Part ofa series on the |
|---|
| Independence of Bangladesh |
 |
| Events |
| Organisations |
| Key persons |
| Related |
 Bangladesh portal |
TheEast Pakistan Renaissance Society was a political organisation formed to articulate and promote culturally and intellectually the idea for aseparate Muslim state forIndian Muslims and specifically for the Muslims ofBengal.[1] The organisation's founders and leaders includedAbul Kalam Shamsuddin, the society president,Habibullah Bahar Chowdhury andMujibur Rahman Khan.[1][2][3][4]
The "Two-Nation Theory", which argued that theHindus andMuslims of India were not a common nation and could not live together as a nation, had been propagated by Muslim politicians and intellectuals such asSir Muhammad Iqbal,Choudhary Rahmat Ali andMuhammad Ali Jinnah, the president of theAll India Muslim League.[5][6] The demand for a separate state for Indian Muslims took definite shape when the All India Muslim League adopted theLahore Resolution (also known as the Pakistan Resolution) on 23 March 1940. The resolution called for the Muslim-majority provinces ofBritish India to be constituted as separate, independent states – it did not specify a single state.[1]
At a meeting held on 30 August 1942, at the offices ofthe Azad newspaper inKolkata, Bengali Muslim activists decided to form the East Pakistan Renaissance Society as a platform to advocate the idea of a Muslim state on a cultural and intellectual basis. The society held regular weekly meetings where articles would be presented and different issues discussed. Despite the focus onIslam, the meetings were not restricted to Muslims.[4]Manabendranath Roy delivered a speech onPakistan and Democracy, which highlighted the inevitability of self-rule forIndian Muslims.[4] In September 1944, Mujibur Rahman Khan along with economist M Sadeq, published a booklet,Eastern Pakistan: Its Population, Delimitation and Economics which contained a description of the government, economy, population, geographic boundary and security of a future state ofEast Pakistan.[4]
The society held its first council at theIslamia College in Kolkata in July 1944. Among those present at the inaugural occasion wereKhwaja Nazimuddin,Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Hasan Suhrawardy,Nurul Amin,Mohammad Akram Khan,A K Fazlul Huq, Abul Quasem,Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan,Shahadat Hossain,Golam Mostofa,S Wajid Ali,Abu Jafar Shamsuddin, Abul Hussain, Golam Kuddus,Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Gopal Halder.[4]
The Muslim League and most other advocates of Pakistan had demanded a single state of Pakistan consisting of the British Indian provinces ofPunjab,Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (then Northwest Frontier Province),Sindh,Balochistan andBengal, and sought theUrdu language to be the only official language andlingua franca of Muslims.[1] However, the East Pakistan Renaissance Society not only argued that Muslims were a separate nation from Hindus, it also advocated that theBengali Muslims were distinct from the Muslims of other parts of India, on an ethnic, cultural and geographical basis.[1][3] Unlike religion, the society argued that ethnicity and cultural differences cannot cross geographic boundaries.[1][3] The society and its supporters in the Bengal Muslim League asserted that Bengali Muslims should constitute an independent state, as an "Eastern Pakistan" rather than part of a single state of Pakistan.[1][7] The society asserted the importance of the Bengali culture and language, which many advocates of Pakistan criticised as being "Hinduised" and "Sanskritised."[1][8]
The society dissolved after thepartition of India in 1947 which also partitioned Bengal to create the Muslim-majorityEast Bengal (also known as East Pakistan), which became part of Pakistan; Hindu-majorityWest Bengal andAssam became part of India. Several of the society's leaders were leading activists in theBengali language movement (1953–1956), which was a mass struggle in East Pakistan for the recognition of the Bengali language as the second official language of Pakistan, along with Urdu.[1][3]
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)| History |
| .jpg)   |
|---|---|---|
| Organisations | ||
| Leaders |
| |
| Activists |
| |
| Literature | ||
| Architecture | ||
| In Memory | ||
