Hinduism in West Bengal and Bangladesh

West Bengal, a Hindu-majority province in contemporary India, and Bangladesh (East Pakistan before 1971), its neighboring Muslim-majority sovereign state with a significant Hindu minority, are political entities created in the 20th century. Bengal’s 19th-century history, in the high noon of British imperialism, is a well-known era in the study of modern Hinduism for the great reformist and revivalist movements in its colonial society (see the Oxford Bibliographies in Hinduism articles “Reform Hinduism”; “Asiatic Society of Bengal”; “British Colonialism and Imperialism”). Over the 20th century, in contrast, the inhabitants of Bengal witnessed partitions along lines of religious and linguistic difference, lived under four postcolonial states (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma), and endured widespread displacement across national borders. The map of Bengal underwent sudden and dramatic changes between 1905 to 1971: “West Bengal” and “eastern Bengal and Assam” (1905); “Bengal,” “Bihar and Orissa,” “Assam” (1911); “West Bengal” and “Assam” (independent India) and “East Pakistan” (1947); and, finally, “Bangladesh” (1971). Note that the name “Bengal,” unlike the other partitioned provinces of Punjab and Sind, disappeared from the map altogether after 1947. The new context of late colonialism, Partition, and the rise of nation-states, therefore, has shaped a distinct trajectory of Hinduism in West Bengal and Bangladesh. The legacy of Partition has also, at the same time, tended to isolate “Hindu” West Bengal, in popular and scholarly conceptions, from “Muslim” Pakistan and Bangladesh, not only coloring the long exchange between Hindus and Muslims in the region, before and after 1947, but also tending to deny the specific practices and worldviews that set the region apart from other parts of South Asia. This bibliography lists scholarly works on Hindu practices, formations, and identities in West Bengal and Bangladesh, in relation to the context of Partition, postcolonial state-making, and human mobility in the region. It focuses on approaches that have reimagined the changing “space” of 20th-century Bengal, and its religious life, beyond national and communitarian borders through creative analyses of social and cultural relations.