To understand the 1940s, a nodal decade in Indian history, go back to the 1905 partition of Bengal which galvanised pre-independence politics
Nearly 110 years have passed since Bengal's partition in 1905, which was aimed at breaking the political and economic backbone of the educated Bengali middle and upper middle classes, which were beginning to challenge British rule, and at dividing Hindus and Muslims. The administrative reasons cited by the move's author, Viceroy lord Curzon, were specious. The movement against the Partition was so intense and widespread, and it so radicalised Bengal politics, that the Government was forced to annul it. King George V announced the decision at the Delhi Durbar of 1911.
The socio-political legacy of the movement against partition, however, proved critically important for the future. It included the emergence of mass movements, not witnessed in India earlier, and a sharp exacerbation of existing Hindu-Muslim tensions resulting from issues like the latter's demand for separate religion-based electorates in the limited representative institutions granted by the British, and complaint of exploitation by Hindu landlords. Besides, the majority of Muslims had supported the partition, which, they believed, was to their advantage, and opposed the call for a boycott of British imports, particularly cloth, issued during the agitation.
The annulment of the partition angered Muslims. Their ties with the British deteriorated further following the latter's military operations against Turkey during World War I, and absence of support to the Khilafat (Caliphate) thereafter. The estrangement, however, was ephemeral. An attempt to forge Hindu-Muslim unity by combining the civil disobedience and Khilafat movements, the latter opposing the dismemberment of Turkey, failed; Gandhiji's revocation of the former following the killing of policemen at Chauri Chaura, alienated Muslims. Hindu-Muslim relations continued to deteriorate. In March, 1940, the All-India Muslim league formally adopted a resolution demanding the creation of independent states for Muslims in north-western and eastern British India.
This pushed to the forecourt of the 1940s one of the most contentious of the developments that made the decade one of the most tumultuous in India's history. The other developments were World War II; the Japanese bombing of Kolkata in 1942 and 1943; the Quit India movement of 1942; the famine which hit Bengal in 1943 and claimed three million lives; the militant mass movement in 1945-46 against the trial and sentencing of British Indian Army officers who had joined the Indian National Army; the militant peasants movement launched by the Communist Party of India in the late 1940s; the Muslim league's call for observing August 16, 1946, as Direct Action Day to mobilise support for its Pakistan demand; the Great Calcutta Killing and countrywide rioting that followed; and, of course, Independence and partitioning of India in 1947 and the consequent arrival of millions of refugees from Pakistan.
Of these, militant mass movements were a legacy of the anti-partition movement, as was the sharp aggravation of Hindu-Muslim relations to a point where, eventually, partition became inevitable. The anti-partition movement, radicalised Indian politics; there could henceforth be no compromise over the demand for total independence. Further, if partition unleashed forces which led to the tumultuous 1940s, the latter initiated processes which deeply influenced post-Independence developments in India and the world — the acceleration of de-colonisation worldwide following India's independence; Pakistan's invasion of Kashmir (1947), the hostile Indo-Pakistani relations and their global and regional fall-out; the social, economic and political impact (more marked in eastern India) of the arrival of refugees from Pakistan; the continuation in independent India of the political tools used in the struggle against Britain, to name some of them.
The 1940s was thus a nodal decade in Indian history that needs to be revisited and understood. A book that merits serious attention in this context is The Stormy Decades: Calcutta (Social Science Press, 2015) edited by Tanika Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. The focus is on Kolkata from the early 1940s to early 1950s but the scope is national and international. It needs to be read.