ncouraged from the first to take part in public meetings and to
parade the streets in procession as a protest against Partition, were
mobilized to picket the bazaars and enforce the boycott. Nor were their
methods confined to moral suasion. Where it failed they were quite ready
to use force. The Hindu leaders had made desperate attempts to enlist
the support of the Mahomedans, and not without some success, until the
latter began to realize the true meaning both of the Partition and of
the agitation against it. Nothing was better calculated to enlighten
them than another feature introduced also from the Deccan into the
"national" propaganda. In the Deccan the cult of Shivaji, as the epic
hero of Mahratta history, was intelligible enough. But in Bengal his
name had been for generations a bogey with which mothers hushed their
babies, and the Mahratta Ditch in Calcutta still bears witness to the
terror produced by the daring raids of Mahratta horsemen. To set Shivaji
up in Bengal on the pedestal of Nationalism in the face of such
traditions was no slight feat, and all Mr. Surendranath Banerjee's
popularity barely availed to perform it successfully. But to identify
the cause of Nationalism with the cult of the Mahratta warrior-king who
had first arrested the victorious career and humbled the pride of the
Mahomedan conquerors of Hindustan was not the way to win over to it the
Mahomedans of Bengal. In Eastern Bengal especially, with the exception
of a few landlords and pleaders whose interests were largely bound up
with those of the Hindus, the Mahomedans as a community had everything
to gain and nothing to lose by the Partition. For those amongst them who
were merchants the boycott spelt serious injury to their trade and led
in some instances to reprisals in which the Hindus fared badly. Whenever
it happened in this way that the biter was bit, the Bengalee Press
accused the Government of encouraging the revival of sectarian strife,
just as it denounced every measure for the maintenance of order which
the Government was compelled to take in the discharge of one of its most
elementary duties, as brutal repression and arbitrary vindictiveness,
and any mistake of procedure made by some subordinate official under the
stress of a very critical situation was distorted and magnified into a
gross denial of justice. But it was out of the punishments very properly
inflicted upon the misguided schoolboys and students whom the
politicians h