Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions of Pakistan, 1940–1947

Abstract This paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali intellectuals and literary critics from 1940–1947. Historians of late colonial South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with colonial Indian ‘Muslim minority’ provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come into focus, the spotlight has centred on politicians like Fazlul Huq or Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy. This paper aims to provide a corrective to this lacuna by analyzing Bengali Muslim conceptualizations of the idea of Pakistan. Bengali Muslim thinkers, such as Abul Mansur Ahmed, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, and Farrukh Ahmed, blended concepts of Pakistan inside locally grounded histories of the Bengali language and literature and worked within disciplines of geography and political economy. Many Bengali Muslim writers from 1940 to 1947 creatively integrated concepts of Pakistan in poetry, updating an older Bengali literary tradition begun in earlier generations. Through a discussion of the social history of its emergence along with the role of geography, political thought, and poetry, this paper discusses the significance of ‘Pak-Bangla’ cultural nationalism within late colonial South Asian history.