In actuality, social location in the industrialized world is more truly bounded by group factors-race, gender, class at birth, and so on-but that observation is obscured by myths of individualism.
Some Bangladeshis oppose conversion theories, arguing instead for the more prestigious notion of immigration. Tamizuddin Khan, a founding father of Pakistan, wrote in his memoirs: “But immediate conversion does not seem to be a full explanation for the preponderance of Muslims in Bengal, where the caste system was far less rigorous than in South India, which saw no large scale conversions. There is reason to believe that in Bengal an additional cause for such a large concentration of Muslims was the fact that millions of Muslim[s of the] disintegrated Moghul Empire and of the innumerable provincial satraps and chieftains settled in the fertile soil of Bengal and most of them took to the cultivation of the land” {The Test of Time[1989], p. 51).
For the East Bengalis, Pakistan was both a triumph and a tragedy. Bengal was one of two states cut in half by Partition, the west going to India, the east to Pakistan. Many miles of India separated East from West Pakistan, and no sooner were the flags raised than the troubles began. Bengalis were dominated and economically exploited by West Pakistan, where political power was concentrated. Finally, in 1971 the Bengalis revolted, aided by India, and succeeded in establishing the new state of Bangladesh.
According to government figures, Faridpur's population approximately doubled between 1931 and 1988 (Government of Bengal, Bengal District Gazetteer, B. Volume, Faridpur District, Statistics, 1921–1922 to 1930–1931 [1933] and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Upazila Statistics of Bangladesh [1988]). It is somewhat problematic to compare figures, because districts were reorganized in the mid-1980s. The 1988 figures for Faridpur district are actually the sum of five districts which more or less coincide with the localities comprising Faridpur district in 1931. In 1931, Rajoir thana, the police district in which Panipur lay, had a population of 102,000. Rajoir upazila in 1988 shows a population of 174,-000. A study in 1945–46 revealed that Faridpur had one of the highest population densities in Bengal, about 740 people per square mile (Partha Chatterjee, p. 163).
Soil erosion in the mountains north of Bangladesh, combined with river-course changes produced by hydroelectric projects in India, has vastly increased the amount of nonnutritive silt carried by floodwaters. These factors may also be stimulating more frequent and dire flooding. In 1987 and 1988 large parts of the country were under water, far in excess of the usual annual flooding. When I first visited Panipur in the winter of 1988, a few months after the floodwaters had receded, I hiked through ankle-deep sand-an entirely new phenomenon, according to local accounts. Floodwaters, which had always enriched agricultural land, were now instead smothering it in silt.
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