Lord Curzon Cut Bengal in Two in 1905. Tagore Answered With a Song That Became Bangladesh's Anthem

On the morning of 16 October 1905, crowds in Calcutta walked barefoot to the Ganga, the traditional sign of mourning, and bathed. Then they tied threads of coloured cotton on each other’s wrists. Strangers did it. Policemen had it done to them. Rabindranath Tagore, by his nephew Abanindranath’s account, made a sudden dash into the Nakhoda Mosque to tie rakhis on the wrists of the clerics there.

The day Bengal was cut in two had been turned into a festival of brotherhood. George Nathaniel Curzon, the Viceroy, was the man who cut it. That June he had written to a colleague about what to expect: “Conceive the howls! They will almost slay me in Bengal.”

Officials expected the howls to die down quickly. They lasted six years, and they won.

Efficiency, with no room for Indians

Curzon landed in Bombay on 30 December 1898 and ran India with what Sumit Sarkar, the historian of the period, calls a “veritable cult of efficiency.” He built railways, reorganised the police and protected ancient monuments.

What he did not want was Indians sharing the work. In November 1900 he assured the Secretary of State, Lord Hamilton, that the Indian National Congress was “tottering to its fall.” In 1903 he told a colleague his line was to treat it as an “unclean thing,” never taking notice of it. Sarkar calls the 1900 forecast “ludicrously off the mark,” and observes that it took “the provocative policies of a Curzon” to breathe new life into the Congress moderates.

The famine and the fear of charity

Within a year he had a disaster. Drought in 1899 brought famine to western and central India. By June 1900 the historian and retired civil servant Romesh Chunder Dutt counted nearly six million people on government relief works. Dutt called it “the most wide-spread and the severest famine that has ever visited India.”

On 19 January 1900 Curzon defended, in his Legislative Council, a circular asking the provinces for “a greater stringency in the tests” people had to pass before they got relief. Indian newspapers had called it inhuman. He accepted that the state must be ready “to spend its last rupee in the saving of human life.” Then he set out the other side of the scale, in terms his Victorian predecessors would have recognised:

In my judgment any Government which imperilled the financial position of India in the interests of a prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism. But any Government, which, by indiscriminate alms-giving, weakened the fibre, and demoralised the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime.

What his own commission counted

His defenders have a real point here. The relief bill was the largest ever, at least fifteen crore rupees by the government’s own count, and the Famine Commission of 1901 agreed with Curzon, judging that over the famine as a whole relief had been “excessive.”

The same report also shows what relief that came too slowly cost. It put the famine’s toll in British-ruled districts alone at about one and a quarter million lives, and made no count for the princely states, whose starving people it saw crossing into British territory. “Many crawled over the border only to die.” In Gujarat, it found, deaths would have been fewer had relief in the villages been given “with due liberality.” When relief did flow freely from June 1900, “it was then too late; the mischief had been done.”

A durbar with Nero in the room

Two years later he was planning a Coronation Durbar at Delhi for 1 January 1903, to celebrate Edward VII as King and Emperor.

Critics objected while drought still threatened parts of the country. Curzon answered them in Council in September 1902: “our old friend Nero, who is alleged to have fiddled while Rome burned, has often been brought out for my special delectation.” He promised that no rupee would be taken from relief and that most of the cost would come back through sales and railway fares. Sarkar calls it “a sheer waste of more than two million rupees.”

Fewer Indians running Indian universities

His Universities Act of 1904 grew out of what Sarkar calls “a secret and purely white conference” at Simla in 1901. The commission that followed had one Indian member, Gurudas Banerji, and he disagreed with its conclusions. It cut the number of elected members on university senates and handed officials the final say over which colleges could affiliate.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale fought the bill in Council on 18 March 1904 and called it “distinctly retrograde.” He predicted that the new senates would be “dominantly Europeans, with only a slight sprinkling of Indians.” Curzon said the aim was “to raise the standard of education all round.” Sarkar notes that total spending on education in 1903 to 1904 was about 2.5 per cent of the budget, while Curzon’s police reforms added Rs 15 million a year. The new control over colleges was later used to discipline student protesters.

The case for cutting Bengal

In 1901 Bengal held 78.5 million people and stretched across Bihar and Orissa as well, and British officials had worried about its size since the 1860s. The public case, first set out by the Home Secretary, Herbert Risley, in December 1903, was that Bengal’s government was overburdened and Assam needed a port. It would also give the expanded Assam’s officers, Risley added, “a wider and more interesting field of work.”

The final plan, announced on 19 July 1905, created a new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam with its capital at Dacca (now Dhaka). It held about 31 million people, 18 million of them Muslim.

The historian John R. McLane argues that administrative reasons came first and that the political motive, though real, never outweighed them. He concedes the core point anyway: “there definitely was an intention to ‘divide and rule.’” The question is how much. The files answer it.

What the files said in private

Risley’s confidential notes, dated 7 February and 6 December 1904, were written for colleagues, not the public:

Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different ways. That is perfectly true and is one of the merits of the scheme.

And:

It is not altogether easy to reply in a despatch which is sure to be published without disclosing the fact that in this scheme as in the matter of the amalgamation of Berar to the Central Provinces one of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.

The Viceroy’s own words

Curzon was blunter still. On 17 February 1904, writing on the train from Chittagong to Dacca, he told the Secretary of State, St John Brodrick, that the Bengalis “like to think themselves a nation,” and that yielding now would mean “cementing and solidifying, on the eastern flank of India, a force already formidable.”

The next day in Dacca he offered the Muslims of eastern Bengal a province that would give them “a unity which they have not enjoyed since the days of the old Mussulman viceroys and kings.” McLane dates the first real Muslim support for partition to that visit. Sarkar sees the Hindu-Muslim angle as secondary at first, since the main target was Calcutta’s educated, mostly Hindu leadership. How the empire built that kind of offer into a system is another story.

When London toyed with splitting off Bihar and Orissa instead, a division along the lines of language, Curzon refused. “The best guarantee of the political advantage of our proposal,” he cabled, “is its dislike by the Congress Party.”

His successor, Lord Minto, had little love for Curzon and thought the partition had been pushed through “with an unfortunate disregard for local sentiment and public opinion.” He kept it anyway, writing in February 1906 that “from a political point of view alone, putting aside the administrative difficulties of the old province, I believe partition to have been very necessary.”

A boycott, and a thread on the wrist

On 8 July 1905 the old-school politician Ambicacharan Majumdar told the Bengal council that “the struggle of a helpless people is probably over.” A month later, at a packed Calcutta Town Hall on 7 August, the meeting voted to boycott British goods, and he took it back: “It now seems to me that the real struggle has just begun.”

Foreign cloth was burned in bonfires. On partition day, at Ramendrasundar Trivedi’s suggestion, women left their kitchen fires unlit. Tagore had proposed the rakhi ceremony at two meetings in late September, and newspapers carried the call to tie them “irrespective of class, caste or creed.”

Sarkar’s figures show that Bengal’s weaving mills turned out 7.9 million yards of cloth in 1907 to 1908, while 1,330 million yards of piece-goods came into Calcutta from outside. The boycott, he concludes, left “hardly a dent” in imports.

Nor did the movement bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims, which Sarkar counts among its central failures. Much of Muslim opinion in the east backed the new province, led by Nawab Salimullah of Dacca. McLane notes that the government later lent the Nawab a very large sum, but warns against calling that support bought. Bengali Muslims had long lost out on schooling and government jobs, and the new province offered both.

The song that outlived the empire

Tagore wrote a run of songs in those months. The one Sarkar most associates with partition day is “Banglar mati, Banglar jol,” a prayer that the earth and water of Bengal be holy.

Another took its tune from the countryside, from the Baul singer Gagan Harkara’s “Ami Kothay Pabo Tare.” It appeared in the September 1905 issue of the magazine Bangadarshan, weeks after the partition was announced. It was called “Amar Sonar Bangla.” In the official English version its first line reads “My Bengal of gold, I love you.”

On its face it is a love song to a landscape: mango groves in spring, ripe paddy fields, the shade of banyan trees along the rivers. The scholar Niaz Zaman, writing in The Daily Star, calls it a song “composed in protest against the division of Bengal.”

Undone in six years

By the time the partition took effect, Curzon had already resigned, in August 1905, after a quarrel with his commander-in-chief, Lord Kitchener, over the post of Military Supply Member.

The agitation outlasted him. By 1911 the Home Member of the Viceroy’s council, worried by continuing revolutionary violence in Bengal, argued that “until we get rid of the partition ulcer, we shall have no peace.” On 12 December 1911, at another Delhi Durbar, George V announced that Bengal would be reunited. The capital of British India would move from Calcutta to Delhi. Muslim League protests were loud, and ignored. Sarkar calls the reversal “a rude shock” for the Muslim political elite.

Bengal was divided again in 1947, when its eastern half, this time without Assam, became East Pakistan. In 1971 it fought its way out in the war that made Bangladesh. On 13 January 1972 the new country officially adopted its national anthem. It was the song from the September 1905 Bangadarshan, the one that begins “My Bengal of gold, I love you.”