Rezaul Karim (lawyer)

Rezaul Karim (born 1902) was a Bengali Muslim lawyer and member of the Indian National Congress. During the Indian independence movement, he was a champion of composite nationalism and a united India.

Early life and education
Rezaul Karim was born in 1902 in Birbhum, Bengal Presidency, Colonial India.

Rezaul Karim received his education in the Calcutta Madrasa and in the University of Calcutta during the 1920s and 1930s. He "studied law and inherited a traditional Muslim education in Arabic and Persian", having "access to Bengali literary and cultural traditions in Calcutta".

Karim was acquainted with Kazi Nazrul Islam and Muzaffar Ahmad, with whom he had contact.

Career
At the time of the Indian independence movement, Rezaul Karim championed Hindu-Muslim unity and thus opposed the partition of India. He wrote a text called Pakisthan Examined in which he stated that it is "strange to say that all those persons who have always supported British imperialism in India, have become now the advocates of the Pakistan movement. But those Muslims who always supported the freedom movement of the country are almost to a man stoutly against this movement." As a nationalist Indian Muslim, Karim said that “our position in India is just the same as it is with the Hindus of the land. We belong to India, and we are one nation with the people of the land.” He advocated for composite nationalism, with historian Neilesh Bose of the University of Victoria stating that “Rezaul Karim developed a Bengali Muslim composite nationalism that aimed to connect religion, region and nation in the context of a subjunctive, possible future India.” Rezaul Karim called for Indian Muslims to support a united India and firmly rejected the two-nation theory:

Works

 * Naya Bharater Bhitti [Foundations for a New India] (1935)
 * For India and Islam (1937)
 * Pakisthan Examined with the Partition Schemes (1941)