There is a tendency for people to talk about ethnic divides and conflicts in terms of supposed genetic (or racial) groupings that are actually based on cultural or linguistic categories. This is true of many Southasian conflicts, and most recently of the violence in the Indian Northeast. Popular misconceptions aside, modern anthropology tells us that despite immense diversity, humans are really one, both biologically as a species and culturally in terms of the innate potentials and tendencies of diverse groups. The latter point basically expresses the postulate of the Psychic Unity of Mankind, originally formulated in the 19th century by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian, and which endures to date in one form or another in anthropology and various other disciplines. But how does the humanistic view expressed in Bastian's postulate help us comprehend real situations in which human groups locked in conflict either fail or refuse to see their common humanity across ethnic, religious or political divides?
This piece focuses on conflicts involving Bengali Muslims, which, briefly put, are of two types. First, within Bengali Muslim society in Bangladesh, there is an unresolved tension between two poles of collective identity – Bengali and Muslim. Second, since the British colonial period, the growth and geographical expansion of the Bengali Muslim population has been associated with conflicts against non-Bengali ethnic groups living along or across the borders of present-day Bangladesh. In this context, after reviewing the historical emergence of Bengali Muslims, I consider questions of identity and connections to the past as these relate to contemporary Bangladeshis.
Bengal's frontiers
As is well-known to students of Bengal's history, it was a military commander named Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji, who, through his conquests around 1204-1205, ushered in Muslim rule in a region that came to be known as 'Bangala', and later as 'Bengal' in English. Legend has it that Bakhtiyar Khilji – who was operating under a Delhi-based Turkish sultan named Qutb-ud-din Aibak, and who himself hailed from the Turkic Khilji (Khalji) tribe long settled in what is now southern Afghanistan – defeated Lakshman Sen, the king of Bengal at the time, with just 18 horsemen. This fact (or myth) has led to much caricature and Hindu-nationalist anguish regarding the latter's incompetence. The history of the rise of Islam, particularly the emergence of a Bengali Muslim agrarian society, may be known in broad outlines, but the ethnic and cultural processes involved in this transformation remain poorly understood among the educated classes in Bangladesh, and in Southasia generally. In this regard, Richard Eaton's The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 is one of the few books to significantly address this lacuna.