Riyad
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It is interesting how Buddhist East Bengal became Islamic Bangladesh.
How did East Bengal become Muslim majority?
Picture: Ruins of Buddhist empire in Bangladesh.
Sharbatanu Chatterjee, Open-minded optimist, Indian by nature, knowledge-hungry liberal minded and g...
10.8k Views • Upvoted by Sarosh Mohammad, Muslim
This is a very interesting question and prompted me to read up a lot on the history of the historic region of Bengal. I have gathered opinion and words extensively from the resources mentioned below.
As Karl Marx had said, history of humankind is all about a history of class struggles. However, there are several theories to explain why West Bengal was Hindu-majority while East and North Bengal were Muslim-majority.
Fig 1: Bengal (Pre-partition)
In fact, this is quite paradoxical!
If one traveled from West to East along the vast land mass known as Indo-Gangetic plain in the pre-partition days, when there were some Hindus and some Muslims in every part of the plain, one would have observed that the proportion of Muslims in the population would go on reducing as one went east. Thus, the North-West Frontier Province, Baluchistan and Sind were overwhelmingly Muslim ; Punjab was balanced, with a Muslim majority tapering off as one went from Attock to Ambala, west to east within the province ; and the United Provinces and Bihar were overwhelmingly Hindu. Yet suddenly the pattern reversed itself in East and North Bengal, and then again fell into place in the easternmost province of British India, namely Assam.
1. The First Theory:
This question had perplexed Syed Mujtabaa Ali who had come to the conclusionthat this was due to the arrival of Arab traders in the coastal towns of East Bengal, in the Chittagong-Barisal stretch (Bottom right in Fig 1) who had settled down and brought and spread their faith in much the same way as they did in the Malabar region of present-day Kerala, or in Malaysia or Indonesia. Annada Sankar Ray writes in his Jukto Bonger Sriti (Memoirs of United Bengal) that a tradition existed in Chittagong of writing Bangla in Arabic script. He attributes it to maritime trade relations between Chittagong and Arabia from the pre-Islamic period.
The theory of Islam being spread by this trade-and-contact route, rather than by the conquest-and-conversion route, is plausible, and also attractive, but is probably not correct.
(Plausible, because a similar phenomenon was noticed in the case of a number of Portuguese who had settled down in those parts, and had created Roman Catholic pockets. Buddhadeb Bose writes in the first part of his autobiography Amar Chhelebela (Bengali) that he had seen a person of almost pure Portuguese blood in the coastal town of Noakhali (of Noakhali genocide infamy) in the 1920s who spoke the usual Noakhali dialect. Gopal Haldar, in his reminiscences of pre-partition Noakhali mentions two villages adjoining Noakhali town called Shahebghata (literally, wharf of the Europeans) and Ezbelia (Isabella?), inhabited by ordinary-looking folk but of the Catholic faith, and with names like Gonsalves and Fernandes.)
This theory, on the other hand, is probably not correct, because firstly, it cannot explain how faraway places in North Bengal, such as Rangpur and Dinajpur became Muslim-majority, while places more accessible on the riverine route, such as Lower Assam, did not ; also why the Portuguese, who were no less proselytizers than the Arabs, could not spread their faith.
Finally, the theory is probably not correct because there is a better explanation.
2.The Second Theory:
That explanation is that this region, along with large parts of the rest of India and places as far west and north as modern-day Afghanistan and Xinjiang, had become entirely Buddhist, and by the sixth century or so this Buddhism had also become adulterated with diverse forms of animism, occult practices, promiscuity, and the like, something in the nature of what is known in Hinduism as vamachara, and had degenerated into a loose faith. The great Acharya Sankara set out on foot from faraway Kerala to set right this state of affairs and in a life of only 32 years got the country firmly back to the Hindu fold. It is possible that the Acharya could not reach the eastern parts of Bengal because of the relative inaccessibility of the delta. In fact the delta of Eastern Bengal was known in legend as Pandavavarjita Desha -- the land that even the Pandavas avoided. The population therefore remained Buddhist-Animist, and easily converted to Islam when the marauders from the west came to Bengal. Extensive ruins of Buddhist monasteries are found at Paharpur and Mahasthangarh in the northern parts of present-day Bangladesh. The Buddhist priest Dipankar Srigyan had set out from a village called Bajrajogini near Dhaka to convert the whole of Tibet to Buddhism. Buddhism held fray in East Bengal
The Muslims of East Bengal are therefore, in all probability, converts mostly from Buddhism-Animism and not from Hinduism. This view is also held by the eminent historian Vincent Smith among others. The argument finds great support from the fact that Buddhism has yielded elsewhere, as it did in East Bengal, much more easily to Islam than Sanatan (Orthodox) Hinduism. Thus once-Buddhist Afghanistan and Xinjiang eventually became totally Muslim, while Hindu India did not. Similarly, Buddhist East Bengal became Muslim-majority, while lands to the west, which had become Hindu under the influence of Sankara remained Hindu.
3. The Third Theory
Ashok Mitra of the Indian Civil Service has advanced a very different theory which he attributes to his Gurus in Anthropology and Demography, respectively Jatindra Mohan Datta and Sailendra Nath Sengupta.
According to him these two gentlemen worked out the total number of Muslims and Christians that had come to India from outside upto the 17th century. They then extrapolated this figure to 1951 using the prevailing rate of increase in population. Deducting the result from the total number of Muslims in India and Pakistan they came to the conclusion, among others, that ninety-five percent of the Bengali Muslims had been Hindus in the last, that is the nineteenth century. This is very interesting, but leads to a number of total absurdities. First, it is inconceivable that the number of Hindus converting to Islam would be more in the British age than in the Moghul or Nawabi age. There were several incentives to convert during those earlier ages, while there were only disincentives during the British times, at least upto the beginning of this century. Secondly any estimate of the total number of Muslims who entered India might be made, if at all, with some difficulty, but to estimate how many of them entered Bengal seems impossible. How they surmounted this obstacle is not mentioned in Ashok Mitra’s book. Thirdly, this theory does not explain the anomaly of sudden increase in Muslim population in East Bengal as one goes from West to East. Lastly, it presupposes that the rate of growth of population is the same among Hindus and Muslims whereas in fact it is not so ; the latter was always more than the former. Ashok Mitra does not endorse the conclusions of his Gurus, but cites them without comment. Neither Syed Mujtabaa Ali nor Annada Sankar Ray are confident that their views are correct or even supported by a substantial historical school.
4. The Fourth Theory (Most Probable):
M.R.Akhtar Mukul, a prominent present-day Bangladeshi intellectual, has tried an explanation in his book 'Purbapurusher Sandhane' (in Bangla, meaning 'In Search of Our Ancestors') . In this book also he has supported the contention that the Muslims of East and North Bengal are mostly converts from Buddhists. (Similar to Theory 2) He has commented upon the absence of recorded history of Bengalis in the period between the decline of Buddhism in India and the coming of Sufi saints to Bengal. Finally he has also concluded that the simple appeal of the Sufis, who preached a form of Islam in which Allah, the Muslim God, was looked upon as an object of love rather than fear, proved to be irresistible to the massses of Eastern Bengal. These masses, according to him, were at the lower end of the caste spectrum under the Brahminical hierarchy, and were an oppressed lot. They eagerly embraced the egalitarianism of Islam, and that is how Eastern Bengal became Muslim majority.
While the theory is basically in tune with the likely theory postulated earlier, Mukul has not been explicit as to whether the masses first converted from Buddhism to Hinduism, and then to Islam or directly from Buddhism to Islam. His emphasis on the presumed Brahminical oppression suggests the first, while (this is due to Tathagata Ray's emphasis) in all probability the second is what had actually happened. In his analysis as well as the interview that this author had with him Mukul had also betrayed a strong dislike for what he calls the 'Brahminical religion'. From the the annihilation of Buddhism in the plains of India (which has been referred to earlier in connection with the travels of Acharya Sankara) he has conjectured that Buddhists were also annihilated all over India, without revealing any basis for such a presumption, and without taking any account of the fact that ruins of Buddhist shrines, like Mahasthangarh in North Bengal or Nalanda in Bihar, had existed through the Hindu period, to this day without being vandalised. And last of all, his theory does not explain why what happened in Eastern Bengal did not happen in western part of Bengal, Magadh or Mithila regions (now parts of the Indian state of Bihar) or Avadh, Tirhut, or Rohilkhand (now parts of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) - after all the Sufis could not have reached Eastern Bengal without passing through these regions, and there is no reason why the Sufis would not have tried their proselytisation in these parts. What, then, is the reason why the people responded to the Sufis in Eastern Bengal while they did not do so in such large numbers in Western Bengal, Magadh, Mithila, Avadh or Rohilkhand? The only plausible reason appears to be the extremely tenacious hold of Sanatan Dharma, as opposed to the looseness of the Buddhist-animist faith.
Hence, it appears that the subject has not been adequately researched. It is doubtless a very interesting topic of demographic research but the results, whatever they may be, may cause trouble, which may explain the reluctance to research.
The pattern of population in pre-1947 Bengal was roughly as follows : the province had one huge city and its industrial-commercial hub, its capital Calcutta. The rest of the province was known as moffussil, a region generally looked down upon by the inhabitants of the big city. In this region there were a few minor towns, such as Dhaka, Chittagong and Darjeeling, but the rest was predominantly rural. As already said, the western part of the province, including Calcutta, was Hindu-majority while the north and the east were predominantly Muslim. Even here there was an interesting pattern. The towns of even the east and the north, such as Dhaka, Mymensingh, Chittagong, and Rajshahi, were all Hindu-dominated.
The famous physicist, Meghnad Saha, in a speech before the Indian Parliament had said “ . . . the city of Dacca, the biggest city in Eastern Pakistan, it had a population of 200,000 before partition. 70 per cent of it were Hindus --- 140,000. They owned 80 percent of the houses there. . . . . I know it because I come from Dhaka”. The same position is stated by Annada Sankar Ray. The countryside on the other hand, was overwhelmingly Muslim.
5. Another confirmation:
Another confirmation of the conversion of Animists-Buddhists-loosely called Hindus theory is from the second link in the references. It seems that with the Mughal conquest of Bengal beginning the last decades of the sixteenth century their local governors made frantic efforts to settle land and expand agriculture. Large parts of East Bengal were nothing but thickly forested swamps in those days. People staying on the margins of society involved in boating, fishing etc who were, loosely speaking, Hindus but actually of no religion became part of this Mughal imperial design. They were settled on land and induced to farm and they were socially moored by small mosques led by spiritual preceptors who came into convert the locals to a new way of life. There was not much opposition because these were new areas but the local Hindu communities that existed reacted by closing their ranks and becoming more conservative.
This had the result of expulsion of many Hindus from the fold on the grounds that they had been "polluted" by contacts with the Muslims. These Hindus of course became Muslims. The net result was that more people started becoming Muslims. The Bengali Hindu society is much to blame, thus. In fact, the Brahmins who converted or their relatives converted were called 'Pirali Brahmins' after Pir Ali of Jessore (present Bangladesh).
Interestingly, Rabindranath Tagore, who has come to be almost synonymous with Bengal and Bangaliana (Bengaliness) is a Pirali Brahmin.
These are some of the reasons that the eastern part of historical Bengal had a majority of followers of Islam. And now, it is a foreign land. Nothing could be more tragic.
How did the Eastern part of the region of Bengal end up with a Muslim majority? - Quora
How did East Bengal become Muslim majority?
Picture: Ruins of Buddhist empire in Bangladesh.
Sharbatanu Chatterjee, Open-minded optimist, Indian by nature, knowledge-hungry liberal minded and g...
10.8k Views • Upvoted by Sarosh Mohammad, Muslim
This is a very interesting question and prompted me to read up a lot on the history of the historic region of Bengal. I have gathered opinion and words extensively from the resources mentioned below.
As Karl Marx had said, history of humankind is all about a history of class struggles. However, there are several theories to explain why West Bengal was Hindu-majority while East and North Bengal were Muslim-majority.
Fig 1: Bengal (Pre-partition)
In fact, this is quite paradoxical!
If one traveled from West to East along the vast land mass known as Indo-Gangetic plain in the pre-partition days, when there were some Hindus and some Muslims in every part of the plain, one would have observed that the proportion of Muslims in the population would go on reducing as one went east. Thus, the North-West Frontier Province, Baluchistan and Sind were overwhelmingly Muslim ; Punjab was balanced, with a Muslim majority tapering off as one went from Attock to Ambala, west to east within the province ; and the United Provinces and Bihar were overwhelmingly Hindu. Yet suddenly the pattern reversed itself in East and North Bengal, and then again fell into place in the easternmost province of British India, namely Assam.
1. The First Theory:
This question had perplexed Syed Mujtabaa Ali who had come to the conclusionthat this was due to the arrival of Arab traders in the coastal towns of East Bengal, in the Chittagong-Barisal stretch (Bottom right in Fig 1) who had settled down and brought and spread their faith in much the same way as they did in the Malabar region of present-day Kerala, or in Malaysia or Indonesia. Annada Sankar Ray writes in his Jukto Bonger Sriti (Memoirs of United Bengal) that a tradition existed in Chittagong of writing Bangla in Arabic script. He attributes it to maritime trade relations between Chittagong and Arabia from the pre-Islamic period.
The theory of Islam being spread by this trade-and-contact route, rather than by the conquest-and-conversion route, is plausible, and also attractive, but is probably not correct.
(Plausible, because a similar phenomenon was noticed in the case of a number of Portuguese who had settled down in those parts, and had created Roman Catholic pockets. Buddhadeb Bose writes in the first part of his autobiography Amar Chhelebela (Bengali) that he had seen a person of almost pure Portuguese blood in the coastal town of Noakhali (of Noakhali genocide infamy) in the 1920s who spoke the usual Noakhali dialect. Gopal Haldar, in his reminiscences of pre-partition Noakhali mentions two villages adjoining Noakhali town called Shahebghata (literally, wharf of the Europeans) and Ezbelia (Isabella?), inhabited by ordinary-looking folk but of the Catholic faith, and with names like Gonsalves and Fernandes.)
This theory, on the other hand, is probably not correct, because firstly, it cannot explain how faraway places in North Bengal, such as Rangpur and Dinajpur became Muslim-majority, while places more accessible on the riverine route, such as Lower Assam, did not ; also why the Portuguese, who were no less proselytizers than the Arabs, could not spread their faith.
Finally, the theory is probably not correct because there is a better explanation.
2.The Second Theory:
That explanation is that this region, along with large parts of the rest of India and places as far west and north as modern-day Afghanistan and Xinjiang, had become entirely Buddhist, and by the sixth century or so this Buddhism had also become adulterated with diverse forms of animism, occult practices, promiscuity, and the like, something in the nature of what is known in Hinduism as vamachara, and had degenerated into a loose faith. The great Acharya Sankara set out on foot from faraway Kerala to set right this state of affairs and in a life of only 32 years got the country firmly back to the Hindu fold. It is possible that the Acharya could not reach the eastern parts of Bengal because of the relative inaccessibility of the delta. In fact the delta of Eastern Bengal was known in legend as Pandavavarjita Desha -- the land that even the Pandavas avoided. The population therefore remained Buddhist-Animist, and easily converted to Islam when the marauders from the west came to Bengal. Extensive ruins of Buddhist monasteries are found at Paharpur and Mahasthangarh in the northern parts of present-day Bangladesh. The Buddhist priest Dipankar Srigyan had set out from a village called Bajrajogini near Dhaka to convert the whole of Tibet to Buddhism. Buddhism held fray in East Bengal
The Muslims of East Bengal are therefore, in all probability, converts mostly from Buddhism-Animism and not from Hinduism. This view is also held by the eminent historian Vincent Smith among others. The argument finds great support from the fact that Buddhism has yielded elsewhere, as it did in East Bengal, much more easily to Islam than Sanatan (Orthodox) Hinduism. Thus once-Buddhist Afghanistan and Xinjiang eventually became totally Muslim, while Hindu India did not. Similarly, Buddhist East Bengal became Muslim-majority, while lands to the west, which had become Hindu under the influence of Sankara remained Hindu.
3. The Third Theory
Ashok Mitra of the Indian Civil Service has advanced a very different theory which he attributes to his Gurus in Anthropology and Demography, respectively Jatindra Mohan Datta and Sailendra Nath Sengupta.
According to him these two gentlemen worked out the total number of Muslims and Christians that had come to India from outside upto the 17th century. They then extrapolated this figure to 1951 using the prevailing rate of increase in population. Deducting the result from the total number of Muslims in India and Pakistan they came to the conclusion, among others, that ninety-five percent of the Bengali Muslims had been Hindus in the last, that is the nineteenth century. This is very interesting, but leads to a number of total absurdities. First, it is inconceivable that the number of Hindus converting to Islam would be more in the British age than in the Moghul or Nawabi age. There were several incentives to convert during those earlier ages, while there were only disincentives during the British times, at least upto the beginning of this century. Secondly any estimate of the total number of Muslims who entered India might be made, if at all, with some difficulty, but to estimate how many of them entered Bengal seems impossible. How they surmounted this obstacle is not mentioned in Ashok Mitra’s book. Thirdly, this theory does not explain the anomaly of sudden increase in Muslim population in East Bengal as one goes from West to East. Lastly, it presupposes that the rate of growth of population is the same among Hindus and Muslims whereas in fact it is not so ; the latter was always more than the former. Ashok Mitra does not endorse the conclusions of his Gurus, but cites them without comment. Neither Syed Mujtabaa Ali nor Annada Sankar Ray are confident that their views are correct or even supported by a substantial historical school.
4. The Fourth Theory (Most Probable):
M.R.Akhtar Mukul, a prominent present-day Bangladeshi intellectual, has tried an explanation in his book 'Purbapurusher Sandhane' (in Bangla, meaning 'In Search of Our Ancestors') . In this book also he has supported the contention that the Muslims of East and North Bengal are mostly converts from Buddhists. (Similar to Theory 2) He has commented upon the absence of recorded history of Bengalis in the period between the decline of Buddhism in India and the coming of Sufi saints to Bengal. Finally he has also concluded that the simple appeal of the Sufis, who preached a form of Islam in which Allah, the Muslim God, was looked upon as an object of love rather than fear, proved to be irresistible to the massses of Eastern Bengal. These masses, according to him, were at the lower end of the caste spectrum under the Brahminical hierarchy, and were an oppressed lot. They eagerly embraced the egalitarianism of Islam, and that is how Eastern Bengal became Muslim majority.
While the theory is basically in tune with the likely theory postulated earlier, Mukul has not been explicit as to whether the masses first converted from Buddhism to Hinduism, and then to Islam or directly from Buddhism to Islam. His emphasis on the presumed Brahminical oppression suggests the first, while (this is due to Tathagata Ray's emphasis) in all probability the second is what had actually happened. In his analysis as well as the interview that this author had with him Mukul had also betrayed a strong dislike for what he calls the 'Brahminical religion'. From the the annihilation of Buddhism in the plains of India (which has been referred to earlier in connection with the travels of Acharya Sankara) he has conjectured that Buddhists were also annihilated all over India, without revealing any basis for such a presumption, and without taking any account of the fact that ruins of Buddhist shrines, like Mahasthangarh in North Bengal or Nalanda in Bihar, had existed through the Hindu period, to this day without being vandalised. And last of all, his theory does not explain why what happened in Eastern Bengal did not happen in western part of Bengal, Magadh or Mithila regions (now parts of the Indian state of Bihar) or Avadh, Tirhut, or Rohilkhand (now parts of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) - after all the Sufis could not have reached Eastern Bengal without passing through these regions, and there is no reason why the Sufis would not have tried their proselytisation in these parts. What, then, is the reason why the people responded to the Sufis in Eastern Bengal while they did not do so in such large numbers in Western Bengal, Magadh, Mithila, Avadh or Rohilkhand? The only plausible reason appears to be the extremely tenacious hold of Sanatan Dharma, as opposed to the looseness of the Buddhist-animist faith.
Hence, it appears that the subject has not been adequately researched. It is doubtless a very interesting topic of demographic research but the results, whatever they may be, may cause trouble, which may explain the reluctance to research.
The pattern of population in pre-1947 Bengal was roughly as follows : the province had one huge city and its industrial-commercial hub, its capital Calcutta. The rest of the province was known as moffussil, a region generally looked down upon by the inhabitants of the big city. In this region there were a few minor towns, such as Dhaka, Chittagong and Darjeeling, but the rest was predominantly rural. As already said, the western part of the province, including Calcutta, was Hindu-majority while the north and the east were predominantly Muslim. Even here there was an interesting pattern. The towns of even the east and the north, such as Dhaka, Mymensingh, Chittagong, and Rajshahi, were all Hindu-dominated.
The famous physicist, Meghnad Saha, in a speech before the Indian Parliament had said “ . . . the city of Dacca, the biggest city in Eastern Pakistan, it had a population of 200,000 before partition. 70 per cent of it were Hindus --- 140,000. They owned 80 percent of the houses there. . . . . I know it because I come from Dhaka”. The same position is stated by Annada Sankar Ray. The countryside on the other hand, was overwhelmingly Muslim.
5. Another confirmation:
Another confirmation of the conversion of Animists-Buddhists-loosely called Hindus theory is from the second link in the references. It seems that with the Mughal conquest of Bengal beginning the last decades of the sixteenth century their local governors made frantic efforts to settle land and expand agriculture. Large parts of East Bengal were nothing but thickly forested swamps in those days. People staying on the margins of society involved in boating, fishing etc who were, loosely speaking, Hindus but actually of no religion became part of this Mughal imperial design. They were settled on land and induced to farm and they were socially moored by small mosques led by spiritual preceptors who came into convert the locals to a new way of life. There was not much opposition because these were new areas but the local Hindu communities that existed reacted by closing their ranks and becoming more conservative.
This had the result of expulsion of many Hindus from the fold on the grounds that they had been "polluted" by contacts with the Muslims. These Hindus of course became Muslims. The net result was that more people started becoming Muslims. The Bengali Hindu society is much to blame, thus. In fact, the Brahmins who converted or their relatives converted were called 'Pirali Brahmins' after Pir Ali of Jessore (present Bangladesh).
Interestingly, Rabindranath Tagore, who has come to be almost synonymous with Bengal and Bangaliana (Bengaliness) is a Pirali Brahmin.
These are some of the reasons that the eastern part of historical Bengal had a majority of followers of Islam. And now, it is a foreign land. Nothing could be more tragic.
How did the Eastern part of the region of Bengal end up with a Muslim majority? - Quora
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