Josh Loeb

Bengali Politics in Britain: Logic, Dynamics and Disharmony by Faruque Ahmed

BANGLADESH has had a complicated past. It was India, then East Pakistan, then Bangladesh. But it is also East Bengal, as opposed to West Bengal, which is in India.

How much more complicated when you add Britishness to the mix? Bengali Politics in Britain, by journalist and Highgate curry house manager Faruque Ahmed, does not bother itself with such questions. Instead, it provides a comprehen­sive run-through of Bengali political activity in Britain from Victorian times until the early 1990s.

And Ahmed shows that, while there is a symmetry in the image of immigrants from the East ending up in the East End, the areas close to London’s docks were not necessarily the most important in the annals of Anglo-Asian life.

Euston Road, Red Lion Square and Highgate is where Asians massed during the campaign for home rule for India, the trauma of Partition and finally east Pakistan’s secession to become Bangladesh.

“All the various independence move­ments began here,” he explains en route from his Archway Road curry house [Bengal Berties in Archway Road] to a former training centre of the Bangladesh independence movement – East Pakistan House, in Highbury Hill.

“The first Asian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, was elected as the Liberal MP for Finsbury Central in 1892. The Indian Home Rule Society began life in a house in Queens Wood in Highgate.”

In his book, Ahmed quotes Bengali nationalist Zakaria Khan Chowdhury’s account of how East Pakistan House came to be established as a “recruitment centre” in the lead up to the Bangladesh war of independence.

Chowdhury wrote: “We believed we had to win the war of independence through guerrilla warfare.

“At that time reading Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara was compulsory for us. We also contacted some countries to train us in guerrilla warfare.”

Next on our tour are Conway Hall and Camden Town Hall, where hundreds gathered to hear denunciations of the autocratic rule of Pakistan’s military dictator, Ayub Khan, in the early 1960s.

The tour rounds off at 65 Cromwell Avenue, in Highgate, where Indian revolutionary Shyamaji Krishna Verma established India House, a boarding house and training centre for those opposed to colonialism.

Bangladesh being largely a Muslim country, it is hard not to see some of what Ahmed writes through the prism of recent events, and it is a shame his book does not cover in depth the Anglo-Bengali reaction to the Iraq War or to Islamic terrorism in Britain. But perhaps Ahmed’s omissions themselves reveal something about the state of Bengali-British politics. From the campaign for home rule until the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War, Bengalis’ political experiences in this country almost always involved campaigns that were specifically Asian or Bengali in appeal.

These days someone of Bengali parentage campaigning for, say, the Green Party, will probably not be seen first and foremost as a Bengali politician.

Likewise, bombings on the Underground may not be seen as a Bengali issue but as an international issue, or an issue for Muslims in general. As it happens, Bangladesh has its own problems with Islamic terrorism. This, says Ahmed, is the country’s “biggest problem”.