THIS narrative swirls between the mainstream historiography of the 1947 Bengal Partition and the reminiscences of the grassroots Hindu-Muslim encounters on the eve of that epoch-making split. The middle of the 1940s, as I recall, epitomised the jaded sunset of the British Raj in India. Growing out of the British Indian subject status in those days was like staring out of a 鈥榝racturing chrysalis.鈥� In their daze of identity muddle, people often, in my localities, distinguished themselves only as Muslims, Hindus, or Christians, not as British Indians, Bengalis, Indians, or Pakistanis. The meandering memories of the past and the living experiences of the time are still Bangladeshi political and social inheritances. They are germane to probe the existing political and intellectual deadlock in contemporary Bangladesh and look at the future with a smidgeon of hope, wisdom, and compassion.
Growing up in a vicinity barely twenty-four miles outside Dhaka, I remember that now and then communal rioting broke out in the city that catapulted Hindu-Muslim tension to our nearby villages. Behind such eruptions, rumours played