Partition of Bengal (1905): Curzon, Swadeshi and Reversal

The Partition of Bengal was the division of the vast Bengal Presidency of British India into two provinces, which took effect on 16 October 1905 under the viceroy Lord Curzon. It provoked the Swadeshi movement, the first mass campaign of Indian nationalism, and was reversed in 1911. Its impact on Hindu-Muslim relations and on Indian politics lasted far longer than the partition itself.

Background: an unwieldy province

At the start of the 20th century the Bengal Presidency included Bengal proper, Bihar, Orissa and Chota Nagpur, with a population of roughly 78 million. It was governed from Calcutta, which was also the capital of British India. British officials had discussed reorganising it for decades, arguing that a single lieutenant governor could not run so large an area well, especially its neglected eastern districts.

Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1899 to 1905, was an energetic administrator who believed in efficient government. Plans drawn up in 1903 and 1904, notably by Home Secretary Herbert Risley, proposed transferring eastern Bengal to a new province. Confidential official notes also argued that a united Bengal was a source of political strength for nationalists and that dividing it would weaken them.

The partition

The scheme was announced in July 1905. Eastern and northern Bengal, including Dacca (Dhaka), Chittagong and Rajshahi divisions, were joined with Assam to form a new province, Eastern Bengal and Assam, with its capital at Dacca. It had around 31 million people, a majority of them Muslim.

The remaining province of Bengal, governed from Calcutta, kept western Bengal together with Bihar and Orissa. It had a large Hindu majority, but Bengali speakers were outnumbered there by speakers of Hindi and Oriya. Educated Bengalis therefore saw the measure as an attack on Bengali identity and a deliberate attempt to set Hindus and Muslims against each other.

The partition came into force on 16 October 1905, despite petitions, meetings and protests. Curzon himself left India the following month after a dispute with the army commander Lord Kitchener.

The Swadeshi and boycott movement

Opposition began even before the partition took effect. At a large meeting in Calcutta Town Hall on 7 August 1905, leaders resolved to boycott British manufactured goods. The word swadeshi, meaning “of one’s own country”, became the slogan of a campaign to buy Indian-made cloth, salt, sugar and other goods instead of imports.

On 16 October 1905, many Bengalis fasted, bathed in the Ganges and observed a day of mourning. The poet Rabindranath Tagore encouraged people to tie rakhi threads on each other’s wrists as a sign of unity, and wrote patriotic songs, including “Amar Sonar Bangla”, which later became the national anthem of Bangladesh. The cry “Bande Mataram” (“I bow to thee, Mother”), from a poem by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, became the movement’s rallying call.

The campaign went beyond boycott. Activists set up national schools, swadeshi textile mills, banks and craft workshops, and volunteer groups enforced the boycott in markets. Foreign cloth was burned in public bonfires. The movement spread to other parts of India, especially Maharashtra and Punjab.

Moderates, extremists and revolutionaries

The Swadeshi years exposed divisions inside the Indian National Congress, which had been founded in 1885. Moderates such as Surendranath Banerjea and Gopal Krishna Gokhale wanted protest within constitutional limits. So-called extremists, led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo Ghosh, called for passive resistance and full self-rule, or swaraj. The two wings split openly at the Surat session of Congress in 1907.

A smaller number of young Bengalis turned to violence. Secret societies such as the Anushilan Samiti and the Jugantar group organised bomb attacks and assassinations. In April 1908 a bomb thrown at Muzaffarpur, intended for a British magistrate, killed two Englishwomen; the young revolutionary Khudiram Bose was hanged. The government responded with press laws, arrests and the deportation of leaders, and Tilak was imprisoned in Mandalay from 1908.

Muslim responses

Many Muslim leaders of eastern Bengal supported the partition. They hoped the new province would bring jobs, schools and influence to a region where Muslims were the majority but landlords and professionals were mostly Hindu. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca became the leading Muslim supporter of the new province.

In December 1906 the All-India Muslim League was founded at a conference in Dacca. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 then introduced separate electorates for Muslims. Historians debate how far the partition caused these developments, but it clearly sharpened communal politics in Bengal.

Key people

Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1899 to 1905, carried out the partition and defended it as an administrative reform. His successor, Lord Minto, and the Secretary of State for India, John Morley, had to manage the protests and the violence that followed.

Surendranath Banerjea, a veteran Calcutta politician and editor, led the moderate campaign of petitions, meetings and boycott. Rabindranath Tagore lent the movement its songs and its spirit of unity in its first months, although he later grew critical of its coercive side. Aurobindo Ghosh, editor of the newspaper Bande Mataram, argued for complete independence; tried in the Alipore bomb case in 1908-1909, he was acquitted and later withdrew to Pondicherry to pursue a spiritual life.

On the other side, Nawab Salimullah of Dacca led Muslim support for the new province and hosted the conference at which the Muslim League was founded. Bampfylde Fuller, the first lieutenant governor of Eastern Bengal and Assam, became so unpopular with Hindu nationalists that he resigned in 1906.

Reversal in 1911

The protests, the violence and the damage to British trade convinced the government that the partition could not stand. At the Delhi Durbar on 12 December 1911, King George V announced that Bengal would be reunited. At the same time the capital of British India was moved from Calcutta to Delhi.

The new arrangement, effective from 1 April 1912, created a Bengal province of Bengali-speaking districts, while Bihar and Orissa became a separate province and Assam regained its own status. Bengali Hindu nationalists welcomed the annulment as a victory. Many Muslims in eastern Bengal felt betrayed, and as compensation the government promised a university at Dacca, which opened in 1921.

Timeline

• 1899, January: Lord Curzon becomes viceroy of India.
• 1905, July: The government announces the plan to partition Bengal.
• 1905, 7 August: A meeting in Calcutta Town Hall adopts the boycott of British goods.
• 1905, 16 October: The partition takes effect; a day of mourning is observed.
• 1906, 30 December: The All-India Muslim League is founded in Dacca.
• 1907, December: Congress splits between moderates and extremists at Surat.
• 1908, 30 April: The Muzaffarpur bombing kills two Englishwomen.
• 1911, 12 December: George V announces the reunification of Bengal at the Delhi Durbar.
• 1912, 1 April: The reorganisation of provinces comes into effect.

Legacy

The partition failed in its immediate aims. Instead of weakening Bengali nationalism, it turned a debate among the educated elite into a mass movement and introduced the methods of boycott, national education and self-reliance that Mahatma Gandhi later used on a much larger scale.

Its effects on communal relations were longer lasting. The experience of a Muslim-majority province in the east, and its loss in 1911, influenced Muslim politics in Bengal for decades. In 1947 Bengal was divided again, along similar lines, during the Partition of India; its eastern half later became Bangladesh.

Why it matters

The Partition of Bengal was a turning point in the Indian independence movement. It showed that ordinary Indians could be mobilised against British policy, and it foreshadowed both the mass campaigns and the religious divisions that shaped the end of British rule.