Bangladeshi Culture Prior to the year 1947, the region that now makes up the People’s Republic of Bangladesh came under the eastern portion of Bengal – one of the provinces of British India. Owing to its river boundaries and fringe location, this region was largely culturally and politically set apart from the remaining parts of India across numerous eras of the nation’s history. With the dawn of Islamic rule in the subcontinent during the 12th century, under the Turco-Afghans, a large Muslim pocket was created in the Bengal region. In the year 1576, Bengal became a part of the vast and famous Mughal Empire. Only in the year 1757 was it integrated into British India (Cheema, 2013).

The Muslims of British India remained politically and economically backward. But Bengal’s Muslim population comprised a small community of aristocrats; a huge cluster of uneducated, poverty-ridden peasants; and a small though steadily increasing English-speaking bourgeois population. Bengal’s Muslim upper-class contributed significantly to the nationwide freedom struggle alongside fellow Muslim brethren, particularly after the Muslim League was created. In the 1930s-40s, they advocated a nationwide Islamic separatist movement. The Muslims of Bengal wholeheartedly supported the Muslim League’s adoption of the 1940 Lahore Resolution which demanded the...

While the province was a mere 1/6th of West Pakistan’s size, it comprised of more than half the Pakistani nation's population. Further, it was linguistically and culturally more homogeneous in comparison to West Pakistan (Cheema, 2013).
The start of the Bangladeshi independence drive goes back to 1947, after Pakistan was created and the Muslim League acquired provincial and central power. East Pakistan’s Awami League (the Muslim League’s East Pakistan arm) failed to acquire the membership of a number of key Bengal Muslim leaders including H.S. Suhrawardy, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, and A.K. Fazlul Haq. Moreover, it focused on ensuring Bengalis’ cultural and political rights were realized (Guhathakurta & Schendel, 2013). However, in contrast to this division’s efforts, the central Pakistani Muslim League concentrated on reducing the Bengali majority margin in the government, suggesting equal governmental representation for every regional unit. Additionally, it aimed at imposing Urdu- a language spoken by not even 8% of the entire East Pakistani population. Awami League,…