1. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: FERMENT AND CHANGE
1. K. K. Datta, “Social Conditions in India in the Eighteenth Century,” in History and Culture of the Indian People, ed. R. C. Majumdar and V. G. Dighe (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1977), 8:749–755.
2. Tapan Raychaudhuri, “The Mid-Eighteenth-Century Background,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern India, vol. 2: Ca. 1757–ca. 1970, ed. Dharma Kumar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 8.
3. Jats, a rural group in the Punjab, were Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh, but here he refers to the Hindu Jats.
4. John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 78.
5. Rachel Fell McDermott, Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kālī and Umā in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 31.
6. Allison Busch, “Hidden in Plain View: Brajbhasha Poets at the Mughal Court,” Modern Asian Studies 44.2 (2010): 267–309.
7. Islamic law, or the Sharia, is based on the Quran and the Sunna, or usual practice, best exemplified by the life of the Prophet. The four schools of legal interpretation—Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii, and Hanbali—present different opinions on the practice of rituals, the degree to which certain laws should be considered obligations, and the methodology for interpreting the Sharia. All were founded by eminent Muslim scholars in the first four centuries of Islam, and all are considered equally valid by Sunni Muslims.
2. THE EARLY TO MID NINETEENTH CENTURY: DEBATES OVER REFORM AND CHALLENGE TO EMPIRE
1. Rammohun Roy The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, ed. Jogendra Chunder Ghose (New Delhi: Cosmo, 1982), 4:928–929.
2. Crossing the ocean, and hence leaving the holy land of India, was considered sufficient reason for loss of caste in Hindu Brahmanical society.
3. Kulin: an elite group found among certain Bengal Brahman and Kayastha subcastes, whose men were much sought after as husbands. Rammohan himself was a Kulin Brahman.
4. Brian Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1996), 105.
5. William W. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (London: Trubner, 1871), 9.
3. THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY: LEADERS OF REFORM AND REVIVAL
1. The temple of Kālī, the Great Goddess, in Calcutta.
2. Sacred stone used in Vaishnava domestic worship.
4. An annual festival to Lord Shiva that occurs on the fourteenth day of the new moon in the month of Phalgun (February/March).
5. The Himalayan peak on which Shiva is thought to dwell in meditation.
6. There is a readily available, though not always accurate, English translation of these autobiographical articles in Dayanand Saraswati, Autobiography of Dayanand Saraswati, ed. K. C. Yadav (Delhi: Manohar, 1978).
7. Five sacred trees planted together to form a grove for contemplation.
8. Restraint and enjoyment.
9. High caste in Bengal, traditionally associated with clerical work.
10. Syed Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam: A History of the Evolution and Ideals of Islam with a Life of the Prophet (1923; Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1990), vii.
11. Nautches are public performances by dancing girls, often in the context of religious festivals.
12. The term is properly “Kunbi,” and refers to Maharashtra’s broad community of farming people, ordinary cultivators of low caste.
13. The Civil Marriage Act (III of 1872) legalized marriages performed according to the Brahmo rites, and allowed marriages between persons who did not profess any specific religion or between those of different religions.
14. The term “widow” here refers to a girl whose husband died before the marriage was consummated.
15. All married women wear the red kunku mark on their foreheads in Maharashtra.
4. LIBERAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE MODERATES
1. The terms “Moderate” and “Extremist” were chosen by the actors in the political drama of the period.
2. Other examples include famous women physicians, such as Kadambini Ganguly (1861–1923), Anandibai Joshi (1865–1887), Rukhmabai (1864–1955), and Haimabati Sen (1866–1933).
3. R. P. Masani, Dadabhai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1939), 25.
4. Armed thieves, highway murderers, and robber bands.
5. Dadabhai refers to the export from India of the savings and pensions of British officials, and to other costs of British rule such as supplies and military expenditures.
6. William Wedderburn, Allan Octavian Hume, C.B., “Father of the Indian National Congress,” 1829 to 1912 (London: Unwin, 1913), 51–52.
7. Surendranath Banerjea, A Nation in Making: Being the Reminiscences of Fifty Years in Public Life (1925; Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1963), 30–31.
8. Panipat, the site of numerous pitched battles in Indian history. It lies about fifty miles north of Delhi.
9. An Urdu term for which the English word “religion” is only an approximate translation.
10. One crore equals ten million rupees.
11. J. N. Gupta, Life and Work of Romesh Chunder Dutt (London: J. M. Dent, 1911), 13.
13. Provincial governors, chief ministers, and judges.
14. “Sheriff” is an apolitical titular position of authority bestowed for one year on a prominent citizen of Bombay (and now Mumbai).
15. Cornelia Sorabji, India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji, Indian’s First Woman Barrister, ed. Chandani Lokugé (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 215–216.
5. RADICAL POLITICS AND CULTURAL CRITICISM, 1880–1914: THE EXTREMISTS
1. See the analysis in Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 108–122.
2. A small, round, flat stone, usually kept on the home altar, said to be sacred to and an embodiment of Vishnu or, especially in Bengal, Krishna.
3. Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (1856–1895) was, like Tilak and Gokhale, a Maharashtrian reformer but differed with the former over the role of social vs. political reform; Agarkar considered himself a political Moderate.
4. Kings of ancient India had their grants to subordinates engraved on copper or bronze rectangular plates.
5. Sir John Robert Seeley, author of The Expansion of England (London, 1895).
6. Once the private home of Warren Hastings, Belvedere later became the official residence of the lieutenant-governor of Bengal, until the imperial capital was moved to Delhi in 1911.
7. Mofussil towns are those in the provincial or rural districts of India.
8. Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish nationalist politician of the late nineteenth century, was founder and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
9. Rajas, or passion, is one of the three qualities of Sānkhya philosophy. The other two, mentioned also, are sattva (purity) and tamas (inertia).
10. The Maratha liberator Shivaji apparently considered Ramdas Swami, the Hindu devotee of Rāma and Hanumān and a prominent contemporary Marathi saint-poet, to be his spiritual guru. The two are said to have first met in 1674.
11. Divine play or sport of God.
12. Bauls are Bengali singers who are known for their characteristic clothes and musical instruments, and who also tend toward a syncretistic type of religious sensibility. Rabindranath Tagore was very influenced by the Baul singing tradition and by what he understood to be the Bauls’ solitary mystical orientation.
13. The shehnai is a double-reed oboe made out of wood, with a flared metal bell at the end. Its sound is said to be auspicious, and the instrument is commonly used in weddings in North India.
14. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) and Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) were both Italian national heroes.
15. This refers to the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909, which included separate electorates for Muslims, enlarged the viceroy’s Legislative Council, and increased the electorate overall.
16. “Perfidious Albion” is a hostile epithet for Great Britain.
17. Edward J. Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 44.
18. Translatable as “universal learning,” “all-India,” or “the world and India.”
19. N. Cattopadhyaya, “Mahatma Gandhi at Rabindranath’s Santiniketan,” Visva-Bharatai Quarterly (special issue, 1949): 336.
20. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 342–343.
21. Radice writes in his glossary that the first part of Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar’s famous Bengali primer includes two boys, Gopal and Rakhal, associated with good and bad behavior, respectively. See Tagore, Selected Short Stories, trans. William Radice (London: Penguin, 1994), 309.
22. The first line of a popular poem by Madanmohan Tarkalankar, a mid-nineteenth-century Bengali reformer who supported education for girls.
23. The kathāmālā is the Bengali version of Aesop’s Fables, another of Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar’s books for children.
24. See n. 12 above; this is the Bengali spelling.
25. Āgamanī songs, or songs anticipating the “coming” of the goddess Umā to her parents’ home during the annual autumnal Durga Puja festival, are mournful expressions of longing and hope.
26. Ardhodaya is the annual auspicious conjunction of the stars in the months of Paush or Magh, when Hindus take a ritual bath in the Ganges.
27. Rome, or Europe generally.
28. The first sources are the Quran and the actions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, i.e., the hadith.
6. MAHATMA GANDHI AND RESPONSES
1. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (hereafter CWMG), 100 vols. (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1961), 1:51.
2. CWMG 39:74 (Autobiography; or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1929).
4. Hector Bolitho, Jinnah, Creator of Pakistan (London: John Murray, 1954), 84.
5. Interview with Abdul Ghaffar Khan (then in exile) by Dennis Dalton, Kabul, Afghanistan, July 1975.
6. Winston Churchill, India: Speeches (London: T. Butterworth, 1931), 94–95.
7. Dennis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
8. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi—The Last Phase (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1956–1958), 2:409.
9. Padmini Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1974), 328.
10. On 1 July 1909, Madan Lal Dhingra, an Indian student, assassinated Sir William Curzon-Wyllie, political aide-de-camp to Lord Morley, the secretary of state for India.
12. What Gandhi means here is that there is a satyagraha movement in the right spirit, governed by love and truth, and a satyagraha movement in the wrong spirit, where the outward form is correct but the inner motivation is fear or hate. Obviously Gandhi vastly preferred the former to the latter.
13. On April 10, 11, and 12, the mob committed various acts of violence, such as the burning of government offices and railway stations, disruption of communications, and assaults on or murder of Europeans and government officials.
17. Reginald Reynolds, who took the letter to the viceroy, referring to it in To Live in Mankind (New York: Doubleday, 1952), 51–52, observes: “Before I went Gandhi insisted I should read the letter carefully, as he did not wish me to associate myself with it unless I was in complete agreement with its contents. My taking of this letter was, in fact, intended to be symbolic of the fact that this was not merely a struggle between the Indians and the British.”
18. Quoted in D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma, rev. ed., vol. 6 (Delhi: The Publications Division, Government of India, 1962), 76.
21. Panchayat Rule is an old South Asian form of village rule, with an elected assembly (yat) of five (panch) elders making decisions for the village and settling disputes. The 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution, passed in 1992, contains provisions for this devolution of power to the village level; panchayats are responsible for economic development and the administration of social justice.
22. The honorific addition of “ji” is so common that it is used by Nehru and Godse alike.
23. Although this theme was incorporated by Karl Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism (1957), it has since been discredited by most economic historians.
24. Robert C. North and X. J. Eudin, M. N. Roy’s Mission to China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 1.
25. John Callaghan, Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993).
26. M. N. Roy, Memoirs (Bombay: Asia Publishers, 1964), 379, 543, 413.
27. James Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) was a British Labour politician who served two separate terms as prime minister of the United Kingdom.
28. Khalid Sayeed, Pakistan: The Formative Phase (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 78.
29. “Maulana” is a title preceding the name of a respected Muslim religious leader.
30. H. W. Hale describes many incidents, including bombs thrown indiscriminately by terrorists into crowds of civilians. He calls the months leading up to the attack on Irwin “intensive bomb-making” activity, especially by those associated directly or indirectly with the HSRA. The most notorious example was the terrorist Bhagat Singh, who threw a bomb in the Legislative Assembly Hall at Delhi on April 8, 1929. See H. W. Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937 (Allahabad: Chugh, 1974), 60–62.
32. The closeness of this vote was indeed a shock to Gandhi, and Kartar Singh is correct in his assessment of its significance.
33. Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) was a British Conservative politician and statesman who became prime minister of Britain from 1902 to 1905. He is perhaps most famous for the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
34. Kudi Arasu, Madras, 2 May 1925, quoted in Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 259.
35. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 257.
36. Ellen Cicely Wilkinson (1891–1947) was one of the first women in Britain to be elected as a Member of Parliament (MP). She was part of a delegation sent to India in 1932 by the India League to investigate the prevailing conditions there. The report was critical of the British government in India, including its resort to “emergency ordinances,” with their provisions for police acts and arrests. The government banned the report.
37. V. D. Savarkar, The Story of My Transportation for Life (Bombay: Sadbhakti, 1950; first published in Marathi, 1927), 521.
38. The above introduction to Godse is indebted to Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi,” in At the Edge of Psychology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), 70–98.
39. Humayun Kabir, “Muslim Politics, 1942–47,” in The Partition of India, ed. C. H. Phillips and M. D. Wainwright (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), 405. Percival Spear, in Modern India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 424, comments: “The manner and circumstances of his [Gandhi’s] death transformed the situation. The Mahatma was even more powerful in death than in life. The policy of revenge was abandoned. The Hindu extremists were discredited. … The danger of bitterness boiling over into anti-Muslim pogroms was averted.”
40. Nathuram Godse, May It Please Your Honour (Pune: Shri Gopal Godse, 1978), 7.
7. TO INDEPENDENCE AND PARTITION
1. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).
2. Interviews were with Bengal I.C.S. officers, retired in the UK, 1971–1972; with leaders of the Bengal Muslim League, in Dhaka, 1972, 1976; and with Congress leaders and ordinary citizens of India, 1972–1973, 1976.
3. Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
4. Gynandra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
5. Quoted in Farhat Tabassum, Deoband Ulema’s Movement for the Freedom of India (New Delhi: Manak, 2006), 142.
6. Quoted in Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruqi, The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1963), 112.
7. Quoted in Faruqi, The Deoband School, 97.
8. S. R. Mehrotra, Towards India’s Freedom and Partition (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979), 197.
9. Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).
10. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 174ff.
11. Vallabhbhai Patel, called Sardar (Chief), was an important Congress leader from the Bombay area, a confidant of Gandhi, a long-time political organizer for the Congress, and deputy prime minister under Nehru after Independence.
12. Ambubachi is a three-day period in the month of Ashadh when Hindu widows keep a fast.
13. The Khilafat movement (1919–1924) agitated for the preservation of the caliphate in Turkey after the Ottomans were defeated by the British in World War I. Led mainly by Indian Muslims, and supported by Gandhi, the movement was disbanded in 1924, when the Republic of Turkey itself abolished the caliphate.
14. Maulana Hasrat Mohani (1875–1951) was a poet, member of the Muslim League, founding member of the Communist Party of India, and a believer in armed revolt against the British.
15. Mian Fazl-i-Husain (1877–1936) was the most influential Muslim in India in the 1920s and early 1930s. Leader of the Muslim League Punjab branch, where Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims lived in a delicate demographic balance, he realized the importance of Unionist politics and opposed the idea of a separate state for Muslims.
16. “Sanghathan” and “Tanzim” here refer to Hindu and Muslim reformist movements, respectively, which were active in the 1920s. The latter was founded mainly in response to the former, which strove to reclaim and reconvert Muslims, and to militarize Hindus for national solidarity.
17. Quoted in Dhananjay Keer, Savarkar and His Times (Bombay: A. V. Keer, 1950), 219.
18. A member of the Brahmo, Prarthana, or Arya Samajes.
20. Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, Evolution of Pakistan (Lahore: All-Pakistan Legal Decisions, 1963), 31–32.
21. Pirzada, Evolution of Pakistan, 27, quoting Choudhary Rahmat Ali, Pakistan: The Fatherland of the Pak Nation (1947).
22. According to some records, he was born in 1876.
23. Hector Bolitho, Jinnah, Creator of Pakistan (London: John Murray, 1954), 17.
24. G. Allana, Quaid-e-azam Jinnah: The Story of a Nation (Lahore: Ferozsons, 1967), 62.
25. Edwin S. Montagu, An Indian Diary, ed. Venetia Montagu (London: W. Heinemann, 1930), 57–58.
27. Jinnah, Some Recent Speeches and Writings, ed. Jamīl-ud-dīn Ahmed, 2 vols. (Lahore: M. Ashraf, 1942), 2:314.
29. Of these four female leaders, Ahilya Bai Holkar is discussed in chapter 1.
30. Mehrotra, Towards India’s Freedom and Partition, 230–232.
31. Quoted in Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977), 2:279.
32. An act passed by the Punjab Legislative Council in 1925 which gave control of all Sikh places of worship to a representative body of Khalsa, or orthodox, Sikhs. This in effect removed from power the non-Khalsa Sikh mahants, or priests, who had assumed jurisdiction of the shrines from 1849, when the British began to rule Punjab.
33. Khwaja Abdul Majid (1875–1962) was a lawyer, educationalist, and social reformer who supported Gandhi in his opposition to the partition of India.
34. Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru (1875–1949), of Kashmiri parentage, was an eminent lawyer, and a political and social leader, who helped mediate the Gandhi–Irwin Pact of 1930 and the Poona Pact of 1932.
35. An organization founded in the 1930s whose aim was to bring Hindi and Urdu writers together.
8. ISSUES IN POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA
1. Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence and After, 1946–1949 (Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1949), 4; taken from Nehru’s midnight speech of August 14, 1947, quoted below.
2. Rabindranath Tagore, One Hundred and One Poems (New York: Asia, 1966), 173.
3. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 37–44.
4. Nehru, Independence and After, 4; quoted below.
5. Tamil Nadu Elementary Education Act (1920), with amendments of 1973.
6. Head of the largest, richest landowning family in the village.
7. Mailam, a small town in northern Tamil Nadu, is the site of a Murugan temple. Untouchables were traditionally debarred from entering such places of worship.
8. A type of white flower that has hundreds of fragile, hairlike stamens.
9. Quoted in B. R. Verma, Commentaries on Mohammedan Law (Allahabad: Law Publications, 2002), 145.
10. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 201.
11. Imrana, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of five living with her husband in the Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, was raped by her father-in-law in June 2005. Although he was eventually punished by the state, village elders and several Islamic jurists declared Imrana the guilty one, in effect charging her with adultery and overlooking the rape, and stated that she would have to live with another man, since her husband was now to be considered her son. This sparked nationwide controversy. In London in October 2006, Ayesha Azmi was awarded about $2,000 in recompense for being dismissed from her job as a teaching assistant because she wore a full-face veil, or niqab, while teaching. Azmi’s case sparked a national debate in Britain.
12. Nehru, Independence and After, 123.
13. Technical Sanskrit philosophical terms for the three components of the universe: lightness (sattva), dynamism (rajas), and darkness (tamas).
14. Nehru to Chou En-Lai, Sept. 26, 1959, Documents on the Sino-Indian Boundary Question (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1960), 78.
15. Quoted in Dennis Kux, Estranged Democracies: India and the United States, 1941–1991 (New Delhi: Sage, 1993), 145.
9. PAKISTAN, 1947 AND LATER: THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL UNITY
1. Quoted in Sharif al Mujahid, Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah: Studies in Interpretation (Karachi: Quaid-i-Azam Academy, 1981), 640.
2. Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, 10: History and Politics, trans. D. Folliot and J. Mathews (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1962), 114.
3. For a listing of such books and articles, see Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 1–5.
4. Muhammad Iqbal, Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, compiled by “Shamloo” (Lahore: Al-Manar Academy, 1948), 11–13.
5. Allen McGrath, The Destruction of Pakistan’s Democracy (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 132.
6. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Selected Speeches and Statements of the Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah: 1911–34 and 1947, ed. M. Rafiq Afzal (Lahore: Research Society of Pakistan, University of the Punjab, 1966), 456.
7. The customs and sayings of the prophet Muhammad.
8. Maulana Amin Ahsan Islahi (1904–1997) was a prominent scholar of Islam in Pakistan and a high-ranking member of the Jamaat-i-Islami.
9. Tawīl is finding analogous situations; qiyās is determining how to act if there is no clear injunction; ijtihād is applying human reason in interpreting a text; and istihsān is finding the best procedure in the light of the teachings of Islam.
10. Quoted in Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000: Disenchanted Allies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 56.
11. Quoted in Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (London: Hurst, 1998), 146.
12. Quoted in Owen Bennett Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 187.
10. BANGLADESH: INDEPENDENCE AND CONTROVERSIES OVER THE FRUITS OF FREEDOM
1. Dacca was renamed Dhaka after the liberation war of 1971.
2. The Communal Award allocated seats in central and provincial legislatures according to groups and their interests, but the seats were not proportionate to population percentages. Muslims, 54 percent of the population of Bengal at the time, received 47.8 percent of the seats, and Hindus (put in the “General” category in the Award), though 44 percent of the population, received, together with the Depressed Classes, only 32 percent of the seats. In addition, voting was to be by separate electorates.
3. Harun-Or-Rashid, “Bengal Ministries 1937–1947,” in History of Bangladesh, 1704–1971, vol. 1: Political History, 2nd ed. (1992; Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1997), 256.
4. Kazi Ahmed Kamal, Politicians and Inside Stories: A Glimpse Mainly Into Lives of Fazlul Huq, Shaheed Suhrawardy, and Moulana Bhashani (Dacca: Kazi Giasuddin Ahmed, 1970), 111.
5. Poush is the ninth Bengali month, from mid-December to mid-January.
6. Mahākāl, Great Time, is an epithet for Shiva, the god of destruction.