The Politics of Identity

Neilesh Bose, a history graduate student and Fulbright scholar, can finally rest-to a degree. After a year of continuous international travel, he has recently returned to the Medford campus to continue his doctoral research on Bengali Muslims.

Neilesh Bose

"I am researching regional, religious, and cultural politics of Bengali Muslims from the 1920's through and including the 1947 partition of Bengal," says Bose, who traveled everywhere from London, England to various parts of India and Bangladesh as part of his research.

Specifically, Bose's research focuses on the relationship between politics and the creation of the nation-state of Pakistan in its eastern half of Bengal in the 1940s.

"In the context of the emergence of new, modern ideologies that arise during this period, such as communism, pan-Islam, fascism, and anti-colonial nationalism, I am seeking to uncover the meanings and contours of Bengali Muslim politics that led to the support of the Pakistan movement in Bengal." wrote Bose, via e-mail, from India last October. "I also hope to shed light on the politics of nationalism in an anti-colonial context and the ways in which various groups develop political ideologies vis-à-vis each other (for example between Muslims and Hindus) as well as relative to colonial powers."

Bose, who plans to graduate in spring 2008, has found that the creation of Pakistan, for example, can be linked the apprehension many in the Bengali Muslim community felt at the time.

"As far as the Bengali case is concerned, a particular Bengali Muslim identity is not the only factor that contributed to the creation of Pakistan," he says. "But the political interests of how Muslims, who were in the minority in an all-India context and a majority in the regional context of Bengal, would have fared in an independent India and the anxiety that came with this political concern contributed to the development of the nation-state of Pakistan."

Due to both the complexity and density of Bose's research topic, it was necessary for him to spend extended periods of time both in India and in the geographical areas surrounding it. While in India, he reviewed documents at places like the National Library and the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, both located in Kolkata, and conducted a series of interviews in each locale, as well as in the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh.

"I looked at both political files from the archives of institutions I visited and writings by Bengali people themselves. It was often a challenge to get what I was looking for since, in South Asia, documents, information, and data are often very heavily guarded and there's a heavy bureaucracy in that part of the world," says Bose. "I conducted interviews with elders who were alive in the 1940's, many of whom lived through three different nation states, colonial India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. So, these people gave their reflections on how things changed and why something like Pakistan happened."

The interviews also gave Bose a glimpse into a "hidden" feature related to the partition of India.

"The partition was accompanied by a huge amount of migration of Bengali Muslims from India, what we now call India, to the part that we call Pakistan, as well as an influx of Bengali Hindus from what became Pakistan into what became independent India" says Bose. "There are many stories of violence during this period, of people who saved their neighbors or friends from rival communities. These are stories that didn't really make it into the archives of the places I visited or the world of published history."

While Bose's research focuses on a specific group, Bengali Muslims, the work is part of a broader interest he has in how people develop a group identity.

"I'm interested in identity because I think identity politics has a great deal to do with how we perceive nation-states and national governments," says Bose, whose currently writing his dissertation. "There are assumptions about what led to the creation of Pakistan and other nation-states, and I'm interested in what lies beneath and behind these beliefs."

Along with his Fulbright Scholarship, Neilesh Bose's work has been supported by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He also received funding for his research from the Tufts Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and the School of Engineering through their Graduate Student Research Grant-in-Aid and Graduate Student Travel Programs. Neilesh Bose can be reached at Neilesh.Bose@tufts.edu.