Chatgaia buli). Therefore, it is a moot point to what extent they considered themselves to be speakers of Bengali.⁴

Subsuming this welter of vernaculars under the rubric of the Bengali language was a long process. It gathered pace after the British East India Company occupied the region in the eighteenth century. Two groups were especially influential. Colonial linguists were keen to impose order on the dazzling complexities of South Asian speech forms. And educated cultural activists who thought of their own dialect as “standard Bengali” used it in their efforts to construct a Bengali identity, a Bengali community, a Bengali nation, and “Bengaliness.”⁵

A sophisticated historiography exists that is devoted to the flourishing of this vision of Bengaliness during British rule. Historians have been less interested in how it fared in the rocky post-British period when the notion of Bengali superiority became entangled in state practices of internal colonialism and countermoves progressively sought to restrict its reach. This article focuses on these moves to “provincialize” postcolonial Bengaliness.⁶ But to situate these postcolonial struggles over Bengaliness, we need a brief sketch of its complex colonial crafting.⁷

Bengaliness: colonial contortions

The British East India Company’s annexation of Bengal in the year 1757 prompted leading elite Bengalis, largely concentrated in the colonial city of Calcutta (Kolkata), to develop a new understanding of regional identity. This was based on the idea of a shared language and a sense of unity among Bengali speakers, and it celebrated their cultural production. Bengali identity, or Bengaliness, took on a proud new meaning for them as they assumed the mantle of spokespeople for the region’s inhabitants. Their version of Bengali – a “new Sanskritized and sanitized language under preparation in Calcutta”⁸ – formed the basis of this new Bengali paradigm, but they also considered numerous cultural practices, including food, music, speech genre, literary writing, and dress style, to be quintessentially Bengali.⁹ For them, to be a Bengali was to be sophisticated, cultured, aware of the wider world, and in possession of delicate sensibilities.

Generations of scholars have closely analyzed and interpreted this model, and it continues to be a topic of intense academic scrutiny. The result is an intricate historiography with its own codes and expressions. Thus, the term “Bengal Renaissance” evolved to refer to cultural and social changes that commenced in the early years of the nineteenth century. And bhadralok (respectable people, or genteel society – distinct from the common people, known as chhotalok) became the key term for the literary-minded upper class in Calcutta who steered this intellectual and cultural project.¹⁰

The elaboration of Bengaliness was a response to the shock of British annexation and a worldwide upswing of nationalist models. Bengal was the first sizeable region of South Asia that the British acquired and the colony of British India expanded from this bridgehead. Calcutta became the capital of British India and would remain so for a century and a half. The composite social elite of Bengal now had to cope with the fact that they were relegated to a subservient position, which necessitated serious soul-searching. Added to this was their new overlords’ need for a class of local officeholders to help them collect land taxes and run the colonial administration. For these ends, British-style education was opened for a select group of youngsters in Bengal, and some were also admitted to universities in Britain. Their encounter with European ideas about civilization, nationalism, modernity, rational thought, religion, class, gender, and urbanity played a major role in firing the cultural stirrings now known as the Bengal Renaissance.

These Banglaphone recipients of colonial education, privileges, and employment generated the new paradigm of Bengaliness. It was embodied in poets, playwrights, essayists, educators, composers, and novelists whose creative works fired people’s imaginations, decoded social change, bolstered self-confidence, and welcomed readers into a community of refined emotion and inner nobility. Among these many cultural heroes were people that continue to be deeply admired and widely reviewed in contemporary scholarship and public discourse, for example, Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838-1894), and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Even though those who propagated the new meaning of Bengaliness formed only a tiny minority, over time their adaptation became the bedrock of self-identification for many middle-class Bengalis. As a result, the term bhadralok broadened to include those who shared the elites’ dreams, respect for high culture, and genteel attitudes, without necessarily sharing their wealth, education, or service jobs.¹¹

Over time Bengaliness became more than an aesthetic and emancipatory identity; it turned into something of a civilizational model, to be admired and emulated by less refined others in South Asia. According to Chatterji, “as the uncovenanted beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement, as compradors and collaborators, the bhadralok dominated nineteenth-century Bengal and successfully staked their claim to be the fuglemen of a new India.”¹² But this political claim to superiority (what Bandyopadhyay described as “Bengal’s geopolitics”¹³) gave rise to an avalanche of critical voices, initially hesitant but increasingly strident.

Intra-Bengali contestations

Certain Bengali speakers resisted this civilizational model on the grounds of class, education, employment, religion, region, and gender. These detractors disputed the model’s point of departure: the unity of all Bengalis. They demonstrated that there were many ways in which people could express their Bengaliness. One critique was that genteel Bengaliness idolized the subculture of a minute well-off minority, the largely high-caste Hindu “respectable people” who lived mostly in the colonial capital and rural manor houses. Bengali Hindus belonging to lower orders as well as non-Hindu Bengalis found it hard to recognize themselves in the model, and they increasingly challenged the right of high-caste Hindus to speak for all Bengalis. These critics pointed out that the bhadralok lifestyle was not only based on educational privileges and cultural achievement, but also had its roots in the exploitation of the labor of other Bengalis: agricultural tenants, servants, women, and dependents. Therefore, the genteel model of Bengaliness served the interests of the elite vis-à-vis the colonial rulers as well as vis-à-vis most other Bengalis.¹⁴

Historians have studied this critique most closely for two groups: Bengali Muslims¹⁵ and low-caste Hindus/Dalits.¹⁶ The genteel model favored the idea that high-caste Hindus were the “primary citizens of the land and inheritors of an ancient Aryan civilization.”¹⁷ From the late nineteenth century onwards Muslim and low-caste/Dalit contestations signaled that a high-caste appropriation of Bengaliness was untenable.¹⁸ Even so, many bhadralok dismissed non-bhadralok definitions of Bengaliness as irrelevant. The political consequences of this attitude became painfully clear as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries unfolded, and the region of Bengal was torn apart.

Colonial Bengaliness beyond the Bengali fold

The historiography has tended to treat Bengaliness as an autonomous creation. Historians have paid relatively little attention to how it emerged from interactions with numerous other regional identities. Rather, they have understood it primarily as an emancipatory cultural phenomenon in response to British rule in Bengal. What was crucially important, however, was that educated Bengalis, who felt superior to others in the region, translated their notion of Bengaliness into political entitlements. They used it to wield power. As British rule spread across South Asia, the colonial government placed educated Bengalis in administrative, educational, and other salaried jobs well beyond Bengal. Just like Bengal, these surrounding areas were cultural and linguistical composites. In these places, Bengali speakers were in the minority and the expansion of educated Bengalis with claims of cultural superiority set in train several reactions.

Some were welcoming, and certain non-Bengalis chose to emulate genteel Bengaliness.¹⁹ Others rebuffed Bengali superiority, most notably in Orissa (Odisha), Bihar, and Assam (Map 1). In these places, the colonial state often appeared to be a British-Bengali coproduction. A decidedly anti-Bengali attitude fueled local emancipatory projects that successfully resisted Bengalization and established other languages – Odia, Hindi, and Assamese – as alternative languages of education and officialdom. It has been said that Bengali-language activists were appalled because they felt that “the outlying provinces were being unjustly taken away from the cultural custody of Calcutta.”²⁰

Map 1. The Bengali heartland and surrounding areas, with current boundaries.

By the turn of the twentieth century, it was clear that the Bengali civilizational model had failed to travel beyond the Bengali-speaking heartland.²¹ The conviction that Odia, Assamese, and the speech practices of eastern Bihar were all Bengali dialects – and should benefit from the civilizing touch of Calcutta bhadralok speech – had suffered defeat. The dream of a Greater Bengali identity fell apart because the colonial state had accepted these languages as separate from – and basically on a par with – Bengali.²² A new trend had manifested itself across the wider region: language and (colonially demarcated) territory became welded together in the forging of competing nation-building projects.²³

Splitting the Bengali heartland

The link between language, power, and territory was further tested in 1905 when the colonial authorities decided to divide the region into two new provinces: one containing eastern Bengal and Assam, and the other western Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar. This move led to what one author has described as “bhadralok hysteria”²⁴ and the emergence of conspiracy theories among high-caste Hindus who saw it as a calculated attack on Bengali unity and power, and an insult to Bengal’s cultural heritage.²⁵ Many Calcutta bhadralok feared losing their cultural and economic control of eastern Bengal. Many Muslim Bengalis welcomed the split, however, hoping for emancipatory effects and better career prospects because eastern Bengal had a clear Muslim majority. These fears and hopes proved largely realistic. In the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, the bhadralok found that they were less privileged than in Calcutta.

A militant anti-colonial movement followed the split.²⁶ It depended heavily on Hindu imagery to mobilize the Bengali masses. Although this was in line with mainstream nationalist thought at the time, it offended many Muslims and contributed to a fateful new twist in Bengaliness as religious identities began to crystallize into compelling political ones. Communal politics, which pitted Bengali Hindus against Bengali Muslims, became a reality. It forced the bhadralok to woo low-caste/Dalit Bengalis into the Hindu fold to build up numbers. Although the administrative division of Bengal was annulled in 1911, communal mindsets survived. Bengal was administratively reunited but the spell of genteel Bengaliness had been broken. Communal politics would dominate the final phase of British rule and turn out to be a major factor in a second territorial partition of the Bengali heartland as the British left.

A final bid to mobilize all Bengalis as a political community was made by a group of Calcutta politicians in 1947. Fearing the breakup of the Bengali heartland as British rule ended, they proposed a “United Bengal” – a sovereign nation-state separate from both India and Pakistan. But it came to nothing: “the United Bengal Plan was never more than a pipe dream.”²⁷ The all-Bengal nation-state that they longed for never materialized.

Bengaliness: postcolonial complications

In the decades after British rule ended, Bengaliness found itself on a different course. Some processes were especially influential in modifying and restraining it. First, Bengaliness fell victim to bifurcation, as did the study of Bengaliness, which split into parallel Indian and Pakistani/Bangladeshi conversations.²⁸ Second, new international borders blocked the dispersal of Bengaliness (Map 1). Third, postcolonial state elites adopted Bengaliness as a discourse of cultural superiority and political dominance. Fourth, Bengaliness faced new forms of rejection and resistance. And fifth, an emergent global discourse of Indigeneity constructed Bengalis as the Other.

Dual Bengaliness

The Muslim-Hindu antagonism that had taken political shape at the beginning of the twentieth century culminated in renewed territorial division when the British left in 1947. British India was broken into Muslim-majority and non-Muslim-majority territories, the former becoming Pakistan and the latter India. Eastern Bengal became East Pakistan, and western Bengal (which was smaller and less populous) joined India as one of its federated states. Many Muslim Bengalis left India for East Pakistan, just as many Hindu Bengalis left East Pakistan for India.²⁹

As bhadralok Bengalis – “former imperial subordinates”³⁰ – saw their colonial moorings slip away, they took control of West Bengal, where they consolidated genteel Bengaliness and underscored its duality by elevating local (ghoti) lifestyles over those of immigrants from eastern areas (bangal), whom they portrayed as rustic and unsophisticated.³¹ For the political elite, Bengaliness also became a powerful tool in their struggles with India’s central state. Meanwhile, in East Bengal the genteel model declined as both a rising Bengali middle class and the Pakistan state searched for a new Muslim Bengaliness and more “Islamic” speech forms, dress codes, food habits, literature, and architecture.³² Dhaka became the new citadel of a retooled Bengaliness.

Separate territorialization became even more definite when, in 1971, East Pakistan broke away and became the independent state of Bangladesh. In East Pakistan, right from the start in 1947, local politicians opposing the dominant West Pakistan state elite employed Bengaliness as a powerfully mobilizing force.³³ Often referred to as the Language Movement, this resistance grew out of frustration about Bengali (the majority language of the 1947–1971 West and East Pakistan state) being denied the status of a national language. The language, its script, and Bengaliness all became emotive rallying points in a struggle that ended in a successful war of independence.³⁴

After 1971, many observers in India expected the appeal of the genteel model of Bengaliness to reemerge in the east, but this did not happen. Bangladesh culture had been shaped by its distinct, tortuous post-1947 experiences. Increasingly self-confident, Bengalis in the new state of Bangladesh distanced themselves from the bhadralok-inspired model, and rival political parties projected their own versions.³⁵ By the 2020s, Bangladesh and India each had thriving, territorialized forms of Bengaliness, and many Bengalis in India had come to accept that these forms should meet on a level playing field. Meanwhile, even in India the dominance of the genteel model was fading.³⁶

Today the number of native speakers of Bengali in India and Bangladesh is about 270 million, four times larger than in the late 1940s. State policies, the educational system, and media outlets propagate parallel Kolkata-style or Dhaka-style “standard” Bengali. Even so, for many Bengali speakers, regional dialects remain the language of the heart and the home. The eastern and western forms of standard Bengaliness have been highly successful but they have not replaced more local identities such as Noakhali-ness, Dhakaiya-ness, or Jalpaiguri-ness by any means. Instead, many Bengalis speak standard Bengali as well as another dialect.

Turbulent as these transformations of postcolonial Bengaliness have been, they were an intra-Bengali issue that had little effect on how non-Bengali neighbors perceived Bengalis. In the colonial period, British wits and racial theorists had viciously lampooned genteel Bengaliness, describing Bengali men as effeminate, effete, non-martial, and pretentious.³⁷ But effeteness was the last thing that non-Bengali neighbors associated with Bengalis: many were more impressed by Bengali assertiveness, expansionism, disdain, and guile.³⁸

In the postcolonial era, Bengalis and non-Bengalis found themselves in a transformed cultural landscape without a trace of Bengali effeteness. Two major features were the emergence of Bengaliness as the idiom of state power, and the dismantling of colonial-era protections restricting Bengali settlement in certain areas.³⁹ Another was what Townsend Middleton has called “forms of coloniality … endemic to the birthplace of Subaltern Studies, Bengal.”⁴⁰ These developments compelled non-Bengalis increasingly to push back against Bengali ascendency.

Bengalis on the move

In colonial times, Bengalis had migrated within and beyond Bengal in small groups or as temporary migrants. After 1947 this pattern changed, and very large groups settled permanently in areas where they had been absent or minorities before. This spatial expansion led to new struggles because it often traversed recently imposed international state borders. As non-citizens and unauthorized newcomers, border-crossers could be vulnerable. They had no right to work, settle, or own property across the border. During colonial rule, everybody in British India had been a British subject. In independent India, Pakistan, and Burma, however, national citizenship emerged as a potent identity that was used to marginalize Bengali newcomers in areas beyond the Bengali heartland. And even in that heartland, citizenship trumped Bengaliness. Simply being Bengali among Bengalis no longer secured social acceptance and protection.⁴¹ Struggles over migration and citizenship generated legal, bureaucratic, and physical confrontations, as well as a new distinction between “assertive” and “timid” Bengaliness.

Bengali superiority as a state discourse

In Bangladesh, Tripura, and West Bengal, postcolonial state elites projected Bengaliness as a discourse of political dominance. Their choice to imagine these spaces as being purely Bengali inspired multiple forms of rejection. Non-Bengali inhabitants could be influenced, even charmed, by Bengali cultural expressions, but they recoiled from Bengali dominance. As state-backed ethnic intimidation became common and sometimes turned violent, non-Bengali citizens felt that their state elites ignored and disowned them. The state model of Bengali superiority promised state protection to Bengalis intent on criminal acts (discrimination, fraud, plunder, rape, murder) against their non-Bengali co-citizens (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Alfred Soren, a Santal (non-Bengali) activist, was murdered after organizing protests against land-grabbing Bengali landlords in 2000. This poster demanded justice – but twenty-odd years later the case was still pending.⁴²

SOURCE: Poster distributed by the Bangladesh Indigenous Union.

Language politics

In addition to struggles over citizenship and majoritarian supremacy, non-Bengalis also sought to rebuff Bengaliness in the “inner domain of cultural identity.”⁴³ Among the many cultural tools at their disposal were marriage strategies, dress codes, cuisine, music, cinema, festivals, emblems, political parties, and social media.⁴⁴ Their struggles also involved reclaiming elements of religion and folklore that Bengalis had presented as their own, reviving non-Bengali traditions, and challenging Brahmanical culture.⁴⁵

Language was an especially powerful means of defending this inner domain. The written forms of South Asian languages have long been battlegrounds for identity politics. In this part of the world, for a language to have a unique script is widely understood to demonstrate high civilizational status. As literacy spread among smaller language communities, language politics flourished.⁴⁶ Script served “not only as an important identity marker, but also as a demarcator from the dominant languages of the region, and maybe, ultimately, as a stabilizer” of languages.⁴⁷

But many South Asian languages do not have a unique script. Instead, they have histories of “multiscriptality.” The Bengali language is no exception. Although today it is written in the Eastern Nagari script, it has used other scripts as well, notably Perso-Arabic and Roman, and during Pakistan times activists in Eastern Bengal attempted, but failed, to impose the Urdu-Arabic script.⁴⁸

Conversely, scripts are often multilingual.⁴⁹ Thus, Bengali is the most prominent language written in Eastern Nagari script, but it is not the only one. Both linguistically related languages (Assamese, Chakma) and non-related languages (Meitei, Kurux, and Toto) use this script, so it is a misnomer to speak of it as a “Bengali script.”⁵⁰ Even so, Eastern Nagari is often symbolically identified with the Bengali language and its rejection understood as a rebuff to all things Bengali. Rejection came in two forms: readoption of previous scripts and invention of new ones.⁵¹

Script readoption

In some speech communities that had abandoned their own scripts and embraced the Eastern Nagari script, campaigns emerged for the reintroduction of the discarded script. In Manipur, the Meitei language (and possibly some other languages⁵²) had been written in a distinctive script. But after conversion to Vaishnavism – a “Bengali” form of Hinduism – in the eighteenth century, the “Bengali” script was introduced and spread with growing literacy during the colonial period. From the 1950s onward, however, Meitei activists began to resist the script (which they considered to be both alien and historically imposed) and made the Meitei script “a strong symbol for an allegedly lost glorious past, a tool for strengthening the modern Meitei identity.”⁵³ Bengalis (who were not part of Manipur’s present) were constructed as “a historicized foe.”⁵⁴ These efforts gradually gained ground, and today the Meitei Mayek script has considerable state backing. It is taught in schools and appears on billboards and government buildings, and in official documents (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Script readoption. Meitei-language notice in two scripts (Meitei Mayek and Eastern Nagari), followed by English, in Imphal, Manipur, 2011. Credit: Willem van Schendel.

Chakma identity politics rejected this “Bengali” script in politically far more charged circumstances. The struggle for independence from Pakistan mobilized mass support by using the “Bengali” script as a powerful symbol of pride and identity. After Bangladesh gained independence in 1971, Bengaliness was anchored in the constitution of the new state, which stated that “Bangladesh’s citizens will be known as Bengali.” A Chakma member of the Constituent Assembly immediately objected to this.⁵⁵ It became clear, however, that the new state elite celebrated Bengaliness, rejected cultural diversity, and refused to acknowledge the separate identities of the country’s dozens of ethnic minorities and languages.⁵⁶ This contributed to an armed autonomy movement in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.⁵⁷ Chakma activists used a revived and adapted script (Ojhapath) as one of their tools to underline that Chakmas were not Bengalis, and that the Chakma language was not a dialect of the Bengali language.⁵⁸

A third variant of script readoption developed around the Sylheti vernacular, spoken in northeastern Bangladesh, in Assam and Tripura (India), and among a large diasporic community in the United Kingdom. Sylheti had historically been written in various scripts, one of which was the local Syloti Nagri script. It was used for print texts in the nineteenth century but was gradually marginalized by Eastern Nagari script. But it was not political conflict between Bengalis and Sylhetis that prompted the resurgence of Syloti Nagri. Rather, it was a purely cultural reassertion of Sylheti identity resulting largely from the efforts of a transnational group of script activists around 2000.⁵⁹

Script invention

The second pattern of graphic resistance against Bengali superiority took the form of new scripts. Smaller language communities in and around the Bengali heartland often did not have written forms until formal education and Christian missionary activity reached them during the colonial period. Missionaries were instrumental in creating locally adapted Romanized scripts for different language communities. As Christianity spread, Bengalis found their heartland surrounded and punctuated by Roman script communities such as Garo, (A·chik),⁶⁰ Khasi, Bawm, and Mizo.⁶¹ This led to postcolonial struggles over which script to use. Kokborok, Hajong, and Dimasa are examples of Eastern Nagari/Roman multiscriptality. More complicated cases of languages with multiple scripts are Kurux (three scripts) and Santali (five scripts).⁶² A special case of script invention is Rohingya, a language related to Bengali (and sometimes described as a Bengali dialect). And yet, after 1948 Rohingya speakers rejected the “Bengali” script – instead opting for Arabic/Urdu or Burmese script⁶³ – until, in the 1980s, a new script was developed: Hanifi Rohingya (Figure 3).⁶⁴ After repeated mass flights of Rohingyas from their native Arakan (Rakhine) in Myanmar between the 1940s and the 2010s, hundreds of thousands ended up in refugee camps in Bangladesh, where some non-government organizations sought to introduce Roman script to teach the Rohingya language.

Figure 3. The word “Rohingya” written in Hanifi Rohingya script, which was developed in the 1980s. Credit: Willem van Schendel.

Finally, speakers of some unwritten languages opted for their own scripts without the intermediate step of using “Bengali” script. Like many non-literate language communities in the region, the Mro (or Mru) in the Chittagong Hill Tracts told stories of having had a script in the past but having lost it.⁶⁵ In the 1980s, Man Le, a Mro visionary, developed the distinctive Mrocha script. Initially, it was linked to a new religion, Krama, but then spread more widely among Mro speakers. Today an estimated eighty percent of Mro are literate in the new script and it is being taught in the first three school years (Figure 4).⁶⁶ Script invention is an ongoing process, as the Toto of West Bengal demonstrate: they created their own script in the 2010s.⁶⁷

Figure 4. Children’s book Shinglok’s Field in Mro script. SOURCE: Guhathakurta and Van Schendel (editors) 2013, 464–465.⁶⁸

Postcolonial script politics have expressed “language grief,” a desire to salvage local identities, and a deliberate distancing from Bengaliness.⁶⁹ They also have modified the meanings that people attach to places. Cultural campaigns and state policies continually changed the linguistic landscape (the written language forms found in the public space⁷⁰). For example, Urdu signs became prominent in Eastern Bengal between 1947 and 1971, only to disappear overnight after Bangladesh became independent. Today, Bengali signs are more dominant in the linguistic landscape of Dhaka than in that of Kolkata (Calcutta), where Hindi and English are prominent competitors.⁷¹ And in Manipur, Meitei Mayek signs marginalized Bengali signs after the state government adopted modernized Mayek script in 1980. Script politics also play a role in struggles over the naming of places. Should the state officially known as Tripura be written as “” (“Tripura” in Bengali) or as “Twipra” (in Kokborok, using Roman script)? How such struggles over the linguistic landscape have affected people’s sense of self and their non-Bengaliness has hardly been studied.

Indigeneity

Defiance of Bengali dominance received a new boost in the 1980s with the advent of a global narrative of Indigeneity. This challenged the civilizational hierarchies underlying a well-established South Asian narrative on “tribes” as well as bhadralok assertions of being the primary citizens of the land. Many non-Bengali communities that had been categorized as tribal embraced the idea of being Indigenous peoples. Supported by international campaigns, this global identity category provided a powerful local resource to confront oppression, demand cultural and economic rights, and organize locally, nationally, and internationally. It helped to reverse the imposed speechlessness (“nirbakization”) that indigenous groups had suffered.⁷²

Indigeneity is a concept that the state elites of both Bangladesh and India reject (Figure 5).⁷³ Nevertheless it has become an effective tool of self-identification to contest Bengali hegemony and internal colonialism (Figure 6) and has been especially successful in Bangladesh.⁷⁴ In West Bengal and Tripura, India’s constitutional safeguards for “scheduled tribes” have caused non-Bengali identity politics to be articulated largely in the idiom of tribal rights.⁷⁵

Figure 5. “The Indigenous peoples of Bangladesh must be given constitutional recognition!”. SOURCE: Poster distributed by the Association of Indigenous Students of Rajshahi University on World Indigenous People’s Day.

Figure 6. A poster listing forty-five non-Bengali communities that are united in the Bangladesh Indigenous Peoples Forum.⁷⁶ SOURCE: Poster distributed by the Bangladesh Indigenous Peoples Forum.

Assertive Bengaliness

In Bangladesh, West Bengal, and Tripura, assertive Bengaliness has provoked anger among non-Bengalis who perceive it as overbearing, condescending, racist, and against the law.⁷⁷ In Bangladesh, the state’s imperious Bengaliness spawned the insurgency in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and countered it with militarization and demographic engineering.⁷⁸ Army trucks brought in thousands of Bengali settlers to displace non-Bengalis and eventually outnumber them. Anti-Bengali sentiments and fighting intensified, and today – half a century later – the area remains under tight military rule. The Chittagong Hill Tracts War became well known internationally as a sustained attack on the rights of Indigenous peoples (Figure 7).

Figure 7. An image of Bangladesh army personnel and Bengali settlers oppressing non-Bengalis in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. SOURCE: Guhathakurta and Van Schendel (eds.) 2013, 408.⁷⁹

In neighboring Tripura, large numbers of Hindu migrants from East Bengal sought refuge after 1947. They came to dominate the non-Bengali population, and the Tripura state assertively celebrated genteel Bengaliness (Figure 8), epitomized by the affectionate relations of the former royal family with Rabindranath Tagore.⁸⁰ Resistance took many forms, right from 1947 when the anti-Bengali organization Seng-krak began protesting the displacement of non-Bengalis from their lands. Many confrontations followed and from the 1980s violence became widespread across Tripura, and it continues today.⁸¹

Figure 8. Caption: Celebrating Bengali cultural icons at the University of Tripura, 2011. The Bengali text respectfully commemorates the 150^th birthday jubilees of poet Rabindranath Tagore (born in 1861) and spiritual master Vivekananda (born in 1863).⁸² Credit: Willem van Schendel.

In West Bengal, resistance to Bengali dominance has taken many forms.⁸³ It has been especially well documented for the north, where it has had a long history.⁸⁴ In Darjeeling district, this culminated in the demand by Nepali speakers for a separate state of Gorkhaland.⁸⁵ As a labor union leader told a researcher in 2017:

There was a design. They were expansionists, the Bengalis. From Bangladesh they took over Tripura, then our Jalpaiguri, then Siliguri. There was influx in Assam. Aren’t they expansionists? They are expansionists  …  These rulers from Kolkata have very colonial designs. Colonial designs! Whenever the demand is raised based on democratic rights to separate from Bengal, they put you in jail.⁸⁶

Likewise, speakers of the Kamtapuri (or Rajbangshi) language in northern West Bengal struggled for an autonomous state.⁸⁷ In 2018 their campaign had some success when the West Bengal Assembly passed a bill recognizing Kamtapuri as a separate language, thereby dropping previous assertions that it was a Bengali dialect.⁸⁸

These moves against assertive Bengaliness have followed the older regional pattern in which language and territory are inextricably connected. Just as in the colonial period, asserting linguistic separateness implies administrative separation from the Bengali heartland.⁸⁹ Whether this is framed as a demand for a separate federated state or an autonomous homeland, the goal is the same: spatial emancipation to push back against Bengali hegemonic designs, internal colonialism, and spatial control.⁹⁰

Timid Bengaliness

Beyond the linguistic heartland a very different scenario has played out in places where Bengaliness could not count on state support and Bengalis have had to be careful to avoid becoming targets of intimidation. A well-known case is Assam where, starting in the nineteenth century and accelerating after 1947, the inflow of Bengalis became “a key coagulant of Assamese nationalism.”⁹¹ A powerful anti-foreigner movement, focusing on Bengali migrants from East Pakistan/Bangladesh, gathered strength from the 1950s (Figure 9).⁹²

Figure 9. Anti-Bengali graffiti on a wall in Dibrugarh, Assam (India), 2004: “Assamese wake up, the Bangladeshis have arrived in Dispur.”⁹³ Credit: Willem van Schendel.

In post-independence India and Myanmar, the forced removal of Bengali speakers suspected of being migrants from Bangladesh became official practice. The Indian authorities employed push-backs⁹⁴ and a succession of administrative tools to expel Bengali non-citizens.⁹⁵ In 1948, Burmese armed forces burned hundreds of Rohingya villages, killed thousands, and triggered a large exodus of survivors to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), a brutal pattern of ethnic cleansing that has been repeated several times, most vehemently in 2017 and 2018.⁹⁶

In several regions, the post-1947 borders cut local Bengalis off from the Bengali heartland. This was the case in areas of the Indian Republic with large, settled Bengali-speaking populations such as Assam (Cachar, Karimganj, Dhubri), Assam/Meghalaya (Mankachar), and Bihar (Manbhum).⁹⁷ After partition, these regions were controlled by non-Bengali elites, and Bengali identities became minoritized and inevitably more fragile and defensive.⁹⁸ Feeling victimized, some minoritized Bengali residents as well as aggrieved Bengali migrants from East Pakistan organized around a demand for “Bangalistan.” This irredentist demand invented a Bengali heartland that included territories that had never been considered Bengali before, a postcolonial echo of the colonial-era dream of a Greater Bengal (Figure 10). It would cover:

… parts of Assam, [the] plains of Meghalaya, West Bengal, Tripura, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Bihar, and Jharkhand. In fact, its territorial ambitions are international – it wants Nepal’s Jhapa district, Myanmar’s Arakan area, and the whole of Bangladesh.⁹⁹

In northeast India, widespread fear of migrants intensified Bengali timidity. State discourse fabricated stories about infiltration from Bangladesh, allegedly nurtured by the Bangladesh government’s sinister design to dismember the Indian nation and establish a greater Bangladesh. The alleged purpose of this demographic aggression was to destabilize northeast India, Bengalize and Islamize it, and ultimately sever it from the rest of India (Figure 11).

Figure 10. “We demand Bangalistan, a self-sufficient social and economic region.” A slogan by the organization Amra Bangali (We Bengalis) in Agartala, Tripura, India, 2011. Credit: Willem van Schendel.

Figure 11. This map, from a book titled Assam’s Agony, claimed to unveil the “unwritten conspiracy” behind “mass infiltration” from Bangladesh.¹⁰⁰ SOURCE: Van Schendel 2005, 196.

Rebuffing Bengaliness

There are many ways in which people can express and enjoy their Bengaliness, and many ways in which others can perceive Bengaliness. I have presented a selection of strategies that non-Bengalis have employed, and continue to employ, to keep Bengali dominance at bay.

Contemporary manifestations of Bengali superiority are rooted in the crafting of a specific genteel vision of Bengali identity some 200 years ago. Like many nationhood projects that emerged worldwide during that period, this vision appeared to provide a strong basis for nation- and state-building.¹⁰¹ But this potential was never fully realized. The formation of the Bengali nation as a politico-linguistic community (or “people-nation”¹⁰²) had fatal flaws that hampered the construction of a unified Bengali nation-state.

This imagined community splintered both externally and internally. Rejections by regional elites in colonial Orissa, Bihar, and Assam imposed distinct spatial boundaries on an envisioned Bengali homeland, and Bengali-speaking Muslim and Dalit activists disputed the right of a small but powerful group of upper-caste Hindus to represent the Bengali linguistic community and to define the Bengali nation. These emancipatory struggles exposed deep fissures among Bengali speakers based on social and ritual exclusion, locality, and economic exploitation.

Despite these tribulations, postcolonial Bengali statehood did take shape. Ironically it bypassed Calcutta, the cradle of genteel Bengaliness. In East Pakistan, Bengaliness emerged as an emancipatory identity that galvanized resistance against the Pakistan state elite. It shaped a robust political community that gained sovereign statehood when Bangladesh became an independent self-ascribed Bengali state in 1971. The 1972 Constitution declared that the Bangladesh state was the receptacle of Bengaliness.¹⁰³ Meanwhile, in India, Bengaliness became entrenched in two federal states (West Bengal and Tripura) but had to contend with the overarching project of building a postcolonial Indian nation. In neighboring areas such as Assam, only the timid version of Bengaliness could flourish.

Today, the ideals of many Bengalis throughout the wider region still resonate with the original features of genteel Bengaliness – to be sophisticated, cultured, aware of the wider world, and in possession of delicate sensibilities. But contemporary Bengaliness is no longer recognizably bhadralok or unitary.¹⁰⁴ The end of British rule accelerated the unraveling of this vision. Changing political, economic, and gender relations affected it; new media platforms allowed lower- and middle-class notions of Bengali culture to circulate; and diasporic connections challenged parochialism. Throughout the post-1947 period, and increasingly hard to ignore, non-Bengalis emancipated themselves. They pushed back against self-congratulatory views of Bengaliness and exposed these masked colonial attitudes, oppressive practices, and willful refusals to listen. Bengali cultural pride and self-assurance began to give way to more complex feelings, including nostalgia and a sense of being embattled. Little by little, genteel Bengaliness lost its grip on postcolonial generations of Bengalis as they redefined and reworked their Bengaliness.¹⁰⁵ Introspection led some to empathize with non-Bengalis and deal with them on a more equal footing.

And yet, postcolonial power elites sought to define the territories of West Bengal, Bangladesh, and Tripura as essentially Bengali spaces, thereby hijacking Bengaliness for their own ends and triggering a range of militant counter-hegemonic movements.¹⁰⁶ In these territories, current state narratives posit Bengaliness as the ageless identity core for all Bengali-speakers, not as the historically contingent and malleable idea that I have explored in this article. Non-Bengali elites – who interpret this “state Bengaliness” as an ideology of oppression – engage in forceful identity politics to mobilize support against their Bengali counterparts. They use ethnic and linguistic symbols, often presented in equally ahistorical narratives, to frame their struggles for economic resources and political power.¹⁰⁷

Such identity politics benefit from several new tools. In the heartland of majoritarian Bengaliness, non-Bengalis feel empowered by global narratives of Indigeneity and internal colonialism. These encourage non-Bengalis to work together and jointly assert their identities (Figure 6). In this way, global developments fortify local initiatives that in turn generate new national and international inter-ethnic alliances.¹⁰⁸

Beyond the Bengali heartland, cross-border Bengali migrants continue to be defined as unauthorized intruders, and longstanding Bengali-speaking residents must prove their bona fides as citizens.¹⁰⁹ Violent confrontations in the form of riots, pogroms, lynchings, rapes, massacres, and acts of genocide are well documented.¹¹⁰ In these clashes, non-Bengalis sometimes join forces with state armies, for example, Rakhine Buddhist communities that participated in the mass expulsion of Rohingyas in Myanmar.¹¹¹

These identity politics have modified Bengaliness. Whereas the colonial Bengali-Odia-Assamese-Hindi conflict was a clash of elite worldviews, postcolonial Bengaliness has involved the legal, ideological, and armed forces of sovereign states, as well as confrontations over scarce resources between lower-class Bengalis and non-Bengalis.¹¹²

Today, conversations between Bengalis and non-Bengalis are often ill-disposed. Individual interactions between Bengalis and non-Bengalis may, of course, be friendly and trusting, but the prevailing political climate mitigates against this. State-driven assertive Bengaliness frustrates productive coexistence and feeds violent confrontations, ultimately victimizing both non-Bengalis and Bengalis. In this cauldron of identity politics, new people-nations are wrought: Gorkha, Jumma, Kamtapuri, Kokborok, Marma, Mro, and more. Their identity politics vary but these movements share an urge to keep Bengaliness at bay. They are exemplars of a connected transnational history of rebuffing Bengali dominance.¹¹³ Such rebuffing strategies parallel those of many other minoritized communities around the world. This points to the urgency of a research agenda on Bengaliness that overcomes both the blinkers of methodological nationalism and the failure to incorporate non-Bengali inputs, responses, and impacts.

Even though non-Bengali voices have made growing numbers of Bengalis rethink notions of Bengali superiority (and made NGOs step up their efforts to serve non-Bengalis), assertive Bengaliness remains the narrative of internal colonialism throughout the region. Political and economic elites routinely weaponize it as they target non-Bengali groups in both India and Bangladesh. Faced with state policies that persistently deny non-Bengalis their civil and cultural rights, many non-Bengali activists are convinced that rebuffing Bengali dominance has become a matter of life and death.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Meghna Guhathakurta, Ellen Bal, and Malini Sur for their insightful comments, and Yasmin Saikia for help with translating from Assamese.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Willem van Schendel

Willem van Schendel works in the fields of history, anthropology, and the sociology of Asia. His recent books related to the theme of this article include Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces: Histories of Networking and Border Crossing (Amsterdam University Press, 2022; edited with Gunnel Cederlöf) and A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2020). A list of his publications can be found at uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel.

Notes

1 The term “non-Bengali” covers a range of self-identifications that share only an awareness of not being Bengali.

2 The origin of the word “Bangla” is unclear. It is usually assumed to be derived from “Vanga” and “Vangala,” found in early Sanskrit texts. These words referred to people and lands beyond the direct knowledge of the writers, somewhere in what we now call Bengal. The languages then spoken in these lands were unrelated to the Bengali language but have left traces in it. Today, Bangla denotes both the region of Bengal (roughly, West Bengal in India and Bangladesh) and the Bengali language. See Chatterji 1926, 62–69; Chakrabarti and Chakrabarti 2013, 32–34.

3 Alexander, Chatterji, and Jalais 2016.

4 In the first comprehensive survey of the language, Grierson gave an overview of different speech forms and their names. Although he acknowledged that it was impossible to establish linguistic boundaries, he identified over twenty vernaculars as dialects of Bengali. Some of Grierson’s dialects are now often treated as separate languages, for example, Chakma, Chittagonian, Sylheti/Siloti, Hajong, and Rohingya. See Grierson 1903, I, ii, 12, 17–9, 214; Guts 2013.

5 “Bengaliness” is a translation of the Bengali words (bangalitto) and বাঙালিয়ানা (bangaliana).

6 Middleton 2020.

7 British colonial rule ended in 1947 and Bengali-speaking regions in India have developed a postcolonial Bengaliness since then. But over sixty percent of Bengali speakers became citizens of Pakistan. According to some historians, they came under renewed colonial rule, now by a West Pakistani elite, until 1971.

8 Kar 2008, 30. See also Grierson 1903, I, 14, 17; Iqbal 2020.

9 For example, adda, “the practice of friends getting together for long, informal, and unrigorous conversations … Adda is often seen as something quin[t]essentially Bengali, as an indispensable part of the Bengali character or as an integral part of such metaphysical notions as ‘life’ and ‘vitality’ for the Bengalis.” Chakrabarty 1999, 110. See also Janeja 2010, 119–126; Sen 2011.

10 Other English terms used for the bhadralok are literati or intelligentsia, but the category was broader and more complex, and it changed over time.

11 Ghosh 2004, 2016; Dasgupta 2018.

12 Chatterji 2001, 299. The Permanent Settlement was the land tax system that formed the bedrock of British rule in Bengal.

13 Bandyopadhyay 1997a, 45–46.

14 High-caste Hindus have always formed a small but ritually and culturally privileged group among Hindus. And Hindus were (and still are) a minority among Bengali speakers. Most Bengalis are Muslims (a fact that did not register until the first population census in 1872) and smaller groups identify as Christians, Buddhists, and followers of other religions.

15 For introductions, see Hashmi 1992; Iqbal 2009; Bose 2014; Daechsel 2015.

16 For introductions, see Bandyopadhyay 1990, 1997b, 2004; Basu 2003; Sarkar 2005.

17 Basu 2010, 79; Bhattacharya 2014; Gupta 2017; Mukharji 2017.

18 At a time when colonial discourse often restricted the term “Bengali” to caste Hindus, many Banglaphone Muslim and Dalit activists aspired to being explicitly accepted as Bengalis.

19 For example, the Maharajas of Cooch Behar and Tripura, and the Chakma Rajas.

20 Kar 2008, 65. See also Mishra 2020, 48–61; Jha 2020.

21 Some Bengali-speaking regions spilled over the administrative borders of colonial Bengal, however, such as Sylhet and Cachar in Assam.

22 An influential version of “Greater Bengal” is articulated in Sen 1935.

23 Ludden 2012.

24 Kar 2008, 55.

25 Ludden 2012, 493.

26 Sarkar 1973; Silvestri 2009.

27 Chatterji 2002, 260. See also Aiyar 2008; Ghosh 2017, 355–366.

28 Janeja 2010.

29 Higher-caste Hindus migrated to India first, followed by Dalits. See Bandyopadhyay and Basu Ray Chaudhury 2022.

30 Ludden 2022.

31 Shamshad 2017; Chatterjee 2020a. Manpreet Janeja (2010) analyzes the divergence of contemporary Bengaliness (bangalitto) in Bangladesh and West Bengal. See Feldman 2021.

32 Rounaq Jahan (1972) characterized this new East Bengali middle class as a “vernacular elite”. See Newbold 2021.

33 Anisuzzaman 2008; Khondker, Muurlink, and Ali 2022.

34 Murshid 2022. For a brief introduction to literature on the war, see Van Schendel 2020, 131–138.

35 Jones 2011.

36 Chakrabarty 2004; Ghosh 2016; Dasgupta 2018; Roy 2019; Chakraborty Paunksnis 2021.

37 For more on the imperial disdain for the bhadralok lifestyle, see Rosselli 1980; Sinha 1995; Dutta 2021.

38 Van Schendel 1992; Bal 2007; Chettri 2017.

39 For example, the 1873 Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, the 1900 Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation, and the 1935 Government of India Act.

40 Middleton 2020, 34.

41 Chakrabarty and Jha 2022; Feldman 2021; Sur 2021.

42 The text (in Bengali) reads: “We demand a court judgement on the murder of indigenous leader Martyr Alfred Soren. Bangladesh Indigenous Union.” See Rozario 2020; Van Schendel 2020, 248–249.

43 Partha Chatterjee employed this term to analyze Bengali cultural resistance to British rule: “The bilingual intelligentsia came to think of its own language as belonging to that inner domain of cultural identity, from which the colonial intruder had to be kept out.” Chatterjee 1993, 7.

44 For example, Tun 2015; Bal 2010; Besky 2017; Mukherjee 2020; Hoque 2022, chapter 5.

45 Mahato 2000; Roy 2015; Sen 2022.

46 Brandt and Sohoni 2018; Brandt 2020a.

47 Brandt 2014, 86.

48 Kurzon 2010; Mandal 2014; d’Hubert 2014, 338–346; d’Hubert 2020; Brandt 2020a, 17–21; Brandt 2021.

49 Not all scripts are, however. Lepcha (spoken by some 30,000 people in northern Bengal) has its own script, presumably developed in the eighteenth century.

50 At least three regional styles of writing Eastern Nagari (western, northern, eastern) could be distinguished before printing began to standardize texts. d’Hubert 2014, 336–338.

51 There were also cases of “script persistence.” These included Burmese script (Marma in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and Rakhaing in Patuakhali and Cox’s Bazar), Armenian script (Armenians), and Urdu script (urban elites and post-1947 migrants).

52 Brandt 2018, 125.

53 Brandt 2018, 127.

54 Brandt 2018, 134.

55 Chakma 2010; Siddiqi 2018, 246–249.

56 Mohsin 2003; Bal 2010; Yasmin 2014; Brandt 2020b; Sultana 2021; Guhathakurta 2022.

57 Van Schendel 2020; 245–250.

58 Brandt 2018.

59 d’Hubert 2014, 340–347; Simard, Dopierala, and Thaut 2020.

60 A script for Garo, A·chik Tok·birim, was invented in 1979 but it remains marginal compared to the Roman script.

61 Pappuswamy 2017.

62 Singha 2002; Debnath 2013; Historial 2013; Brandt 2014, 89–91; Brandt 2020a, 13–14; Choksi 2021.

63 Sarkar Forthcoming.

64 Pandey 2016.

65 Brauns and Löffler 1990, 235–236. See Pachuau and van Schendel 2022; 86.

66 Mahmud 2007, 140; Uddin 2008. See Narzary 2013.

67 Anderson 2019.

68 Published by permission from Save the Children UK, London.

69 Bostock 1997.

70 Shohamy 2006, 110; Gorter 2006.

71 Bengali signs were most dominant after Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. As English emerged as the language of prestige education, English signs became more prominent – and more Arabic signs signaled the reemergence of public expressions of Islam.

72 Mahato 2000. In Bengali, nirbak means speechless. In West Bengal another identity project invented “mulnibasi” for autochthonous inhabitants belonging to the legal categories of “scheduled tribes,” “scheduled castes,” “other backward classes,” and religious minorities. See Roy 2015.

73 Gerharz 2014; Alamgir 2016, 215–217; Brandt 2020b. In 2019, the Bangladesh government directed all registered organizations to delete the terms “indigenous” and “adibashi.” The Indigenous World 2020, 2020, 203–204. See also Uttom 2022.

74 Uddin 2019.

75 Chhetri 2021; Debbarma 2021. But compare this with Thami 2020.

76 The poster equates “Indigenous” with the Bengali word adibashi (original inhabitant, autochthon).

77 For examples, see Datta 2015, 97–143; Roy 2015; Ghoshal 2017; Ahmed 2017, 114–115; Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018, 345; Datta 2019; Jamatia and Gundimeda 2019.

78 Mohsin 2003; Adnan 2008; Alamgir 2016; Bal and Siraj 2017; Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018, 321–362.

79 Cover of a locally published booklet, Chitkar (The Scream), which commemorated the 1993 Naniarchar massacre. The artist was not acknowledged.

80 Jamatia and Gundimeda 2019; Ghoshal 2021, 140–155.

81 Bhattacharjee 1989, 127–134; Bhattacharyya 1989; Van Schendel 2005, 194–195, 203–204; Debbarma 2021.

82 The text reads: “Tripura University offers reverent obeisance to master poet Rabindranath on his 150th anniversary and to Swami Vivekananda on the eve of his 150th anniversary.”

83 For some political movements, see Duyker 1987; Ghosh 1993; Chhetri 2021.

84 Chettri 2017, 45–57; Chhetri 2018; Middleton 2021.

85 Chettri 2017, 82.

86 Middleton 2020, 40.

87 Native speakers and linguists have identified this speech by other names as well: Rangpuri, Koch, Bahe, Kamta, and Kamrupi. See Misra 2006; Toulmin 2009, 1–13; Nandi 2014; Rajbansi–Bengali 2014.

88 See Basistha 2016, 673. In fact, the Assembly recognized it as two languages: “Rajbangshi” and “Kamtapuri.”

89 In the colonial period, anti-Bengali emancipation movements in Orissa, Assam, and Bihar (see Map 1) had successfully resisted the dominance of the Bengali language in their territories and replaced it with alternative languages for education and officialdom.

90 Basistha 2016, 667; Chakravarti 2017; Middleton 2020, 32–33.

91 Sen 2021, 4.

92 Three phases of this movement are known as Bongal Kheda (“Drive Out the Foreigners”), the Assamese Language Movement, and the Assam Movement. See Goswami 2014; Ahmed 2014; Murshid 2016; Ghoshal 2021, 126–138, 200–222; Saikia Forthcoming.

93 Dispur is the capital of Assam. The slogan was signed by the All-Assam Students Union (AASU). I would like to thank Yasmin Saikia for helping me translate this Assamese text.

94 Van Schendel 2005, 197–200, 222–226.

95 Death by Paperwork 2021.

96 The Myanmar government classifies Rohingyas as Bengali/Bangladeshi immigrants, a label that Rohingyas reject. See Farzana 2017.

97 In the 1950s, Bengali-speaking parts of Manbhum were added to the state of West Bengal and became Purulia district.

98 Baruah 2020; Dubochet 2022.

99 Roy 2008.

100 Das 1982, 41, 31, 169; Ghoshal 2021. See Van Schendel 2005, 194–198.

101 For examples, Chatterjee 2020b, 25–30.

102 Chatterjee 2020b, 31–71, 86–89, 107–111.

103 It stated: “The unity and solidarity of the Bangalee nation, which, deriving its identity from its language and culture, attained sovereign and independent Bangladesh through a united and determined struggle in the war of independence, shall be the basis of Bangalee nationalism.” See Siddiqi 2018.

104 Ghosh 2017.

105 Chakrabarty 2004; Chakraborty 2014; Bhattacharya 2019; Bhattacharya 2022.

106 Mohsin 2003.

107 This model of “fixed Bengaliness” is mirrored by equally fixed, timeless models of identity among many non-Bengali activists. There are important parallels between these ahistorical models of ethnic identity and the fixed identities projected by religious identity movements – Islamism and Hindutva – that are presently confronting state Bengaliness in both Bangladesh and India. Highly relevant for contemporary politics, these are largely intra-Bengali in nature.

108 For example, Kapaeeng Foundation and International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA).

109 Sur 2021. In the Chittagong Hill Tracts – beyond the Bengali heartland but inside the Bangladesh territory – non-Bengalis distinguish clearly between the small, long-settled local Bengali community and the new immigrants and armed forces.

110 Mohaiemen 2010; Kimura 2013; Wouters 2022.

111 Simpson and Farrelly 2021, 249–264; Than and May 2022.

112 For case studies, Kimura 2013; Alamgir 2016; Bal and Siraj 2017; Sur 2019, 2021.

113 Rebuffing Bengaliness also takes place among non-Bengalis who distinguish between members of their own group being more, or less, “Bengalized.” Bal and Claquin Chambugong 2014.