There is a long tradition in South Asian historiography that questions the inevitability of the partition of British India into two sovereign nation states – India and Pakistan. Scholars have pointed towards multiple imaginaries of post-colonial South Asia that animated political life in the region right till the very end of colonial rule. The ‘United Bengal’ scheme – the demand for a sovereign nation state of Bengal as a common homeland for both Hindus and Muslims of the province – has been hailed to represent one such imaginary. This presentation will critically examine the politics around the ‘United Bengal’ movement in the light of new archival evidence.

In the ‘endgame of Empire’, the fate of Calcutta emerged as a major concern for both British policy and anticolonial politics, including the campaign for a united sovereign Bengal. This presentation will examine the world of popular politics in Calcutta between August 1946, the aftermath of the Great Calcutta Killing, and the announcement of the ‘Partition Plan’ on 3 June 1947. Specifically, it will focus on the ‘100 Harrison Road Case’ that involved an alleged rape of a Hindu widow by a Punjabi Muslim policeman. This incident dominated Calcutta’s street-politics in those crucial months, precipitating massive popular mobilizations both by the Hindu Mahasabha and sections of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League. In the face of an intense communal mobilization, the United Bengal scheme lost all chances of success. Deprived of popular support, the latter appeared as little more than the last desperate attempt of a few self-interested leaders of Bengal to preserve their political relevance. This presentation will critically evaluate the claim that the movement for United Bengal ‘foreshadowed’ the birth of Bangladesh in 1971.