Abstract
On 26 April, 1947, when the last viceroy Lord Mountbatten asked Quaid-e-Azam
Mohammad Ali Jinnah ‘what his views are about keeping Bengal united at the
price of its remaining out of Pakistan’, Jinnah replied, ‘I should be delighted.
What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta? They had much better remain united
and independent. I am sure they would be on friendly terms with us’. The idea of
an independent Bengal, as a single economic and political unit, was floated by
Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy, then the premier of Bengal, at a press conference
in Delhi in April 1947. He called on the British to recognise an independent,
undivided and sovereign Bengal in a divided India as a separate dominion. This
study argues that Jinnah promoted the idea of an independent Bengal, while the
Congress leadership opposed it. Drawing on fresh archival source material, this
study attempts to address four important questions. Why did Jinnah support the
idea of an independent Bengal against the Congress’s strategy to divide it? Why
did the movement of an independent Bengal fail? Why did alternatively Jinnah
demand a ‘corridor’ connecting East and West Pakistan? Finally, what were the
longer aftereffects of the movement of an independent Bengal? By looking at these
key historical aspects of the movement of Pakistan, this study suggests we can
better understand the 1951 Language Movement in East Pakistan and finally the
birth of Bangladesh twenty years later.
Ilyas Chattha. (2020) ‘What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta’? Jinnah’s Advocacy for an Independent Bengal, 1947, Journal of the Punjab University Historical Society, Volume 33 , Issue 1.
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