Patriotic Songs and the Partition of Bengal
Three years ago the centenary of a momentous event in the history of India’s independence movement passed almost unnoticed. The reason was of course the disinclination of the ruling dispensation to acknowledge that the partition of Bengal was a seminal moment in the history of British India and the movement that for the first time forced the British to back down and to quote Surendranath Bannerjee “unsettle a settled fact” was a watershed in the history of the independence struggle. I refer of course to the ( first) Partition of Bengal, which set off a movement in Bengal that was unprecedented in its scope and managed to fire the imagination of an entire generation of Indians. Today it is fashionable to say that it was an upper caste Hindu agitation and was directed against the poor Muslims who we are told wanted the partition. To my mind this proves that Marxist historians can go to any extent to distort History for their purposes. The Soviet revolution masterminded by a gang of Bolsh...