THE HISTORY MAN: Time travel —Ihsan Aslam

Following on from the partition of Bengal in 1905 two critical events took place in 1906. A large delegation of Muslim leaders — the Simla Deputation — had a meeting with Lord Minto in October. They got what they had demanded: separate electorates to safeguard their interests. And, secondly, the All-India Muslim League was founded in Dacca on December 30

You know you’re becoming history when trips to the hospital begin in earnest. Old age doesn’t forgive anyone. The machinery sooner or later gets an “Out of Order” label stuck on it. It is then difficult to maintain that “everything is fine, really”. There is no way out but to visit the body repair yard, the doctor’s surgery or the hospital.

The happy hospital chap operating the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan wasn’t sure how to describe the experience of being bombarded with magnetic and radio waves other than to say, “It’s noisy”. I was injected with a dye — thankfully, I haven’t turned bright green or been sucked into the space-age machine or — as it seemed to me then — time machine.

Subjected to radio waves up to 30,000 times greater than the earth’s magnetic field, I was soon adrift in white space as the machine took images of my head. Lying isolated inside the machine I remembered this was the week when Pakistan Day, March 23, is commemorated. I imagined I drifted over Lahore and landed near Minar-i-Pakistan. The year was 1940. I could see a huge crowd all around me and I could hear Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah explaining the Muslim demand for independence.

I soon drifted up into space, however. I remembered, too, an old Cambridge colleague, who had phoned a couple of days earlier to remind me of another anniversary. “Do you realise,” he had said, “this year is the centenary of the partition of Bengal?” To be frank, I hadn’t! Well, undergoing the MRI scan now, I was transported to Dacca (Dhaka) and back to 1906. The city looked in awful shape, the people backward.

The partition of the Bengal — the precursor to The Partition of 1947 — had become effective the year before. Viceroy Lord Curzon was behind the move to re-organise the large and unwieldy Bengal presidency. The creation, in October 16,1905, of the Muslim-majority province of Eastern Bengal and Assam had certainly helped the Muslims and aided their journey to independence.

However, there was immense Hindu agitation against the partition. The Hindu reaction was as anti-British as it was anti-Muslim. Historian Khalid B Sayeed has noted that Hindu revivalist movements such as the Swadeshi movement, “took a clear anti-Muslim turn and was run and organised on Hindu lines… It was well-known that partition would benefit Muslims of East Bengal”.

I had travelled back to October 24, 1906 to witness a huge, pro-partition Muslim rally in Dacca. The crowd welcomed the partition and resented the Hindu agitation. A resolution was passed at the meeting that as a result of the division of the Bengal Muslims “would be spared many oppressions which they had hitherto had to endure from the Hindus”.

Commenting on the Hindu reaction against the partition, IH Qureshi, the renowned historian, has written, “The net result was that the Hindu agitation definitely estranged the Muslims from the Congress” and convinced them “of the futility of expecting justice and fairplay from the Hindu majority”. This was a crucial development in the struggle for Pakistan.

Following on from the partition of Bengal in 1905 (it was annulled in 1911), two critical events took place in 1906. A large delegation of Muslim leaders — the Simla Deputation — had a meeting with Lord Minto at the Viceroy’s house in Simla in October. They got what they had demanded: separate electorates to safeguard their interests. And, secondly, the All-India Muslim League was founded in Dacca on December 30.

However, the present beckoned as I landed back with a thud. Time travel: that’s how I’d describe the experience of undergoing an MRI scan.

Ihsan Aslam is exploring public history at Ruskin College, Oxford. He can be contacted at: timeshistoryman@yahoo.co.uk or visited at: http://www.pakistanhistory.com