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By Root 4316 0

be contacted, it did little more than fuel the frenzied speculation that Bose was still alive and would return to claim his legacy of freedom. It is not hard to see why this myth proved attractive in the apocalyptic conditions of Bengal in 1945 when the atomic bomb had followed the mass evacuation from Burma, cyclone, famine and cholera. As the INA trials opened on 5 November, the press carried dozens of pictures and souvenirs of the men under trial and of various INA units, including the all-female Rani of Jhansi Regiment, parading before Subhas Bose. Sarat Bose declared ‘Azad Hind Week’ and hundreds of thousands of rupees were collected for INA defence and rehabilitation costs. Released INA men were fêted enthusiastically and, almost inevitably, many of the Calcutta demonstrations in their honour tipped over into violent protest and riots against British rule. On 7 November 1945 at least 100,000 people staged a mass rally at Shraddhananda Park in the centre of the city. Later the same month, the police fired on student demonstrators, killing sixteen and injuring 125.

Bose and the INA were not, however, the only political trigger in Bengal over these months. There was a much wider apprehension that ‘imperialism’ was rampant once again, despite people’s sacrifices during the war. The press and politicians dwelt on the deployment of British and British Indian, French and Dutch troops to suppress national movements in Indonesia and Indo-China and action against nationalists and trade unions in Burma and Malaya. American ‘commercial imperialism’ was denounced. An All-India South East Asia Day of demonstrations was declared and vigorously celebrated in Calcutta. The word went out that ‘Indians’ conditions throughout Malaya is [sic] helpless. Prominent lawyers, doctors, merchants and missionaries have been confined in solitary cells for over a month without trial.’73 The people on the receiving end of this wave of Bengali sympathy were members of the former Indian Independence Leagues. But brotherly solidarity with the subject peoples of Southeast Asia did not inhibit another type of agitation about the region. This was the movement for the return of Indian nationals who had fled Burma at the beginning of the war, a cause that was by no means popular among Burmese, Malays or Indo-Chinese. In October the Burma government’s Civil Supplies Board announced that, come the following March, it would begin repatriating half a million of these refugees from Calcutta, Chittagong and Vizagapatnam in the south. Moreover, it promised that: ‘all Indian merchant refugees returning to Burma would be granted retail trade licences. If their shops were occupied by Burmese or if they had been destroyed or damaged, the government would help the merchants in reoccupying or rebuilding their premises.’74 Calcutta may have been pleased, but announcements such as this had the effect both of distressing many inhabitants of Southeast Asia and also of raising unrealistic hopes amongst the refugees, many of whom were desperately poor.

While economic unrest and hatred of the British surged through the cities of Bengal, a more insidious and ultimately more murderous passion was slowly gaining force: Hindu–Muslim hostility. Ironically, Hindus and Muslims in Bengal had more in common than they had in most parts of India. They all spoke Bengali and there was no superficial written-language division based on the difference between Sanskrit- and Persian-derived scripts as there was over much of the subcontinent. In the countryside, despite the efforts of preachers who tried to insist on the practice of pure Hinduism or Islam, there was still not a lot to distinguish a Hindu from a Muslim peasant, particularly if he or she was from the plebeian but hard-working Namasudra caste numerous in many of the eastern districts. Most Bengalis were followers of popular devotional sects that blurred the boundaries between Hinduism and Islam, and some of these, notably the Bauls, had both Hindu and Muslim adepts. Yet over the years economic differentials, the play of sectarian