Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Bengali Muslim cultural nationalism from the Pakistani movement in the 1940s through the instantiation of an East Pakistani Bengali cultural concept in the new state of East Pakistan from 1947 until the break-up of East Pakistan into Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract:

The South Asian twentieth century is usually known for the partition, nation-state formation, and now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It is not generally known for the culture concept and its relationship to Muslim minorities. The nineteenth century's glorious Bengali Hindu intellectual past, and its invocations of culture, are certainly well documented and forms a staple for South Asian history. Muslim South Asia, defined either through rich pre-modern cultures and histories or through Pakistan, carries forth a minor historiography, but has little to offer modern intellectual history. Bengal holds not only a history of culture concepts that played a pivotal role in nineteenth century nationalism but also an altogether different appearance of productive culture-concept-building in the form of Bengali Muslim Pakistani cultural nationalism. Though this culture concept was thwarted and destroyed in the embers of the 1971 civil war, I engage with analysis of the continuity of the culture concept from the Pakistan movement of 1940-1947 as well as signature iterations of culture in the East Pakistani Bengali public sphere from 1947 to 1971, particularly from the journal The Concept of Pakistan, active from the mid-1950s through the end of the East Pakistan period. This research shows how political ideas about minorities developed in ways that were not only emanating from nationalisms or state-based propaganda, but always were engaged in critiques of both.