This narrative swirls between the mainstream historiography of the 1947 Bengal Partition and the reminiscences of the grassroots Hindu-Muslim encounters on the eve of that epoch-making split. The middle of the 1940s, as I recall, epitomized the jaded sunset of the one-time Majestic British Raj in India. Growing out of the British Indian subject status, in those days, was like staring out of a “fracturing chrysalis!”

In their daze of identity muddle, people often, in my localities, distinguished themselves only as Muslims, Hindus, or Christians, not as the British Indians or Bengalis, Indians, or Pakistanis! The meandering memories of the yore and the living experiences of the time are still the Bangladeshi political and social inheritances. They are germane to resolving the existing political and intellectual deadlock in contemporary Bangladesh and look at the future with a smidgeon of hope, wisdom, and compassion.

Growing up in a vicinity, barely twenty-four miles outside Dhaka, I remember that now and then communal rioting broke out in the city that catapulted Hindu-Muslim tension to our nearby villages. Behind such eruptions, rumors played crucial roles—they drifted from both ends of the communal aisles. Gossips about cow-bones thrown at the Hindu temples or a slaughtered pig tossed at the Muslim household or in the mosque premises could easily spark a riot in Dhaka.

My father recalled the murder news of Nazir Ahmed, a Dhaka University student brutally stabbed to death in 1942— my school observed his death anniversary even in the late 1940s. At such junctures, emotional rhetoric overshadowed facts. Available memoirs and autobiographies and specks of my recollections validate that in Dhaka, the Hindus and Muslims did not readily live in the same neighborhoods. My village had only a couple of (Hindu) barber families. I noticed that the Hindu bhadralok concentrated in a segment of the town called Munsefpur—the social interactions between the Hindu and Muslim communities did not usually include inter-dining, marriages or entering each other’s residential quarters.

In fact, that posh residential wedge had an unwritten charter— “only the caste Hindus are welcome”! I socialized with the Hindu classmates from the local bhadralok families, but mostly we assembled in their out-house facilities. The ritual of touching and not........

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