“In East Bengal two-thirds of the inhabitants and in North Bengal nearly three-fifths are followers of the Prophet.” As the Mohammedans in those regions increase faster than Hindus, it is quite possible that within a few decades Hinduism may be banished from those parts of Bengal…The influence of Islam is the most powerful engine destroying Hinduism in North and East Bengal at the present day. The next year Takle cited U.N. Mukherjee of the Indian Medical Services whose pamphlet “A Dying Race?” made much the same argument. Official demography added to the stream of knowledge about Muslims that imperialism made available to Britons and Americans.

XREF: Connects to colonial demographic anxieties and communal tension in British India, relevant to partition-era history and Hindu nationalist narratives.

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 94