Word: bengals
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Indians were erasing the memory of British rule from the very place names. Calcutta's Clive Street (India's Wall Street) had been renamed Netaji Subhas Road to honor the late Bengal leader, Subhas Chandra Bose. He was a traitor in British eyes for helping the Japs; but to Indians Bose was a patriot. The holy Ganges would revert to the Sanskrit form, Ganga. Madras would become Chennapatnam. The city of Rajahmundry would become Rajamahendravaram, which would be harder to spell, but since 87% of Indians could not write that would not matter so much...
Hindus accused the Minister of Communications, Moslem Leaguer Abdur Rab Nishtar, of carting off to Karachi (temporary capital of Pakistan) every piece of telephone and telegraph equipment he could lay hands on. Calcutta's Hindu press said that Bengal's Prime Minister Huseyn Shabad Suhrawardy, a Moslem, was stripping western Bengal (which will be part of Hindu India) of food, clothing, machinery and hospital equipment...
...Pakistan would be strong agriculturally (with a wheat surplus in the rich Punjab, 85% of the world's jute an eastern Bengal), but weak industrially...
Returning Punjabi soldiers last year had turned in hate against the moneylenders, merchants and all their coreligionists. In Bengal it had been the same. While 1½ million died of famine, landowners and food dealers, Moslem and Hindu alike, had reaped profits of 1½ billion rupees. "Every death in the famine," estimated the Woodhead Famine Enquiry Commission two years ago, "was balanced by roughly a thousand rupees of excess profit." The economic grievance of peasants against landlords and profiteers became a religious fight...
...Tajik Socialist Soviet Republic, loomed Mt. Stalin (24,590 ft.) and Mt. Lenin (23,386 ft.), mightiest peaks of the U.S.S.R. Gandhi's thoughts last week turned to the lowest part of India, the mushy flats of Noakhali at the mouth of the Ganges. That part of Bengal, where Moslems and Hindus are mixed, will become part of Pakistan...