The Making and Unmaking of Assam-Bengal Borders and the Sylhet Referendum

Abstract

The creation of Assam as a new province in 1874 and the transfer of Sylhet from Bengal to Assam provided a new twist in the shaping of the northeastern region of India. Sylhet remained part of Assam from 1874 to 1947, which had significant consequences in this frontier locality. This paper re-examines archival sources on political mobilization, rereads relevant autobiographical texts, and reviews oral evidence to discover the ‘experienced’ history of the region as distinct from the ‘imagined’ one. The sub-text of partition (Sylhet) is more intriguing than the main text (Bengal), because events in Sylhet offer us a micro-level study. Generations of historians—writing mostly in Bengali and relying on colonial archives—have tended to overlook the mindset of the people of Sylhet. This paper, on the basis of an examination of combined sources, argues that the new province was implicated in overlapping histories, across Bengal-Assam borders. The voice of the indigenous—mostly Hindus but partly Muslim—elites were dominant from 1874 onwards. However, the underdogs—particularly ‘pro-Pakistani’ dalits (lower-caste Hindus) and madrasa-educated ‘pro-Indian’ maulvis—emerged as crucial players in the referendum of 1947. Hardly any serious study, however, has focused on the Sylhet referendum—a defining moment in the region. This study of the Sylhet referendum will reveal a new dimension to the multiple responses to these issues and provide a glimpse of the ‘communal psyche’ of the people in this frontier district, rather than a binary opposition between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ forces.

A History of Symbolic Violence: A Spatial Temporal Exploration of the Cultural Capital Legacy of Bengali Pedagogy

“…By 1874, the stable agrarian economy of ‘Bengal’s prosperous Sylhet Districts’ then locally known as Srihat , and its 17,020,000 inhabitants were incorporated into the corporation’s unregulated private imperial mode of expansionism (Subir, 2020, p. 131). The annexation added a ‘250 per cent increase in revenue’ for the British administration (Hossain, 2013, p. 42). Exercising military power, the armed merchant monopoly emptied around £232 million in modern terms from Bengal’s treasury—‘the largest corporate windfalls in history’ (Dalrymple, 2020, p. 133).…”

“…Equally, at the same time in direct contradiction to Qur’anic injunctions advocating egalitarianism (Qur’an, 49:13), Urdu-speaking Muslim aristocracies of foreign descent belonging to the landowning upper class Ashraf group, occupied all the designated Islamic religious stations of leadership and local administrative roles. Muslim aristocrats ‘traditionally dominated Sylhet from the Mughal era’ and did not desire the presence or occupation of Chhotolok [lower class workers], Atraf [landless lower class] Muslims and native small land holding Bengali-speaking peasant workers to access the same secular economic and social mobility spheres as themselves (Hossain, 2013, p. 75).…”

Partition and its Afterlife: Tracing Home, Memory and Longing in the Imagination of the Displaced Sylhetis

“…The subtext of Partition (Sylhet) is more absorbing than the dominant text of Bengal Partition because it offers an entirely new perspective to our understanding of Partition politics. (Hossain, 2013) In recent times, questions have started being asked about the reasons behind such absence of representation and inadequate visibility of this important chapter of Partition. It had in reality permanently changed the lives and futures of generations of Sylhetis who were displaced from their homeland to arrive as refugees in the newly formed nation-state.…”