1905: The Day Bengal Tied Rakhis

Why Curzon divided Bengal

In 1905 the province of Bengal, which then included Bihar and Odisha, had some 78 million people, and the government said it was too big to run. The Viceroy, Lord Curzon, announced in July that it would be split: a new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, with its capital at Dacca, and a western province of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha governed from Calcutta. The partition came into force on 16 October 1905.

The administrative case was real, but it was not the whole story. Bengal was the centre of educated nationalist opinion in India, and the line was drawn so that Bengali speakers would be a minority in the western province, and Muslims a majority in the eastern one. Historians quote a note by the Home Secretary, Herbert Risley, from 1904: “Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different ways.” Bengal read the plan exactly that way.

How Bengal answered

The answer began before the partition did. On 7 August 1905, a packed meeting at the Calcutta Town Hall resolved to boycott British goods until the partition was withdrawn. That was the start of the Swadeshi movement: swadeshi, “of one’s own country”.

• Arandhan: on 16 October no food was cooked in Bengali homes, as on a day of mourning.
• Rakhi bandhan: at Tagore’s call, Bengalis tied rakhis on one another’s wrists, Hindu and Muslim alike, to say the people of Bengal could not be divided by a line on a map.
• Bonfires of foreign cloth: Manchester cotton was burned in the streets, and people turned to handloom cloth, however coarse.
• Swadeshi enterprise: Indian-owned mills, banks, soap and match factories and stores opened. Prafulla Chandra Ray’s Bengal Chemicals, founded a few years earlier, became a symbol of what Indians could make for themselves.
• National education: when the government threatened students who joined the protests, nationalists founded the National Council of Education in 1906. It grew into today’s Jadavpur University.

A movement that sang

Few protests anywhere have had so many songs. Tagore wrote a stream of songs for it, among them “Banglar Mati Banglar Jol”, the song for the rakhi day, and “Amar Sonar Bangla”, which, sixty-six years later, became the national anthem of Bangladesh. Rajanikanta Sen urged Bengalis to wear the coarse cloth their mother gave them with pride, and the jatra singer Mukunda Das took the message from village to village.

“Bande Mataram”, from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Anandamath, became the movement’s cry. The government responded with circulars forbidding students to shout it. In the same years Abanindranath Tagore painted Bharat Mata, one of the first and best-loved images of India as a mother.

From boycott to bombs

For some, boycott was not enough. Secret societies such as the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar turned to armed resistance. In 1908 two young men threw a bomb at a carriage in Muzaffarpur meant for a hated magistrate; one of them, the eighteen-year-old Khudiram Bose, was hanged that August and became Bengal’s most beloved martyr. The Alipore bomb case that followed put Aurobindo Ghosh in the dock.

Undone: 1911

Six years of protest worked. At the Delhi Durbar on 12 December 1911, King George V announced that the partition was annulled and Bengal’s Bengali-speaking districts were reunited. In the same breath he announced that the capital of British India would move from Calcutta to Delhi. Bihar and Odisha became a province of their own, and Assam was separated again.

What 1905 left behind

• One of the first mass movements of modern Indian nationalism, using boycott and self-reliance as political weapons a generation before Gandhi.
• Jadavpur University, Bengal Chemicals and a culture of Indian enterprise.
• Songs every Bengali still knows, and the national anthem of a neighbouring country.
• The rakhi as a symbol of unity between communities, and not only between brothers and sisters.