Bengali people

The term “Bengali” was used to describe the people of Bengal for several centuries before it became a political description in the 19th century when the British began using it to identify the Bangla people. Because of the close association with India, it was believed that the Bengali people were primarily Hindu. However, 1872 census figures reveal that almost half of the population was Muslim. Subsequently, the British began referring to Hindus as Bengali and identified the Islamic population as Muhammadans or Musulmans. Over time, a new Bengali identity emerged along ethnolinguistic lines, and by the twenty-first century, the People’s Republic of Bangladesh and West Bengal in India comprised the land historically known as Bengal. The Bengali identity is heavily associated with speaking the common language of Bangla, and nearly 100 percent of the population of Bangladesh is Bengali and comprises approximately two-thirds of the total Bengali world population of 250 million. More than 80 million residents of India also speak Bangla.

Background

In the tenth century, Arab and Persian travelers arrived in the area that became Bangladesh and converted many of the residents to Islam, but the Bengali people did not begin to develop a cohesive cultural identity until the fifteenth century. The British arrived in 1757, and Bengal became part of British India in the 19th century. During that time, the Bengal Renaissance emerged, creating major changes in science, literature, politics, and society. Among the Bengali people, distinctions arose according to religion, caste (social status), tribe, and region. In the west, most Bengals were Muslim, but those in the east aligned themselves with the Hindus of India.

Bengal was partitioned twice in the twentieth century. The first occurred in 1905 when the British sought to weaken a nationalist movement led by Bengali Hindus. In 1947, British India was divided into Pakistan, which was heavily Muslim, and India, which remained primarily Hindu. That partition also separated Pakistan into eastern and western regions. On February 21, 1952, civil unrest broke out in Pakistan in response to Urdu being declared the national language. Over the next two decades, Bengalis continued to be marginalized. Supported by India, a separatist movement led by the Awami League emerged, which resulted in a 1971 war that claimed the lives of 300,000 civilians and led to East Pakistan becoming the independent nation of Bangladesh. Scores of Hindu Bengalis fled to India and settled in West Bengal among other Bengali Hindus.

In the spring of 2004, a new debate over Bengali national identity arose in response to a survey conducted by the Bengali Language Service of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in an attempt to discover the greatest Bengali of all time. Traditionally, scholars have accepted the influences of states, regions, cities, homelands, and borders on the development of national identities, but newer studies have begun to consider this development in light of globalization. While some survey respondents insisted that residents of West Bengal were Indian rather than Bengali, others insisted that a common language, culture, and appearance united all residents of Bangladesh and West Bengal under a single Bengali identity.

Overview

The Bengali people are found throughout the world though they primarily reside in Bangladesh and India. Three million Bengalis live in Saudi Arabia. Other Bengalis live in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. According to 2021 Census data, just over 650,000 Begalis dwell in the United Kingdom, with nearly half of them living in London. In London, the area known as Brick Lane offers Bengali music, food, shops, and theaters.

On April 15, the Bengali New Year’s Day, the BBC Bangla Service announced the Greatest Bengali of All Time, leader of the Bangladeshi move for independence Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The second greatest Bengali was Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and authored the national anthems of both Bangladesh and India. Kazi Nazrul Islam, a poet who protested colonialism and the repression of the Bengali people, placed third.

In the United States, the Bengali began arriving in the late 19th century from both India and Pakistan. Most of those early residents settled in California, where they helped build railroads and settle the area. In the early twentieth century, most Bengali immigrants were students, and many chose to remain in the United States. A new wave of Bengali immigrants arrived during the postwar economic boom of the 1940s, settling in New York and New Jersey. The majority of the Bengalis who arrived during this period were Muslim merchants seeking economic opportunities. Most had worked their way to the United States on British ships. Because of segregation, Bengali immigrants married African American and Puerto Rican women and merged into those communities.

In 1965, passage of a new immigration act opened the door for a new wave of immigrants. With increased numbers of Asian immigrants and the tendency to form their own communities, the ties among Bengalis and the African American and Puerto Rican communities declined. The 1971 war for Bengali independence drove an additional wave of Bengalis to America. This group was composed mainly of professionals and others seeking economic opportunities. Most of them settled in New York City, and by 1998, approximately 100,000 Bengalis were living there. After 1980, many Bengali immigrants moved southward to Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

Between 2000 and 2010, census reports indicate that the number of Bengali Americans doubled, reaching 147,300. The number of Bengali immigrants coming to America declined after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, because of restrictions on immigrants from Islamic countries. Nevertheless, in 2019 the Bengali American population was reported at 208,000.

The contemporary Bengali identity is focused on the core elements of the Bangladeshi constitution: nationalism, secularism, socialism, and democracy. Almost 90 percent of the population is Muslim. After decades of instability and continuous charges of government corruption, Bangladesh restored democratic rule in 2008. The result has been greater political stability, economic growth, and food security for the Bengali people within their native land. Despite this, in 2013 Bangladesh had a per-capita income of $2,100, with 47 percent of the workforce engaged in agriculture at the subsistence level. Almost one in three Bangladeshis lived in poverty at that time. By 2023, the amount had increased slightly to $2,860.

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