So wrote Syed Abu Mohammad Ismail Hossain Siraji, a Bengali writer and a poet, who went to Ottoman Turkey as a member of the Indian medical delegation to assist the Khilafate during the first Balkan War in 1912. Siraji narrated the experience of his journey to Turkey in an epistolary form, which was serialized in the noted Bengali magazine Mohammadi in 1912. He later published these letters as a travelogue. In the description here, he is drawing a distinction between home and abroad. His zeal for the pan-Islamist cause brought him to the Balkans, and yet, here, in the midst of the war and noises of canon firing, he remembered Bengal. This sense of belonging to a global ummah Islamia and the simultaneous romantic invocation of Bengal as a homeland were complementary. As a devout Muslim, Siraji possibly could not associate with the deified form of ‘mother Bengal’, a powerful symbol in Indian nationalist Hindu political tradition; yet Siraji was moved by the abstract image of ‘mother Bengal’ portrayed by Rabindranath Tagore in his song.

The intellectual journey of this patriotic song in Bengal is tied up with the cultural imagining of a homeland in different spatial and temporal contexts. In 1905, Bengal was gripped by the colonial decision to partition the province. The Hindu landowning gentry and professional elites were aghast at this decision. Feelings were ambiguous among Muslim Bengalis, who mostly inhabited the riverine tracks of eastern Bengal.