The passenger train service between Kolkata and Dhaka, which had ceased with the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, resumed yesterday. There have been buses for a number of years, but the restoration of an ordinary rail link was significant. There were more passengers in the train travelling from Dhaka to Kolkata than in the one travelling simultaneously in the opposite direction.
The whole of the western and northern border of Bangladesh is a border with West Bengal. Bengal was partitioned in 1947 along religious lines, though, as in the west, there were vast refugee movements in both directions. But Bengali is spoken on both sides, and by 230 million people. (Dhaka was written Dacca until 1982. Kolkata was written Calcutta until 2001, but many, including, strangely enough, the BBC, use the old spelling.)
Under the British, the province had played a large part in the Indian independence movement, but there were also advocates of Bengali independence, and Muslim separatists. There was and is a strong communist tradition. Behind all this was a cultural revival and modernising movement, mainly Hindu, known as the Bengal Renaissance, which had begun early in the nineteenth century and lasted into the second half of the twentieth. Lord Curzon had presided, as Viceroy (1899-1905), over an earlier partition, on lines somewhat different from the ’47 lines, which lasted from 1905 until 1911 and was partly a concession to the Muslims and partly an attempt to break the spirit of nationalism in Bengal.
