Silent Psychological Division out of ‘Social Distancing’: Roots of Bengal Partition through Sociocultural Prism

You are the son of a Muslim; why do you need so much education?" (p.30) This one-liner in the book Identity of a Muslim Family in Colonial Bengal: Between Memories and History (New York: Peter Lang, 2021) by Mohammad Rashiduzzaman is enough to make one understand the enormity of the rift between Hindus and Muslims in colonial Bengal.As researchers of the Partition and refugee studies of South Asia, we often wonder how the masses began to accept the idea of making separate homelands for the two leading communities of Bengal.Indeed, they participated actively in communal politics at the grassroots level, initiated chiefly by the three major political parties of united Indian territory: the Congress, the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, the latter two being actively against the centuries-long tradition of communal harmony in the pre-Partition East Bengal society.Interestingly, a study of the trends of Partition historiography reveals a shift, from the late 1970s onwards, in the focus of the research done by historians and social scientists: from the high politics of Partition to the more human side of it.However, the Partition narratives kept revolving only around the Hindu side of the stories.Hindu refugee narratives, therefore, became more prominent in Partition literature and films.The Muslim accounts of experiencing the division remained marginal for many reasons.The key reason was that the creation of Pakistan, a brand new nation-state on the map of South Asia, has always been seen in official accounts as an absolute achievement of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.The Muslim