By
*Salimullah Khan*
"The peasantry is systematically disregarded for the most part by the propaganda put out by the nationalist parties."
--- Frantz Fanon, 'The Wretched of the Earth,' (1990: 47)
I. *The difference that was Maulana Bhasani*
Maulana Bhasani's name is so closely associated with the independence of Bangladesh as a nation state that it is often hard to recount his prime contributions to peasant struggles and the national movement for independence in colonial India. Little beyond vignettes and anecdotes is known about the Maulana's youth or the glories of his prime in Bangladesh today.
When he moved, under force of circumstances, up to Assam from Eastern Bengal in 1928, he still enjoyed the given name Abdul Hamid Khan reflecting in part the Bengali Muslim imaginary fascination with the Turkish sultanate and flaunting a patronymic of Turco-Afghan origin only adds precious little but that imaginary. In 1920s, his reputation was yet limited to a certain "jail-returned Khilafatist."
Known to have spent a stint at the Darul Uloom, Deoband, U.P., Abdul Hamid had no time to bother with ritual graduation from a seminary.
In the grand old days of agitation for Khilafat and Non-co-operation the young Abdul Hamid Khan began brushing shoulders with such high dignitaries as Chittaranjan Das, the short-lived, firebrand lawyer who sounded a different note inside the Indian National Congress and who knew what was to be done and where to begin to keep Hindus and Muslims of colonized Bengal together.
Our avowed knowledge of Maulana Bhasani's early political engagements is rather thin and sparse. The most accomplished biography by Syed Abul Maksud also does not add much to what one gathers from one or two casual articles by foreign authors (e.g. Bimal J. Dev and Dilip K. Lahiri).
The difference that Bhasani made in the politics of Assam in the pre-1947 years deserves further study, enriched by fresh field research and archival work home and abroad.
Nothing is so simple, as one would think, however. His reputation as a Maoist of sorts, as the "Red Maulana", a concoction of Western journalism in the dark hot days of the Cold War, stuck and overshadowed his life's work and got his true place in history obscured.
"His leadership," as a historian writes, "was rooted in his relentless struggle to
safeguard the rights of the peasantry and the labouring classes." Our historian instantly adds: "Owing to his Maoist inclinations, he was nicknamed 'Red Maulana' (Hossain 2013: 278).
As president of Assam Provincial Muslim League, Bhasani played a crucial role in the Sylhet referendum, July 6-7, 1947, which brought a fragmented Sylhet back to East Bengal to which she belonged before 1874 (Hossain 2013: 278-79).
Nothing surpassed Bhasani's primacy in the struggle for freedom before 1947 until the events of 1969 which, in 1971, fed straight to another stream of struggle for freedom. This latter year, irony of ironies, Bhasani was obliged to ply upstream the Brahmaputra by a country boat, back to old lower Assam, in a reversal of his old passage.
II. *The poliics of late colonial Assam*
Maulana Bhasani attained South Asia-wide notoriety and a national stature as the most charismatic leader of migrant Muslim peasants of East Bengal in Assam in early 1930s and '40s. It was in Assam that he acquired that lasting sobriquet, Bhasani, eternity would know him by. In 1937 he became a member of the Assam Legislative Assembly on a platform of land rights for Bengal peasants pioneering for their survival.
In the years 1928-36, Bhasani kept himself alive by frequently visiting peasant settlements in remote and inaccessible areas of Assam up the Brahmaputra stream for organizing them on the demand for land rights and abolition of the Line System instituted since 1920 by the colonial regime to limit peasant settlement to certain lower Assam districts.
Bengali peasants, an overwhelming majority of whom were Muslims, were flocking in large numbers to settle down in the difficult terrains of wild and inhospitable Assam since that first administrative unification of Eastern Bengal and Assam as a British Indian province in 1905 and which settlement turned into an unsettled fact before long.
Bhasani himself was one them, the pioneers. "The colonisation of Ghagmari and Bhasanir-char," notes Amalendu Guha, "was largely due to his own personal efforts" (Guha 1974: 351).
By 1936, he already emerged as an acclaimed, undisputed leader of the immigrant peasants of the district of Goalpara. One wonders how could peasants in lower reaches of the Brahmaputra come to be called "immigrants" when they belonged to the one and same province in 1905-1911.
Colonial accounts of the province of Assam portrayed the country as a vast expanse of endless wastelands. By 1880s, some of these wastelands were allotted to European planters for developing tea gardens. Assam was still "a (country) where there is plenty of good land awaiting reclamation."
Peasant migration from northern Bengal to lower districts of riverine Assam hardly began before the turn of the century. Since the 1880s the colonial regime was already on the lookout there in search of* "bona fide immigrants" *in order to secure means to obtain steadily expanding fiscal returns from the wastelands, in other words for populating the province "for taxation, for profit", to quote express official words.
The term bona fide immigrant was coined to distinguish persons coming to Assam with the express intention of taking up land and settle in the country, as distinct from tea garden coolies brought from British Indian provinces other than Bengal.
A striking development in the story is the metamorphosis in the meaning of the signifier "immigrant" occured in the meantime. "In official parlace," as Rinku Pegu puts it, "the word immigrant had encompassed all communities coming into Assam. In the public discourse the rhetoric around the word 'immigrant' was focused obsessively on people coming from East Bengal" (Pegu 2004: 588).
This shift of meaning from official to public discourse led to the introduction of the controversial Line System. It was instituted primarily for demarcation of areas in which migrants from East Bengal could settle and in which they could not. The apartheid implicit in the Line System was eventually elaborated into a racial ideology tinged with hierarchies and distinctions relating to language, religious denomination and culture in general.
The Line System was devised ostensibly as an administrative measure to restrict immigrants from moving upcountry. It was conceived by British officials in 1916 and was implemented first in 1920 in Nowgaon and Barpeta sub-division of the Kamrup district (Laskar 2018-19: 514).
In fact the purpose of the measure was more politicized than what its apologists would have us believe: something innocent or administrative. Two concerned scholars put the story in perspective: "It was, in fact, a device to segregate the Bengali Muslims from the indigenous population including the tribal and backward classes" (Dev and Lahiri 1985: 23; cited by Laskar 2018-19: 514).
F.W. Hockenhall, chairman of the Line System Committee appointed in 1937, formulated a binary choice for half a million or more East Bengal peasants in Assam. They must *either* give up their Bengali culture and language for assimilating to Assamese culture and language or remain within the Line drawn for them with their Bengali culture; to which the immigrant community responded: "our people will not accept the one to the exclusion of the other" (Pegu 2004: 586).
III. *From segregation to Partition*
The transformation of Maulana Bhasani from a "jail-returned khilafatist" of 1919 to a member of Assam Legislative Assembly in 1937 needs to be placed in this context. After getting himself elected to the Legislative Assembly he joined the Muslim League and to eventually become and stay the League's president until his expulsion by the postcolonial government in place.
By the time Bhasani became its Assam provincial president the Muslim League itself had morphed into a Muslim mass party if led by proprietary peasants. Maulana Bhasani was preparing against all odds for a civil disobedience movement in early 1947 (March 9, to be precise) against the Line System.
The Line System was however resilient. Bhasani had to take a stand not only against the Assamese reaction and the liberal middle classes, but against his own fellow partyman, the liberal prime minister Syed Mohammad Sadullah who also joined the Muslim League in 1937 as did Bhasani himself. It was truly an uphill battle, no pun intended.
On August 25, 1942, Sadullah ministry came to power for a second time but was still unwilling to go ahead for total abolition of the Line System and proposed instead a new policy with a rationing system of land settlement. The Sadulla ministry, accommodating conservative demands (endorsed by both the Indian National Congress and also Communist Party of India) proposed to absorb all immigrants who had arrived in Assam before 1938 and provide them with wastelands after providing for the "sons of the soil and their future progeny" (Guha 1974: 361). This was a hard to swallow device for castrating the future progeny of the East Bengal peasantry.
The majority of Assam Muslim League under the leadership of Maulana Bhasani rejected this recalcitrant land settlement policy crying out: "no policy without abolition of the Line System would be acceptable to them" (Ahmed 2004: 581).
In 1946, the new Prime Minister Gopinath Borodoloi came forward with a stern measure. He started evicting the immigrant settlers from their homesteads rendering a large number of them homeless. Bhasani advised the landless and evicted to "spread out" and cultivate surplus available land to grow more food, to secure their survival.
By mid-May 1946, Bhasani went on a hunger strike vowing "fast unto death" unless the Government of Assam stopped the eviction rampage. He broke fast after a long 61 day spell and making a strident call to the Muslims of Assam to observe May 31 as a day of protest against "Congress atrocities" (Ahmed 2004: 581-82).
By November, 1946, the Government again started eviction in the districts of Darrang, Kamrup and Nowgaon. On March 9, Bhasani decided to undertake a Civil Disobedience movement, we referred above. The next day Government arrested Bhasani at the Tezpur Town Hall and continued the eviction campaign.
The eviction campaign of the Bordoloi Government brought a communal bitterness between Hindus and Muslims (both indigenous and immigrant) upfront. The fallout of these forcible actions didn't stop with partition. It spiralled and spilled over the newly fabricated borders.
"Communal riots in the pre-independence as well as post-colonial period," it has been noted, "had brought a fearful situation for the Muslim inhabitants (both immigrant and indigenous) in Assam. Hundreds of Muslims were killed and their houses burnt in the communal riot. The Muslim immigrants getting no alternative left Assam taking shelter as refugees in East Pakistan (East Bengal, that is). The number of Muslims (who left for) Pakistan was several lakhs" (Ahmed 2004: 582).
Maulana Bhasani had to retrace his steps when the partition of India into two dominons, Pakistan and India, became a settled fact. As hinted above, Maulana Bhasani was eventually deported from Assam after 1947.
IV. *History's verdict: communalism or self-determination?*
What verdict history awards to Bhasani for his uncompromising stand on the rights of East Bengal peasants? The liberal historian Amalendu Guha thinks Bhasani's handling of the contradiction marks some sort of ineptitude under the force of circumstances. Articulating the Indian National Congress position he intervenes thus: "In no case was Congress ready to accommodate any number of immigrants and thereby to tilt the balance against the Assamese speaking population in their own homeland called the Brahmaputra Valley" (Guha 1974: 361).
What was Bhasani supposed to do then? Guha lays the blame squarely on European shoulders for Bhasani's failure to appreciate the new dispensation. For Guha Bhasani was good but was also in "bad company" of the Europeans.
"The fate of ministries, --Assam had six ministries and an interregnum of Governor's regime (Section 93) during the years ([1937-47])" as Guha finds it, "depended very much on its skilful handling of the immigrant question, because Europeans constituting one-twelfth of the legislature held the balance between the two contending camps," notes Guha.
"Under the circumstances," he continues, "Bhasani championed the peasant cause against zamindars' and money-lenders' exploitation, but in bad company of the European group. Given the Congress's politics of the day, he had no other alternative, since he was a deeply religious man, to seek allies amongst the communists who were a new--and mainly Hindu-force (in the Brahmaputra Valley in the 1940s" (Guha 1974: 361-62).
Arupjyoti Saikia, a younger historian, takes Guha to task for underestimating Bhasani's stature and putting him on the same pedestal with Ambikagiri Raichoudhury, a parent of Assamese nationalism, for instance.
Guha's verdict is subtle though. He thinks Assamese reaction was a consequence rather than a cause of the crisis and that Bhasani was comparable to Ambikagiri Raichaudhury and Nilmoni Phukan. Writes Guha rather nonchalantly: "As a reaction to the immigrant-based Muslim politics in the Brahmaputra Valley, there arose the cry of Assamese homeland being (in) danger, as a pressure on Congress politics. The Assamese reaction was spearheaded by Ambikagiri Raichaudhury, poet, patriot and one-time Non-cooperator and Nilmoni Phukan--the latter also a poet with a long anti-Congress, pro-British career" (Guha 1974: 361).
In Saikia's view, "to place both Ambikagiri and Abdul Hamid Khan, popularly known as Bhasani, (in the same cabin) makes one feel a bit uncomfortable. The kind of charismatic leadership and political skill that Bhasani had acquired as a legislator was no match for Ambikagiri. The (latter) wrote extensively on Assamese nationalism but it is doubtful whether a sizeable section of Assamese society did appreciate it" (Saikia 2007: 117).
Saikia's attribution of an accredited paternity of independent Bangladesh, above all, to Maulana Bhasani is a most insightful, righteous, and farsighted verdict. It is surprising that this spark has not caught on the fire it might have. You never know what maight ignite it next time on.
"The mass appeal that Bhasani had among the immigrant Muslim peasants," argues Arupjyoti Saikia, "could be understood in his meteoric rise as the Father of the Nation of independent Bangladesh" (Saikia 2007: 117).
Saikia's judgement, however, betrays a misgiving. He absolutely misses the point when he accuses Bhasani of being communal and harboring communalism. Bhasani and his colleagues, in his view, "had a strong role to play in the communalization of lower Assam districts" in the 1940s (Saikia 2007: 117). If clamoring for equal treatment as citizens is communalism then so much the worse for invoking right of nations to self- determination.
It is doubtful if this verdict stand the test of time. It seems, in the following assertion, Saikia has resolved his own doubts: "The communal politics of 1940s had other dimensions too. On the aftermath of partition, large blocks of lands left vacant by Muslim peasants who had migrated to East Pakistan was readily occupied by local Hindu peasants-- only few being landless peasants" (Saikia 2007: 117).
*References*
1. Ahmed, Shahiuz Zaman. 2004. Interstate migration (erstwhile East Bengal and Assam), Enforcement of Line System and Question of Settlement (1920-1950). Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 65, pp. 573-585.
2. Dev, Bimal J. and Lahiri, Dilip K. 1985. Assam Muslim Politics and Cohesion. Delhi: Mittal Publication.
3. Fanon, Frantz. 1990. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constant Farrington. London: Penguin Books. reprint.
4. Guha, Amalendu. 1974. East Bengal Immigrants and Bhasani in Assam Politics: 1928-47. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 35, pp. 348-365.
5. Hossain, Ashfaque. 2013. The Making and Unmaking of Assam-Bengal Borders and the Sylhet Referendum. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, January, pp. 250-287.
6. Laskar, Fakrul Islam. 2018-19. Agitation against the Line System: A Study of Assam Politics, 1937-47. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 79, pp. 514-519.
7. Pegu, Rinku. 2004. The Line System and the Birth of a Public Sphere in Assam: Immigrant, Alien, and Citizen. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 65, pp. 586-596.
8. Saikia, Arupjyoti. 2007. "Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Legislative Politics in Assam, 1826-1947 by Amalendu Guha," Social Scientist, vol. 35, no. 3/4, March-April, pp. 114-117.
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North South University,
Dhaka,
September 15, 2026.
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