The first partition of Bengal in 1905 brought that province to the brink of open rebellion. The British recognized thatBengal, with some 85 million people, was much too large for a single province and determined that it merited reorganization and intelligent division. The line drawn byLord Curzon’s government, however, cut through the heart of the Bengali-speaking “nation,” leaving western Bengal’sbhadralok (“respectable people”), theintellectual Hindu leadership ofCalcutta, tied to the much less politically active Bihari- and Oriya-speaking Hindus to their north and south. A new Muslim-majority province of Eastern Bengal andAssam was created with its capital at Dacca (nowDhaka). The leadership of theCongress Party viewed that partition as an attempt to “divide and rule” and as proof of the government’svindictiveantipathy toward the outspokenbhadralokintellectuals, especially since Curzon and his subordinates had ignored countless pleas and petitions signed by tens of thousands of Calcutta’s leading citizens. Mother-goddess-worshippingBengaliHindus believed that partition was nothing less than the vivisection of their “mother province,” and mass protest rallies before and after Bengal’s division on October 16, 1905, attracted millions of people theretofore untouched by politics of any variety.

The new tide of nationalsentiment born in Bengal rose to inundate India in every direction, and “Vande Mataram” (“Hail to Thee Mother”) became the Congress’snational anthem, its words taken fromAnandamath, a popular Bengali novel byBankim Chandra Chatterjee, and its music composed by Bengal’s greatest poet,Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). As a reaction against the partition, Bengali Hindus launched an effectiveboycott of British-made goods and dramatized their resolve to live without foreign cloth by igniting huge bonfires of Lancashire-made textiles. Such bonfires, re-creating ancient Vedic sacrificial altars, aroused Hindus inPoona,Madras, andBombay to light similar political pyres of protest. Instead of wearing foreign-made cloth, Indians vowed to use only domestic (swadeshi) cottons and other clothing made in India. Simple hand-spun and hand-woven saris became high fashion, first in Calcutta and elsewhere in Bengal and then all across India, and displaced the finest Lancashire garments, which were now viewed as hateful imports. Theswadeshi movement soon stimulatedindigenous enterprise in many fields, from Indian cotton mills to match factories, glassblowing shops, and iron and steel foundries.

Increased demands for national education also swiftly followed partition. Bengali students and professors extended their boycott of British goods to English schools and college classrooms, and politically active Indians began to emulate the so-called “Indian Jesuits”—Vishnu Krishna Chiplunkar (1850–82),Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (1856–95), Tilak, and Gokhale—who were pioneers in the founding of indigenous educational institutions in theDeccan in the 1880s. The movement for national education spread throughout Bengal, as well as toVaranasi (Banaras), wherePandit Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946) founded his privateBanaras Hindu University in 1910.

One of the last major demands to be added to the platform of the Congress Party in the wake of Bengal’s first partition wasswaraj (self-rule), soon to become the most popularmantra of Indiannationalism. Swaraj was firstarticulated, in the presidential address ofDadabhai Naoroji, as the Congress’s goal at its Calcutta session in 1906.

Nationalism in theMuslim community

While the Congress Party was calling for swaraj in Calcutta, theMuslim League held its first meeting in Dacca. Though the Muslim minority portion of India’s population lagged behind the Hindu majority in uniting toarticulate nationalist political demands,Islam had, since the founding of theDelhi sultanate in 1206, provided Indian Muslims with sufficient doctrinal mortar to unite them as a separate religiouscommunity. The era of effectiveMughal rule (c. 1556–1707), moreover, gave India’s Muslims a sense of martial and administrative superiority to, as well as a sense of separation from, the Hindu majority.

In 1857 the last of the Mughal emperors had served as a rallying symbol for many mutineers, and in the wake of the mutiny most Britons placed the burden of blame for its inception on the Muslim community.Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98), India’s greatest 19th-century Muslim leader, succeeded, in hisCauses of the Indian Revolt (1873), in convincing many British officials that Hindus were primarily to blame for the mutiny. Sayyid had entered the company’s service in 1838 and was the leader of Muslim India’s emulative mainstream of political reform. He visited Oxford in 1874 and returned to found the Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College (nowAligarh Muslim University) atAligarh in 1875. It was India’s first center of Islamic and Westernhigher education, with instruction given in English and modeled on Oxford. Aligarh became the intellectual cradle of the Muslim League andPakistan.

Sayyid Mahdi Ali (1837–1907), popularly known by his titleMohsin al-Mulk, had succeeded Sayyid Ahmad as leader andconvened a deputation of some 36 Muslim leaders, headed by theAga Khan III, that in 1906 called on LordMinto (viceroy from 1905–10) to articulate the special national interests of India’s Muslim community. Minto promised that any reforms enacted by his government would safeguard the separate interests of the Muslim community. Separate Muslim electorates, formally inaugurated by theIndian Councils Act of 1909, were thus vouchsafed by viceregal fiat in 1906. Encouraged by theconcession, theAga Khan’s deputation issued an expanded call during the first meeting of the Muslim League (convened in December 1906 at Dacca) “to protect and advance the political rights and interests of Mussalmans of India.” Other resolutions moved at its first meeting expressed Muslim “loyalty to the British government,” support for the Bengal partition, and condemnation of the boycott movement.