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Asian Journal of Comparative Politics

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Nationalism and national ª The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/2057891120938145
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Bangladesh: A colonial
legacy behind the clash of
language and religion

Bobby Hajjaj
North South University, Bangladesh

Abstract
The nature of identity formation is complex. The production of identity in South Asia, with its
colonial past, has been largely dependent on the region’s colonial history. In this article we chart
the process of political identity formation in Bangladesh. We identify the various historical causes
that led to the creation of each of the two types of identity prevalent today. These two divisive
identities based on language and religion, one pitted against the other, each became the central
platform of each of the two major political parties, the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh
Nationalist Party (BNP). This disquisition shows clear patterns of political distress that resulted in
the bifurcation of these two divisive political identities that ossified by the late 20th century due
chiefly to the actions of the colonial government of the Raj.

Keywords
Bangladesh, colonialism, identity politics, language, national identity, nationalism, religion

Introduction
Bangladesh, for most of its 50-year history, has been rived by the two divisive political identities of
Bengali and Bangladeshi nationalism: the first based on language and the latter on religion. While
both are political constructs, and the basis and origins of both have been argued for some time
(Absar, 2014; Hossain, 2015; Hossain and Khan, 2006; Kabir, 1987), they were unequivocally
recent creations. This article argues that while the two identities are novel, by historical standards,

Corresponding author:
Bobby Hajjaj, Department of Management, North South University, Bashundara, Dhaka 1229, Bangladesh.
Email: bobby.hajjaj@northsouth.edu
2 Asian Journal of Comparative Politics XX(X)

Bangladeshi nationalism being only four decades old, and its counterpart Bengali nationalism not
much older, the seeds of both were laid down more than a century prior.
The policies of the colonial government of the Raj, both in Bengal (Riaz, 2016: 187) and in
India overall, sowed the seeds of these two divisive political identities. Without a doubt, there was
a multiplicity of factors contributing to the different ramifications that led the nation to these two
divisive paths, including elite group dynamics (Hossain, 2015), geopolitics (Chakravarty, 1994),
electoral systems (Hussain, 2012), and others. However, this article will show that Bengal’s
colonial legacy contributed directly to this creation.
For all practical purposes, the British colonial empire in India started with the Treaty of
Allahabad in 1765 when the diwani rights of Bengal were granted to the British East India
Company by the Mughal throne (Bhattacherje, 2009). In this article, we look at the twists and
turns of some of the developments from thereon that had an incontrovertible impact on political
culture and group-identity creation in Bangladesh more than two centuries later. Raj policies over
this period resulted in the substantiation of Hindu and Muslim religious identities (Ballantyne,
2006; Copland et al., 2012). For example, the 1793 Permanent Settlement created a new class of
Calcutta- and city-based landholders who were disconnected from the vast acreages of rural
Bengal (Guha, 1996). And the policies of the post-1857 Sepoy Mutiny (Ballantyne, 2006;
Gottschalk, 2012) gave birth a new rise of religiosity within both the Hindu and Muslim commu-
nities of India, leading to numerous developments including the 1882–1893 Cow Protection
Movement (Tirmizi, 1979) which further divided the two communities.
It was the rising tensions between the two largest political parties in India – the Indian National
Congress (INC) and the All India Muslim League (AIML), who inadvertently represented the two
largest religious blocs by that point – that were largely responsible for the partition of India and the
creation of East and West Pakistan (Azad, 1998; Jalal, 1994). Post 1947, the creation myth of
Pakistan fostered an atmosphere where West Pakistan political elites tried to foist a new identity on
the people of East Pakistan (Akanda, 2013). This led to the Language Movement of 1952 and the
initial creation of Bengali nationalism, an identity that was as much a declaration of an original
identity as it was a bourgeois attempt at the preservation of a non-West Pakistan identity (Kabir,
1987). This was a language-based identity in opposition to the mytho-political religion-based
identity behind the establishment and continuation of Pakistan.
Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971 was fought with a rekindled awareness of that
Bengali identity. After the war, the Awami League (AL) leadership, which had won the pre-war
1970 Pakistan general elections, institutionalized Bengali nationalism by enshrining it into the
nation’s first constitution. The AL also took political leadership of this identity (Riaz, 2016: 24). In
1977, when the new military government was looking to create political legitimacy through the
creation of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), they kindled a new form of religion-based
identity in opposition to the AL-owned language-based identity, coining it Bangladeshi national-
ism (Murshid, 1997; Riaz, 2016: 155).
Since 1990, and the return of competitive parliamentary politics in Bangladesh, these two
identities have been the basis of the ideologies of the two biggest political parties, the AL and
the BNP, and the ideological basis of their competition.

On identity
Identity, or at least national identity, is a relatively recent addition to the archives of human
constructs. The birth of the nation, and as such a national identity, not only took place in Europe
Hajjaj 3

first, but was also a purely European construct wrought by the unique preceding history of the
continent. Earnest Renan defined a nation above all as “a soul, a spiritual principle” (Pavri, 2008:
108). Hegel defined the nation as an ethno-cultural community, held together by ties of “kinship,
language, and other means of union” (Nimni, 1991: 28). This is of course in stark contrast with
developing nations like Bangladesh, because nations carved out of former colonies were done so
by specific human design and did not happen due to any pre-existing cultural or social cohesion.
The point of identity politics is, “To persuade people that they are one; that they comprise a
bounded, distinctive solidary group; that their internal differences do not matter, at least for the
purpose at hand” (Brubaker, 2005: 88), making it a key component in the forging of post-colonial
nations. So national identities were driven even in its very first formations by state-patronization
and sponsorship (Fazal, 1999: 175; Oommen, 1994).
Ernest Gellner, an authority on our understanding of nationalism, defines it simply as “primarily
a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent”
(Gellner, 2006: 1), a definition with which famed historian Eric Hobsbawm (2005: 9) also agreed
in his seminal work on the topic. It is also one that is congruent with both natural and manufactured
types of national identity creation, because it defines the idea of nationalism through its effect and
not its cause. Nonetheless, Gellner’s primary focus in his opus Nations and Nationalism is on the
causal connection and the connective growth between industrialization and nationalism. He states:
“nationalism is rooted in a certain kind of division of labor, one which is complex and persistently,
cumulatively changing” (Gellner, 2006: 24).
Gellner posits that nationalism is rooted in power, education, and shared culture, and as such is
dynamic just like its constituent parts and not a “permanent feature of the human condition”
(Breuilly, 2006: xviii). In many ways adding to Gellner’s thesis, Benedict Anderson (1983) would
later identify the production and dissemination of language, especially printed language, as a
prerequisite for a nationalistic sentiment. While Gellner states that cultural homogeneity is a
prerequisite for industrial society, and hence the manufacturing of nationalism, Anderson
(1983: 46) focuses on the natural creation of nationalism through the print medium. Partha
Chaterjee (1993: 18), an authority from among the previously colonized, harkens back to Horace
Davis on the one hand and Herder and Fichte on the other, to establish the two typologies of
nationalism, one born out of a rational need of the Enlightenment, and the other based on more
emotional justifications of culture and tradition. These accumulations of theses thus assume that
the perpetuation of a national identity can transpire without there being a fundamental basis of
that identity of nothing more than mytho-historical construct. Other authors have also contended
that language contributes significantly to the evolution of national consciousness because it
works both as a medium of communication and as a basis for national thinking (Hossain and
Khan, 2006: 328; Vaziri, 1993: 15).
At the heart of colonial identity creation, on the other hand, is the act of codifying difference
(Chatterjee, 1993: 16). As the preeminent commentator on the topic, Edward Said, elaborates,
identification of the “self” in colonies was created through multiple layers, and was forged initially
among the upper echelons of the colonized territories, classes, and their intellectuals (Said, 1995:
40). In this regard, the first layer of identity came from the rhetoric of the colonizers in their
deprecation of the colonized, and their specious justification of the process of colonization and its
perpetuation. The spirit in which the colonizers viewed the colonies in the mid-19th century is
evident in the words of John Stuart Mill, who made no bones about stating that his political ideas
enshrined in On Liberty and Representative Government could not be applied to India because the
4 Asian Journal of Comparative Politics XX(X)

natives were “civilizationally, if not racially, inferior” (Said, 1995: 14). It was in this milieu that
identities in the Indian subcontinent were born in the 19th century.
Nineteenth-century India had no legitimate right to be considered as one united nation. Histor-
ian Joya Chatterji (2007: 4) suggests that even taking all of Bengal to be a “natural unity” or to
assume it had some “intrinsic nationhood” would be a spurious assumption. However, that does not
mean that there were not contiguous regions that did not share a language or culture. Bengal as one
homogenous region was treated as such from the 17th century till the early 20th century when the
vagaries of the Raj split the province in two. No less conceited was the Raj only 42 years later when
they divided the acreage of India according to the Radcliffe Line, creating a whole new set of
nations that matched no rational national criterion.
Again, then we see the clear demarcation between the national identities forged in the West and
those of the colonies. The argument suggests a causal connection with the industrial revolution and
the economic need of industrialized society or the needs of the colonial powers. It was through the
expropriation of resources and the undermining of industrial production in the colonies that
colonial powers created the vast imbalance in wealth (Acemoglu et al., 2001; Chaterjee, 1993;
Piketty, 2017; Wiener, 2013). As such, a nationalism of the European sort would hardly be a
natural fit for the newly independent nations.
Bangladesh, like most former-colonized nations, has had to muddle through a number of
identities, due to the flux of the colonial system and the vagaries of its colonial overlords. It has
been discussed ad nauseam that the country’s political elite have tried to create one form or another
of nationalistic narrative and provide the people with a monolithic identity (Hossain, 2015; Huque
and Akhter, 1987; Murshid, 1995, 1997; Osmany, 1992). In Bangladesh’s case, the first set of
recognizable mytho-historical markers came with its identification not as it is now, but as a more
significant Indian identity created in opposition to the colonial oppressor: the anti-Raj movement.

Post-colonial identity as a reflection of colonial policy

Political identity creation in Bangladesh went through two major phases: first, a language-based
nationalism was peddled, treating itself as the vaunted and tortured ‘other’ in contrast to an AIML-
led and religion-based Pakistani proto-colonial regime; and the second phase was an opposition to
the first, in a new religious vein. The multiplicity of identities vouchsafed by the major political
parties in Bangladesh in the early 21st century are as much reflections of post-colonial political
realities as they are a product of colonial policies.
It was due to the newly changed political landscape of Bengal post 1793 and the Permanent
Settlement that the nature of land ownership and the character of the traditional elites began a
transformation (Guha, 1996; Islam, 2007), which led to the rise in the mid- to late 19th century of
the Calcutta-based Hindu Bhodrolok (Chatterji, 2007). The Hindu Bhodrolok was a minority of
Calcutta-based elites imbued with a Western education and economically empowered both by
access to the Raj and by the nature of landholding after the Permanent Settlement of Bengal.
Culture, in Bengal, or rather the culture as espoused by the Bengali language as such, also became
the culture of this class of social and cultural elites. This tended to produce a dichotomy between
the Bengal, especially Eastern Bengal, Muslim peasantry and their Western, Calcutta-based, Hindu
land-holding counterparts (Hossain, 2015). The influence of the Hindu elite in the Raj government
is also clearly illustrated by the fact that they “held over 80% of the covenanted services staffed by
Indians in Bengal at the beginning of [the 20th] century” (Kabir, 1987: 477).
Hajjaj 5

Peasant political movements like the Faraidi movement and the likes of Titu Meer were as much
a revolt against the inequities of the Raj as they were against the new minions of the Raj, the Hindu
landholders (Islam, 2007). In the realms of culture creation, and print literature, the Bengali
vernacular became the bastion of the Hindu elite and the literary giants of the late 18th century.
The likes of Bonkimcandra Chaterji and his revolutionary novel Anandamath depicted Muslims,
especially, as interlopers in the Indian subcontinent (Chaterji, 2005). Bengal was a land not of the
Muslims. So the narrative of a Bengaliness or a to-be-created Bengali nationalism was one where
the Muslim was the oppressive ‘other’. This certainly was an unequivocal break from the past few
centuries, during which Bengal was ruled by Muslim rulers and Eastern Bengal populated by a
sizeable Muslim population.
One of the primary reasons for this break from the past was the Raj’s recognition of the Muslims
as a specific entity post 1857, which in turn gave birth to the political realization of “Hinduness”
(Ballantyne, 2006; Gottschalk, 2012). Both Hindus and Muslims by the mid-19th century had
started identifying themselves in terms of their religious identity, especially in in-group versus out-
group interactions (Prior, 1993: 183). Copland et al. (2012: 188) refer to five prominent reasons in
their effort to explain this break from the past, among which was the way religion became homo-
genized and “insistent upon the loyalty of their members.” Part of this was also related directly to
changes in technology and time, as transport systems, especially the railway, aided in connecting
previously disparate communities, and matters other than geographical propinquity started becom-
ing more prominent factors in forging group identity (Kerr, 2001). The increasing ease of overseas
travel also saw new leaders arise within the Muslim communities who had experienced the Arab
form of rituals and practices and returned with a reformist zeal (Islam, 2007). The perception of
threat from Protestant Christianity and the colonialist’s views of reform also actuated more con-
servative religious movements like the Hindu Arya Samaj and the Muslim Faraidi movement
(Copland et al., 2012; Tirmizi, 1979).
At the dawn of the 20th century, in an effort to find support among the East Bengal Muslim
community, and more specifically the Dhaka-based land-holding elites, for the unpopular measure
of the partition of Bengal in 1905, Raj policy spurred the birth of the AIML (Islam, 2007). The
Muslim community had initially shown little enthusiasm either for or against the partition, but they
were able to reap its benefits as the number of “educational institutions grew rapidly and the
proportion of Muslim students rose from 3% in 1905 to 14% in 1908” (Kabir, 1987: 478).
Notwithstanding the benefits to the East Bengal Muslim, the AIML then was a political party
created not specifically on ideology, but rather with the singular purpose of providing support to
Raj policy, and in consequence further divide the Bengali polity, at least at the elite level, based on
religion. More policies related to cementing this divide followed. As Kabir enumerates:

Hindu opposition to the Bengal (Rural) Primary Education Bill of 1930, the Bengal Moneylenders Bill
of 1932, and the Bengal Agricultural Debtors Bill of 1933, all of which aimed at ameliorating the
conditions of the peasants, armed the Muslim political leaders with a powerful weapon of communal
appeal to politicize and mobilize the peasantry. (Kabir, 1987: 479)

The sudden advent of the First World War and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire resulted
in the Bengal Muslim masses feeling a sentimental evocation of their Muslimness through the rise
of the Khilafat movement (Singh, 2009). By this point, the INC was well on its way to identifying
more with the Hindu masses due to a mix of reasons including the fall in Muslims converging to the
INC (Copland et al., 2012: 198), and also prominent INC leaders like Bal Gnagadhar Tilak and
6 Asian Journal of Comparative Politics XX(X)

Aurobindo Ghose identifying INC politics unequivocally with strong Hindu symbolism (Copland
et al., 2012: 191; Harvey, 1986). However, it was the INC that gave their unqualified support for
the Khilafat movement. By then the divide had started to settle in among leaders like Maulana
Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, who and whose protégés would later go on to provide instrumental
leadership in the movements that culminated in the two divisive nationalist identities that reside in
Bangladesh today.
Few things, however, cemented the course of events in the sub-continent more than the debacle
of a partition that the Raj wrought in their hasty retreat from their Indian colony. It was the
contentious state of politics, fraught with anger, vituperative, and frustrations, that led to not just
an unbridgeable political divide between the AIML and the INC, but a state of chaos and religion-
based riots. Immediately after 15 August 1947, as soon as the two nations of India and Pakistan had
parted, that they launched into their first war against each other. The manner of the parting of the
two nations, and the immediate aftermath of the Kashmir War, ensured that the state of Pakistan’s
political reality would be one based on a stark opposition to India and a search for a religious brand
of nationalism (Fair, 2014). India, on the other hand, would be prompted to use its influence in
manifold ways to strengthen its own borders and weaken Pakistan, which authors like Absar (2014)
and Hossain (2015) argue would provide India with a strong foreign-policy based reason to abet a
Bengali national identity in East Pakistan.

Formation of two divisive nationalisms in Bangladesh

Some have traced Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan in 1971 as the outcome of an elite
conflict for political power and access to resources dating back to British rule and the struggle
between Indian Muslims and the dominant Hindu community (Chatterji, 1994; Hossain, 2015: 367;
Jalal, 1994).
One of the earliest precedents shaping Bangladesh’s future political identity came on 30
December 1906, with the creation of the AIML. Following in quick succession from the division
of Bengal, it was spearheaded by Salimullah Khan, Nawab of Dhaka. The purpose of AIML’s
creation and its relations with the Raj administration might be clearly observed from the pro-
nouncement of its first president, Nawab Viqar-ul-Mulk, when he said: “the political rights of a
subject race thrive best in the soil of loyalty, and consequently the Mussalmans should prove
themselves loyal to their Government before they can ask for any of their rights” (French, 1998:
43). As another author opines, “the Muslim League emerged as a political party with three
objectives, namely: promotion of loyalty among Muslims to the rulers, protection and advance-
ment of their political rights and interests, and prevention of the feeling of hostility to other
communities” (Choudhury, 2008: 38). The AIML, however, was not organized or strong enough
to counter the grief generated by the partition of Bengal, and in 1911 the partition was reversed in
order to mollify a newly burgeoning form of Bengali nationalism (Tang and Kudaisya, 2000: 162–
163).
The 1916 Lucknow Pact, then, only 10 years later, was not only a momentous affair but a
monumental step forward for the AIML. Jointly the INC and the AIML agreed to share power in
both the executive and the legislature, with the INC getting two thirds and the AIML getting a
third, and recognized the need for a separate electorate for the Muslims (Ahmed, 1988: 148).
However, up until the mid-1930s, the AIML remained a party of the landholding elites, and even
movements that roused the passions of the Muslim population, like the Khilafat movement, worked
with the INC leadership (Singh, 2009: 124). Furthermore, it was not until the Provincial Elections
Hajjaj 7

of 1937 that the AIML found even nominal electoral support from the Muslim electorate when they
won 109 of the 482 reserved Muslim seats, but they found to their chagrin that even without
winning any of the Muslim seats the INC could form a government entirely on their own (Kulke
and Rothermund, 1998: 314).
It was mainly in response to this stark realization that Jinnah focused on making the AIML
the “‘third’ focus of power in India and the ‘sole spokesman’ for Muslims” (Roy, 1990: 390).
Three years later, on 23 March 1940, the Lahore Resolution was passed. It was in that
resolution that the leadership of the AIML rejected the scheme of federation as contained
in the Government of India Act of 1935. The Lahore Resolution, as it was constituted,
demanded ‘independent states’ based on Muslim majority territories, even if the plural ‘states’
was a putative misprint (Roy, 1990: 392). It is this singular action of the AIML, or as some
might argue Jinnah, that resulted in the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan in 1947
(French, 1998; Jalal, 1994; Roy, 1990). Moreover, while some have put the burden of respon-
sibility wholly on the shoulders of Jinnah, former AIC President Abul Kalam Azad argued
that the AIC itself might shoulder much of that blame (Azad, 1998), and revisionist historians
have argued that the Lahore Resolution might have been a negotiation tactic by Jinnah that
went awry (Jalal, 1994; Roy, 1990).
By the time the next provincial election came around, in December 1945 and January
1946, after the end of the Second World War, the political landscape was much changed, and
in the Central Legislative Assembly, the AIML won all of the Muslim seats and around 90
percent of the vote (Singh, 2009: 354). The strength of this mandate might have led to further
ossifying of the AIC’s stance, and their subsequent undercutting of Jinnah’s strategy (Jalal,
1994: 208).
History will reflect on the Indian partition as one of its most violent and macabre episodes. The
first big burst of violence came with the Calcutta riots upon Jinnah’s call for ‘Direct Action’ to
realize the state of Pakistan, in July 1946. It was the 16 August observation of Direct Action Day
that spurred the riots in Calcutta, claiming according to some sources between 7000 and 10,000
lives (Sengupta, 2006: 293). The orgy of violence that started on that day carried on almost
unabated for an entire year, till the final partition of India. Leaving lasting impressions and an
unbridgeable gap between India and Pakistan and, as Christine Fair (2014) suggests, creating the
‘anti-India’ credo of the Pakistani military establishment henceforth.
On demarcating the Radcliffe Line that divided the Empire, Singh insightfully notes:

The fact that the border was never intended to be anything other than a “rough and ready
improvisation” was impressed upon Radcliffe, and the result of the labors of his eponymous Commis-
sion bear all the marks of the rush job that they finally produced. (Singh, 2009: 443)

There is, however, a strong counterargument to the arbitrariness and Raj-whimsy basis of the
Radcliffe Line. Historian Joya Chatterji (2007) has, in the last decade, revealed the very
active role of the Calcutta-based Hindu Bhodrolok elites and the designs of the INC that led
directly to the contours of the Radcliffe Line as it divided Bengal. Chatterji’s work clearly
shows that while these same Bhodroloks had vehemently opposed the partition of Bengal in
1905, by the 1940s they had realized that they would be entirely politically marginalized in a
Muslim majority Bengal. It was this fear that fueled their desire for a partition of Bengal in
1947. Added to this the Congress’ imperative to get a state where they could not only win but
also hold onto power, meaning a partition of Bengal which divides the state between Hindu
8 Asian Journal of Comparative Politics XX(X)

and Muslim majority regions in almost exactly the way the Radcliffe Line eventually did
(Chatterji, 2007: 59).
It was the deep grievances created in the process of the partition that reinforced post-1947
Muslim nationalism. However, the same idea of nationalism had not percolated equally to all parts
of the newly formed state of Pakistan: the West and the East divided by 2500 km of India in
between. It was not just a geographic divide, but a racial and cultural one as well. While the very
first problem the new union of Pakistan faced was one related to language, as the years and the
decades rolled on clashes over other forms of cultural and religious identities were also brought to
the fore.
In the same vein that identities were forged during the Raj era, according to the political tides of
the time, so it was as well after partition, which eventually led to the further separation of East and
West Pakistan, and the creation of Bangladesh. Just as the arbitrariness of the Radcliffe line led to
the necessary creation of a renewed Bengali nationalism, similarly, the fractured politics of a post-
independent Bangladesh necessitated the creation of a whole new form of nationalism based on
religious identity under the rubric of Bangladeshi nationalism. While parts of all of these new
identities were faux constructs, they did take on lives of their own.
It was in opposition to this identification by the colonialist that colonial identities started to
take root. French colonial writer and philosopher Frantz Fanon (1968) argued in his seminal
work The Wretched of the Earth that colonialism had destroyed pre-colonial culture and
history. While the original identities never really ossified, due to the continuous flux in
political realities, it is worthwhile to note that the initial production of an identity of the
colonized was not one that the colonized themselves had a hand in presenting, but rather a
faux-romanticized shaping of it by a curious colonialist mind; an attempt by the colonialist to
decipher the colonized as an alien beast, who had not the power to represent themselves in
any viable category. Furthermore, it was the production of such literature that affixed the first
stamp of an identity against which the colonized rebelled, but in their rebellion they also gave
it sustenance.
With the slow emergence of these new identities-in-opposition also came new generations of
political leadership. The late 19th- and early 20th-century leadership came mostly from the eche-
lons of colonial society that was most imbued with the education and the values of the colonizers.
Inadvertently imbued with the culture of the conqueror, this new elite leadership in response to the
stark colonial reality of difference reacted by moving “to embrace and promote native culture [and]
mark[ed] the beginning of anticolonialist identification” (Chrisman, 2004: 192). From the likes of
Sir Aurobindo, to Mahatma Gandhi, Subhash Bose, Nehru, and Jinnah, are all leaders of that ilk.
Their movements too, barring maybe some of Gandhi’s eccentricities, were derived from the
values they had acquired from the colonizers.
These new leaders, along with the polity’s consciousness of themselves in relation to the
colonial government, created the need for a political identity. The problem with this new search
for an identity resulted inadvertently in confused and static identities being created; static for the
very reason that they were not organic. Culture, however, is never static, and over time a new
culture was generated that, while much affected by all three conventions of ruler culture, original
indigenous culture, and the romantic mix imagined by the founding elites, was too changed to be
even considered a hybrid of the three. Said (1995) noted in Orientalism that, “the project of
describing the colonized . . . had the effect of fixing local traditions which had historically been
fluid and adaptable” (Smith, 2004: 243).
Hajjaj 9

National character in Bangladesh

Famed 18th-century enlightenment philosopher David Hume believed that each nation has a
natural character: “the Swiss are honest, the French are funny, and the English are smart” (Prinz,
2013: x). The scientific validity of the claim is undoubtedly suspect, but the idea of nationalism is
premised on precisely such beliefs. The national character of Bangladesh has never been well
defined. Bangladesh’s history also delineates that neither its “process of identity selection” nor the
“cultural markers adopted” were constant or fixed (Murshid, 1997: 7).
The political struggle between Bangladesh’s two largest political parties, the AL and the BNP,
is still being played out, and this fight is being fought on the meaning of Bangladeshi nationalism.
However, the rhetorical definitions espoused by each party also give a pellucid image of the party’s
own past. AL’s definition of nationalism can be identified as the idea of attempting to make culture
and polity congruent (Gellner, 2006: 42). This is certainly in keeping with its own history and the
history of Bangladesh’s independence because the AL’s most significant political accomplish-
ments are embedded in the anti-Pakistan movement.
If Bengali nationalism is held true to its terminology, then it would mean the exclusion of all
groups that are not historically Bengali, which ousts people of the hill tracks, biharis, and many
others. A bill was proposed in 2016 in the Bangladesh parliament which if passed would nullify the
status of nationals of some of these minorities, and which in principle was contrary to the nation’s
existing constitution and to any democratic and constitutional spirit (Imam, 2016). Stiff resistance
from all stakeholders saw the bill stalled, but the fear of it coming to the fore again in the near
future is not unjustified. Another problem that Bengali nationalism has suffered from for a long
time and which has been intensified recently is that of the cultural congruency between Bangladesh
and the Indian province of Bengal. It has become an even more pertinent factor since August 2016,
when West Bengal’s name was officially changed to Bengal.
The BNP’s version of Bangladeshi nationalism, not staying true to its name, has attempted to
hark back to the original schema of the division of states post Raj and disinterred religion as the
basis of a proto-nationalism. This application of religious identity might not have been a conscious
attempt at a rekindling of the old AIML kind of identity; however, the alliance between the BNP
and the Jamaat-e-Islami over the last two decades has given rise to potent arguments that this brand
of nationalism is contrary to the very idea of nationalism itself.
The problem of the big regional hegemon has also played more than a minor role in this identity
construction. It did not require a long trek back to the original dichotomy of 1947. Post-1971
perception of Indian domination was very much rooted in the nature of retreat of the Indian army
from Bangladeshi soil post war and the “conclusion of the 25-year Treaty of Friendship, Cooper-
ation and Peace in early 1972” (Kabir, 1987: 484).

How colonial policy pushed language-based nationalism

As with the Indian Muslim identity before it, which gave birth to the state of Pakistan in opposition
to the majority Hindu identity of Congress, Bengali identity was born out of opposition to the
Muslim identity of West Pakistan. It was a Muslim identity born directly from the AIC and AIML
conflict created by Raj policies. And it was a Pakistani identity based almost exclusively on the
religion of Islam, and this Islamic identity proffered Urdu as the language of sub-continental Islam,
because it was the language of the Muslim elites. Bengali nationalism, notwithstanding geopoli-
tical or other exogenous actuators, was the singular conflict of language that came to a head in the
10 Asian Journal of Comparative Politics XX(X)

Language Movement of 1952. To better appreciate the emotive strength of language, we will
briefly discuss the causes and nature of the language movement itself.
Bengali stood in stark opposition to Urdu, as the native language of then East Pakistan, now
Bangladesh. The biggest problem, however, was that less than four percent of the population
of Pakistan in 1948 could claim Urdu as their mother tongue, while Bengali was the mother
tongue of over 54% of the population (Akanda, 2013: 23). Interest and pride in the Bengali
language had also become an essential part of Bengali Muslims’ identity, as increasing
numbers of them were attaining education and social positions (Kabir, 1987: 476). However,
the non-Bengali upper classes who dominated politics and the economy, as well as sections of
the “upwardly mobile Bengali population tended to look down upon the Bengali language as
inferior” (Murshid, 1997: 8).
It was then an appeal to this newly forged Muslim nationalism, in a vain attempt to establish
some form of kinship between the disparate populations of East and West Pakistan, when in 1948
Urdu was announced the sole national language of the country. Of course, insensate political
whimsy and even elitist hubris cannot be discounted entirely from the toxic cocktail of ingredients
that led to the rise of the Language Movement. On the Language Movement itself, one of its
primary architects, Principal Abul Kashem, relates:

The attainment of Pakistan had captivated the whole nation. At this time, everyone used to try to make
us understand how “dangerous” it would be to raise the issue of more than one state language . . . The
local newspapers of that time did not give the issue any importance. (Kashem, 2016)

For some time, the only support they found was from a newspaper based in Kolkata, India, called
Ittehad. Between those years and the actual Movement of 1952, Principal Kashem recalls, “From
‘48 to ‘52, there was no major movement . . . After the Assembly recognized Bangla as the official
language and medium of instruction in educational institutions in ‘48, activists became somewhat
inactive” (Kashem, 2016). The movement fomented over a few years, with the first violent incident
sparking off on 11 March 1948 with a general strike. It was, however, with Prime Minister Khwaja
Nazimuddin’s public speech on the 27 January 1952, where he announced definitively that accord-
ing to Jinnah’s original wishes Urdu should be the sole official language of Pakistan, that the
movement took its final form.
The impetus for the Language Movement came from a mix of causes which included provincial
autonomy as much as the needs of the educated bourgeois whose knowledge of the elitist Urdu was
perfunctory at best. As one noted initiator of the movement, Abdul Haque, commented, “As soon
as Urdu will be made state language of Pakistan, every Urdu-educated person will be qualified for
jobs, and every Bengali will be found unfit for employment” (Akanda, 2013: 31). Contrary to the
argument that the language struggle started purely in the cultural plain, what actually transpired
was much more complex and urgent. Culture was undoubtedly a key component, but not the only
one and quite possibly not even the most pressing one.
Political motivation did not lag far behind either, as was articulated by the noted linguist,
educationalist, and polymath Dr Mohammad Shahidullah when he noted “If Urdu or Hindi instead
of Bengali is used in our law courts and universities that would be tantamount to political slavery”
(Akanda, 2013: 32).
The relentless and staunch severity of the Language Movement left the West Pakistani gov-
ernment with no choice but to eventually back down. It was finally on 7 May 1954 that the Pakistan
Constituent Assembly incorporated the resolution that the official language of the Republic would
Hajjaj 11

be Urdu, Bengali, and any other language recommended by the Provincial Legislatures. This was
of course done to pacify not only Bengali nationalism but all other provincial nationalisms includ-
ing the Pathans and the Sindhis. As much as it might have worked for the other regions, however,
for Bengal it was two years too late.
It was this division over language and rights that planted the seeds of distrust in the people of
East Bengal, and thus the shape of early East Bengal nationalism became one rooted in linguistic
nationalism. As such, Bengali Nationalism became the opposition to the putative cause of a united
Pakistan: Muslim nationalism. It was then the force of this Bengali nationalism that became the
rallying call for Bangladesh’s independence and the war against the West Pakistani military junta
in 1971. While Bengali nationalism’s history is rich with the contribution to actual nation forma-
tion, it also comes with some critical flaws. Notwithstanding the cultural homogeneity of Bangla-
desh, it still is home to citizens of other indigenous cultures and languages. To marginalized groups
like the hill-tracks population could hardly be applied the oneness of language and culture.

Religion-based nationalism in opposition to language

Religious identity has been used as the go-to national identity on multiple occasions, first as the
attempt to establish Muslim nationalism immediately after the birth of Pakistan, and then in its new
guise of Bangladeshi nationalism that was the clarion call of the BNP.
Bangladesh has always been a culture of relatively high levels of religiosity, even if that has not
automatically translated into the polity adopting a strong Islamic national identity. A study in 1988
by UAB Razia Akter Banu found that while most of the Bangladeshi electorate did not as a whole
prescribe to including religious doctrines in politics, they did have a penchant for leaders who
showed more religiosity. Maniruzzaman summarizes Banu’s findings thus:

while 53.5 percent of the rural respondents wanted to elect “English-educated but to some extent
religious people” as their representatives, 39.3 percent of respondents wanted to vote for orthodox
religious leaders as their representatives. In the case of an urban sample only 7 percent of the
respondents indicated preference for religious leaders, while 78 percent reported their willingness
to elect “English educated but to some extent religious people” as their representatives. (Maniruzza-
man, 1992: 213)

The AL’s Bengali nationalism had avowed a secular ideology, but “scholars such as Talukder
Maniruzzaman and Zillur Rahman Khan have argued that Mujib’s secular policies resulted in a
Muslim ‘backlash’ because he underestimated the religiosity of the people” (Murshid, 1997: 13).
Nonetheless, Mujib himself had never resisted invoking Islam in state affairs, and also did very
much pursue recognition by other OIC countries.
Just like the first stint of religious identity that started in 1906 with the birth of the Muslim
League, which started purely in opposition to the Hindu identity of Congress, similarly, the journey
of Bangladeshi nationalism started in 1978 under the reign of President Ziaur Rahman and purely
in opposition to the Bengali nationalism of the AL. Nonetheless, the nature of a religion-based
identity, as discussed, takes on a force of its own, and even if the birth of Bangladesh’s religion-
based identity was due to nothing more than political convenience, it has transformed into a strong
basis for national identity.
The need for Zia’s new regime to establish a strong foothold in the Bangladeshi political
landscape required the introduction of an identity in contrast to that of Bengali nationalism, due
12 Asian Journal of Comparative Politics XX(X)

to both its propinquity with the AL and its non-Islamic undertones, which made it more akin to
India. As a member of the military establishment, General Zia was wary of India, or as some have
noted, of an “anti-Indian” orientation (Hossain and Khan, 2006: 332).

Conclusion
In this article, we discussed the nature of national identity formation and the contribution of
colonial history in the process of that identity formation. We can delineate from the available
historical data that the two branches of the Bangladeshi national identity, one linguistic and the
other religious, that exist today each had much more to do with colonial politics that purely either
language or religion. The strain of linguistic nationalism, or Bengali nationalism, was not a natural
identification with the language of the masses but rather was created in opposition to having had a
foreign language forced on them. Nor was Bengali nationalism in any way pro or anti any religious
nationalism, but it also just happened to be in opposition to the identity peddled by the West
Pakistani government, which adventitiously happened to be one of the ilk of religious identity.
However, once this new identity was forged, this mytho-historical construct took on a life of its
own due to it having become the political platform for the nation’s largest political party, the AL.
A new life was granted to linguist nationalism with the advent of new opposition to it in the
form of the religious nationalism of the BNP. Opposition to the AL, and in a country of deep
religious sentiments the cache of a religion-based identity, created a strong platform then for
BNP’s Bangladeshi nationalism.
Thus, we can see that the clash of identities that Bangladesh suffers from today is the direct
repercussion of the dismal policies from the age of colonialism, which have had grave impacts in
creating the abject political realities of our times.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Bobby Hajjaj https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7279-8248

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