Partition of Bengal 1905: Curzon's Partition and the Swadeshi Movement

The Partition of Bengal of 1905 — often called the first partition of Bengal — was the division of British India's largest province into two administrations: a reduced province still called Bengal in the west, and a new province named Eastern Bengal and Assam in the east. Ordered by the Government of India under Viceroy Lord Curzon, it was announced on 19 July 1905 and took effect on 16 October 1905. It lasted barely six years. The attempt to redraw Bengal's map provoked the Swadeshi movement, transformed the politics of both Hindu and Muslim Bengal, and ended in a humiliating reversal: in December 1911 the British annulled their own measure. This was a different event from the Partition of Bengal 1947, which divided Bengal along religious lines as British rule ended. The 1905 partition was an internal reorganisation carried out at the height of the Raj — but the political patterns it created ran through the next four decades.

A province too large to govern

By the standards of British India, Bengal was ungovernable in size. The lieutenant-governor at Calcutta administered some 189,000 square miles — Bengal proper together with Bihar and Orissa — and by 1903 the population under him had risen to about 78.5 million, the largest of any Indian province. The machinery of government was thin on the ground, and it was thinnest in the east. Eastern Bengal's districts, cut up by great rivers and creeks, were isolated and poorly served by roads; officials rarely reached them, policing was rudimentary, and organised piracy had infested the waterways for generations. Peasants there lived under absentee zamindars, many of them based in Calcutta, while trade, education and government employment all clustered around the capital. Successive officials had tinkered with the province's edges — Assam, with Sylhet, had been cut away in 1874 to form a chief commissioner's province, and the Lushai Hills added to it in 1898 — but the core problem, as the government presented it, remained: one administration could not govern a territory of this scale.

The scheme takes shape, 1903–1905

Proposals to divide Bengal were first considered in 1903, and the initial scheme was published in December of that year in papers associated with the Government of India's home secretary, H. H. Risley; the proposals were officially published in January 1904. The government's public case was administrative, and it rested on three objectives: to relieve the Bengal government of part of its burden and bring administration closer to the outlying districts; to develop backward Assam, ruled by a chief commissioner, by enlarging its territory and giving it an outlet to the sea at Chittagong; and to gather the scattered Oriya-speaking population under a single administration.

In February 1904 Curzon toured the eastern districts to sell the plan, speaking at Dhaka, Chittagong and Mymensingh. At Dhaka on 18 February he told his Muslim audience that the scheme "would invest the Muhammadans of Eastern Bengal with a unity which they have not enjoyed since the days of the old Mussulman viceroys and kings." The remark pointed to the scheme's second life. What began as a modest transfer of districts grew, during that tour, into a full new province under its own lieutenant-governor — and officials were privately candid about its political advantages. Risley wrote in official notes in 1904: "Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different directions… one of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule." Curzon, writing to the Secretary of State in February 1904, warned that yielding to the protests would mean "cementing and solidifying, on the eastern flank of India, a force already formidable." Historians of the episode, following Banglapedia's assessment, generally conclude that the partition began as an administrative scheme whose political merits — splitting the most organised nationalist public in India and cultivating Muslim support in the east — were recognised, and then embraced, as opposition mounted.

The Government of India promulgated its final decision in a resolution dated 19 July 1905, and the partition took effect on 16 October 1905.

The two provinces

The new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam was assembled from the Chittagong, Dhaka and Rajshahi divisions (excluding Darjeeling), the district of Malda, the princely state of Hill Tripura, and the existing chief commissionership of Assam. By the government's published figures it covered 106,540 square miles with 31 million people — 18 million Muslims and 12 million Hindus, a Muslim-majority province. Dhaka became its capital, with Chittagong as a subsidiary headquarters and the port of the enlarged Assam. It received a lieutenant-governor, a legislative council and a board of revenue, though the Calcutta High Court's jurisdiction over it was left undisturbed.

The retained province of Bengal, still governed from Calcutta, kept western Bengal together with Bihar and Orissa: 141,580 square miles and, by the same published figures, 54 million people — 42 million Hindus and 9 million Muslims. One consequence drew furious comment at the time: joined to Bihar and Orissa, Bengali speakers in "Bengal" itself numbered only about 17 million against some 37 million Hindi and Oriya speakers, so the Bengalis became a minority in the province that bore their name. The new province's first lieutenant-governor was Sir Joseph Bampfylde Fuller, an energetic administrator whose perceived partiality towards Muslims made him a target of the anti-partition movement; after a disagreement with the Government of India he resigned in August 1906, an outcome the movement counted as an early victory.

Protest and the Swadeshi movement

Opposition had begun the moment the proposals appeared at the end of 1903, and it was broader than sentiment. Calcutta's lawyers feared a rival court of appeal at Dhaka; its newspapers feared losing their eastern circulation; its merchants feared trade drifting to Chittagong; zamindars holding estates on both sides of the new line faced the expense of two establishments. Above these interests stood the educated Bengali Hindu middle class — the bhadralok — who dominated the professions and the Indian National Congress, and who read the partition as a deliberate vivisection of the Bengali-speaking nation and a blow at nationalism itself.

When petitions failed, the protest changed weapons. On 13 July 1905 Krishna Kumar Mitra's journal Sanjivani called for a boycott of British goods; on 7 August 1905 a great meeting in Calcutta resolved to abstain from buying British products until the partition was withdrawn. Boycott was paired with its positive twin, swadeshi — the use and manufacture of Indian goods. The movement, led in its early phase by figures such as Surendranath Banerjea, spread far beyond Bengal to Punjab, Bombay, Poona and Madras. It stimulated Indian enterprise, from cotton mills to match, soap and glass works; it raised a demand for "national" education outside government control; and it drew in students in their thousands, provoking the government's Carlyle Circular, which threatened to punish institutions whose students joined the agitation — a measure that produced Bengal's first organised student movement in reply. "Bande Mataram" became the movement's anthem, and at the Congress's Calcutta session of 1906, Dadabhai Naoroji's presidential address proclaimed swaraj, self-government, as the Congress goal.

A day of mourning: arandhan and rakhi bandhan

The day the partition took effect, 16 October 1905, was turned by its opponents into a demonstration of unity. Across Bengal it was observed as a day of mourning: in countless homes no cooking fires were lit, an observance known as arandhan. The date coincided with the festival of Raksha Bandhan, and Rabindranath Tagore seized on it: at his call, Hindus and Muslims tied rakhis — the thread of protection a sister ties on a brother's wrist — on one another in the streets of Calcutta, Dhaka and other towns, as a sign that Bengal's fraternity could not be cut by a government line. Tagore himself led a procession after a ritual bath in the Ganges, and his song "Banglar Mati Banglar Jol", written for the occasion, was sung along the way; in the same charged period he composed "Amar Sonar Bangla". That afternoon the foundation stone of Federation Hall was laid in Calcutta, a building intended to stand as a monument to the unity of the two Bengals.

Muslim responses and the founding of the Muslim League

Muslim opinion was not monolithic, and it moved. When the scheme was first published in 1903, leading Muslim voices — the Moslem Chronicle, the Central National Muhamedan Association, and at first Nawab Salimullah of Dhaka himself — condemned it, fearing east Bengal's Muslims would be subordinated under Assam's chief commissioner and that Bengali solidarity would suffer. Once the enlarged scheme promised a self-contained province with a Muslim majority and its own capital at Dhaka, most educated Muslims swung behind it as an unprecedented opportunity. On 16 October 1905 the Mohammedan Provincial Union was founded to bring Muslim organisations together, with Salimullah as its patron. A minority of liberal Muslims — among them Salimullah's step-brother Khwaja Atiqullah, Abdur Rasul and Abdul Halim Ghaznavi — held to the anti-partition cause alongside Congress.

The communal temperature rose in the new province, where agrarian tension between largely Hindu landlords and largely Muslim tenants acquired a communal colour; riots broke out at Comilla in March 1907 and at Jamalpur the following month. It was in this setting that, on 30 December 1906, delegates at the annual session of the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference in Dhaka founded the All-India Muslim League, on the proposal of Nawab Salimullah, with the Aga Khan III as its first permanent president. Banglapedia judges that the partition — and the fear that agitation might undo it — was perhaps the most important factor hastening the League's birth; among its first resolutions was one declaring the partition beneficial to the Muslims of Eastern Bengal and condemning the boycott. Three years later the Morley–Minto Reforms of 1909 gave Muslims separate electorates, institutionalising the communal framing of politics that the partition years had sharpened.

The revolutionary turn

Where constitutional protest seemed to fail, some of Bengal's youth turned to conspiracy. The Anushilan Samiti, a network grown out of physical-culture societies and gymnasia in Calcutta since 1902, expanded rapidly in the atmosphere of the agitation. In 1906 Pulin Behari Das organised its eastern arm, the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti, which — by the estimates of the government's own intelligence — built more than 500 branches across Eastern Bengal and Assam and enrolled between 15,000 and 20,000 members, training them in lathis, daggers and firearms. The revolutionary newspaper Jugantar began publication in 1906. Between 1908 and 1910 Bengal's revolutionary violence reached its peak, with assassinations and attempts on officials including Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Fraser, answered by preventive detention and severe repression. The Congress itself split over these methods at Surat in 1907, between the moderates around Gokhale and Banerjea and the extremist wing of Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh.

Annulment and reunification, 1911–1912

Six years of agitation, boycott and violence persuaded the Government of India that the partition had become untenable. In a secret despatch of 25 August 1911, Viceroy Lord Hardinge's government recommended that it be revoked. The announcement was made with deliberate theatre: on 12 December 1911, at the Coronation Durbar in Delhi, King-Emperor George V declared in person that the partition of Bengal was annulled — and, in the same announcement, that the capital of India would move from Calcutta to Delhi.

The settlement took effect on 1 April 1912. The five Bengali-speaking divisions — Presidency, Burdwan, Dhaka, Rajshahi and Chittagong — were reunited in a single Bengal Presidency under a governor-in-council, of roughly 70,000 square miles and 42 million people, with Lord Carmichael as its first governor. Bihar, Chhota Nagpur and Orissa were hived off into a separate province of their own, and Assam reverted to the rule of a chief commissioner. Bengal was whole again — but the eastern province, and Dhaka's six years as a capital, were gone.

What Dhaka received instead

For the Muslims of eastern Bengal, who had built their hopes on the annulled province, reunification was received as a grievous wrong. The government moved quickly to soften it. On 31 January 1912 a deputation of Muslim leaders — Nawab Salimullah, Nawab Syed Nawab Ali Chowdhury and A. K. Fazlul Huq among them — met Hardinge in Dhaka and pressed the demand for a university in the city as compensation for the annulment. Hardinge promised to recommend it, and an official communiqué confirming the promise followed on 2 February 1912. The Nathan Committee was appointed that May to work out the scheme; after the further scrutiny of the Calcutta University Commission, the Dacca University Act was passed in 1920, and the University of Dhaka opened its doors on 1 July 1921. Its chancellor, Lord Lytton, would describe it a few years later as "a splendid imperial compensation" — an institution that became one of the partition episode's most durable legacies.

Legacy

The partition itself survived barely six years, but its consequences were permanent. The anti-partition agitation was modern India's first mass movement: it carried politics beyond petitioning elites to students, towns and villages, and its twin weapons of boycott and swadeshi entered the Congress repertoire, to be taken up again on a far larger scale by Gandhi's Non-Cooperation movement. The movement also demonstrated — against the official doctrine that a British decision once announced was a "settled fact" — that organised agitation could force the Raj to reverse itself. Against this stands the episode's darker inheritance. By organising eastern Bengal's Muslims as a separate political constituency, crowned by the Muslim League's founding in Dhaka and the separate electorates of 1909, the partition years accelerated a communal reordering of Bengal's politics whose logic historians trace forward to 1947. The boundary Curzon drew in 1905 did not survive; the idea that Bengal could be divided along communal lines did.