The Hindu idea of Hindu, Hinduism and Hindutva, inspired by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s race-defining Ananda Math (1882), started taking shape in the last quarter of the 19th century. It was around this time that Chatterjee’s close associate and scholar par excellence Chandranath Basu (1844-1910) coined the term Hindutva in his work Hindutva: Hindu’r Prakrita Itihas, (The Natural History of the Hindus) propounding the Advait Vedant school of thought that projected humanity itself as divinity abiding in the ideals of absolute harmony, magnanimity, honesty and unity, without accommodation for Christian and Islamic worldview on Hindu nationhood.
Such eloquence of thought came in the wake of a 100 years of colonial British enterprise transplanted on the previous 800 years of Islamic colonisation of Bengal, and the rest of India.
The years leading to the 1857 Mutiny and those following, saw Bengal emerging as the first and fastest "breeding ground" of Islamic fanaticism, triggered by Titu Mir's Wahabi-Fairazi movement and Tariqa-e-Mohammadiya of the 1830s.
The Renaissance of Hindu civilization in Bengal articulated and given shape by Bankim Chandra, Chandranath, Sri Ramkrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sri Aurobindo provoked the first partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon, instigated by Nawab Salimullah of Dhaka. The first anti-Hindu riots in Bengal followed through the years 1905-11.
Eventually, the 1911 revocation of Curzon's communal Division of Bengal, and the cessation of the Khilafat Movement in 1919 at the end of the First World War, led to the Calcutta Riots of 1926.
These anti-Hindu campaigns emboldened, spawned and sustained the Muslim demand for the Partition of India based on community-determined demographic profiling of British Indian states and regions. The Great Calcutta Slaughter and the Noakhali Genocide of 1946 pushed home that agenda, and drove the last nail on the coffin of Partition, instigated by the likes of Sir Abdur Rahim, AK Fazlul Haq, Nazimuddin and Huseyn Suhrawardy.
The Creation of Pakistan in 1947 and the doctrine of ethnic cleansing practised by the newly-created Islamic State found articulation in the East Pakistan riots of 1950 and 1964, forcing large scale relocation of Hindu, Buddhist and Christian populations to Indian states bordering East Pakistan, primarily West Bengal, Assam and Tripura.
Subsequently, the Liberation of Bangladesh by the Indian Army in 1971 resulted in a momentary pause in anti-Hindu hostility, amidst the jubilation of new-found freedom of Bangladeshi muslims from Pakistan's state-directed colonial exploitation of its more populous and prosperous eastern half.
Unfortunately, that 'peace' was short-lived, with the anti-Hindu pogrom revisiting Bangladesh of 1990, to refashion the sustained victimization and oppression of Hindus, only to be outclassed by a fresh spate of killings between 2024 and 2026.
Md. Yunus the stop-gap administrator of Bangladesh attempted to repurpose the Islamic jihadi doctrine and create a conceptually larger Bangladesh to overwhelm the Hindu population of the "Two Bengals" already outnumbered 3:1 by muslims in a global headcount of Bengalis.
In the three-and-half decades of calibrated neo-Wahabi intervention starting in the 1990s, millions of Bangladeshi and Rohingya Muslims were also infiltrated into West Bengal, aggravating the demographic imbalance against the state's majority Hindu population.
Sadly, much of this population 'rebalancing' from across the border was facilitated with the active connivance of Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress Party, proactively playing the "vote-bank" card.
Liberal Indian muslims, particularly those indigenous to West Bengal, must study this historical chronology to understand the widening Hindu-Muslim chasm in Bengali civil society. This social narrative, unique to Bengal, provides the context and backstory of Monday's electoral verdict that secured 207 seats for the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bengal, the biggest-ever mandate in the state's electoral politics.
Facing Islamic mindlessness and abomination through the last several centuries, Bengal's Hindus have dramatically articulated one of the world's most profound cultural and civilisational narratives over the last 200 years, chiselled, sculpted and crafted by a league of highly enlightened minds drawing inspiration and sustenance from India's oldest spiritual scriptures.
Hinduism and Hindutva have remained the solid bedrock under the soft clay of the Bengal delta on which the most obnoxious and subversive weed of Jihadi-Wahabi pogrom was planted and proliferated for a thousand years.
Bengal's Hindutva liberated India, first in 1947, and now, a second time over, 80 years since Independence. In doing so, Bengalis have redeemed India's ancient civilisational inheritance.
© Shubhrangshu Roy
4-6 May, 2026
Excerpts from soon to be launched pixel: Decoding Hinduism: The Metamorphosis of The Metaphysical into The Monolith.
Facts relating to the Islamic communalism of Post-Colonial Bengal sourced from Bangladeshi historian Ghulam Murshid's Bengali Culture Over a Thousand Years.
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