Abstract
There has been a welcome rise in recent scholarship on the links between the two partitions of 1947 and 1971 and what these links have meant for residents of the vast eastern region of the subcontinent. This extraordinary book focuses our attention on Muslim migrations and settlements within and beyond this region in the course of the 20th century. In doing so, it aims to balance out the focus on predominantly Hindu refugees in the historiography of partition and its aftermath, as well as to address the broader—arguably Eurocentric—fields of migration and diaspora studies. It begins by proposing that we view Bengal as not only a source of migrants but as a destination: to conceive of a ‘Bengal diaspora within Bengal as well as outside it’ (p. 2). This conceptual scaffolding is boldly built by considering, in the same analytical frame, short-distance migrations and settlements within the subcontinent—between eastern India and East Pakistan and within eastern India—alongside longer-distance migrations and settlements between the Bengal region and the UK. This is an ambitious and powerful epistemological move that decentres dominant theorisations of diaspora—and indeed, transnationalism—that are built on solely long-distance mobilities. What does such a naming and framing accomplish?
The book, thus framed, unfolds in three parts. The first part sets up the vast historical and theoretical canvas of the project, with chapter 1 outlining a sweeping history of mobility and immobility in ‘the eastern zone’ from 1847 to 1947. This counters the dominant historiography of the subcontinent that accounts for the inter-Asian migrations of the 19th century as gradually slowing down due to sedentarisation through intensive agrarian colonisation, by the early 20th century. Having thus set the stage, chapter 2 aims to more directly explain why migration patterns took the forms they did through the two tides of nation-making in 1947 and 1971. To accomplish this formidable task, the chapter proposes the idea of ‘mobility capital’—a bundle of assets including networks, know-how, material possessions and class aspiration—to discern patterns among the wide range of mobilities within and from the Bengal region.
The second part of the book then traces the contemporary experiences of Muslim migrants as they have migrated or been displaced, their place-making strategies in settlement locations, and the contestations through which such settlement is marked. This vast enterprise condenses the data from India and Bangladesh, including Bengali and Bihari Muslims, separately from the data on Bangladeshis in the UK. Taken together, these chapters critique assumptions about distance: proximity does not necessarily breed belonging and familiarity, just as distance can be formative of new forms of community as in the case of Banglatown in London. The chapters in this section, rich in the stories they present, could have been interlinked more clearly through the questions of ‘community’, historically shifting identity politics and spatial hierarchies that resonate in each. Some reflections on the comparable ways in which the experience of marginalisation leads to the making and maintenance of new forms of hierarchical social relations for migrants, despite the obvious differences in the empirical details, would have made the links between the different levels of analyses stronger in this section.
Chapter 5 makes a strong intervention in dominant conceptualisations of migration, asserting not only that marriage is always migration for women but also that the ‘movement of brides thus calls to be placed in the context of national borders and practices, not just in the broader sense of who “belongs” and who does not’ (p. 149). While the focus on gendering the diaspora is a well-defined thread borne out by the case studies presented, the chapter’s attempts to chart a cultural history of Bengali marriage as migration seems too diffuse, and so generalist as to lose its particularity in the context of both ‘Muslim migration’ and nation-making upheavals in the region.
The final section, centrally concerned with performance—of marking space and claiming origins, of imagining homes and memorialising histories—is the most well knitted. Chapter 6, examining the role of Muharram in shaping community, identity and claims-making in contemporary Bangladesh, is riveting. It balances a rich portrayal of a boisterous Muharram as observed—surprisingly—by Sunni, Urdu-speaking ‘Bihari’ migrants in Dhaka with a wide-ranging critical account of their complex histories in the subcontinent, including multiple displacements, affiliations and fractures. Chapter 7 continues the examination of ‘cultural identity work’ (p. 192), turning to Bengali Muslim ritual memorialisations of ‘Ekushe’—21st February in memory of Bangladeshi Language Martyrs—often at ‘Shahid Minars’ (martyrs’ memorials) constructed in diasporic locations. It outlines, with great sensitivity, the contestations within the Bengali Muslim diaspora as different versions of nationalism jostle for prominence. As the authors argue in the next chapter on history-making, local diasporic politics, national interests and transnational agendas are invariably entangled and must be analysed together.
Co-authored by a historian, a sociologist and an anthropologist, the book is the culmination of a decade-long interdisciplinary project across sites in Bangladesh, India and the UK, aided by a fourth researcher. It is clear that no single person could have accomplished such a massive project and as such this book presents a model of truly interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship. The result is a melody of voices, methods and writing styles that makes it a remarkable if sometimes uneven work to read. The delineation of the ‘Bengal Muslim diaspora’ toes a careful line as it seeks to include ‘Biharis’ and not only Bengali Muslims into its fold to create a ‘sprawling, eclectic work’ (p. 245). This makes the ‘Bengal Muslim diaspora’ a somewhat opaque category whose theoretical contours are not explicitly discussed in the book. One wonders, for example, why the authors chose to use ‘Bengal diaspora’ in the singular when their work underlines the plurality and the historical specificities among these groups. The relations between ‘Muslim’, ‘Bengali’ and ‘Bengal’, that is, the intersections of linguistic, cultural, religious, national and place-based identities, is another continuous thread that is unevenly addressed in the different chapters.
The Bengal Diaspora tries hard to balance its grand, comparative ambitions with the minutiae through extraordinary stories of ordinary people, and this tension is palpable in several sections. The book is at its strongest when making broad, historical arguments; three such overarching contributions stand out through this densely referenced book. First, the authors are consistently attentive to the ways in which mobility is entangled with immobility, and demonstrate the significance of constraints, both material and affective. Second, tracing how short-distance journeys and long distance ones are nested in and co-constitute each other, the book argues that ‘diaspora is a matter of social distance traveled and emotional dislocation (and relocation)’ (p. 248), thus making a critical intervention in both migration and diaspora studies. Finally, by engaging with scholarship on transnationalism, the authors reiterate the importance of the nation state even within the plural and discrete transnational networks that have sustained this diaspora. The critical points that this review has raised are minor given the imaginative force of this work; it will inspire scholarship for the future.