three senior Awami League leaders in prison. Early life Tajuddin Ahmad Khan was born on 23 July 1925 at Dardaria, a village in the Dhaka district of the Bengal Presidency, in British India (now Gazipur District in Bangladesh), to Maulavi Muhammad Yasin Khan and Meherunnesa Khanam in a conservative, middle class Muslim family. He was the eldest of nine siblings—three brothers and six sisters. The Bengal province, the eastern frontier of India, consisted of two conceptual regions: the West Bengal had a Hindu majority population and housed the provincial capital Kolkata, a thriving centre of trade and culture; East Bengal, Tajuddin's home, was an impoverished hinterland of West Bengal, with a mostly poor peasant Muslim population. During Tajuddin's formative years, British rule in India was nearing its end and Bengal was battered by famines, communal tensions and other problems. It was a hotbed of anti-British activism. Against this backdrop, his political activism began at a very early age, sometimes interrupting his studies. The anti-British activists of Bengal were his earliest political inspiration. After attending a few schools in Gazipur, Tajuddin moved to Dhaka, his district headquarter and the principal town in East Bengal, for further studies. In Dhaka, he went to Saint Gregory's High School, where he matriculated in 1944, securing 12th position in undivided Bengal. After matriculation, Tajuddin briefly lost interest in formal education because of his activism, pausing his studies for three years. At his mother's insistence, he resumed his studies and was admitted to Dhaka College. There he attended classes irregularly because of his activism. As a result, he could not take the Intermediate of Arts examination from there; instead, he took it from a private college as an irregular student in 1948 and passed, securing fourth position in East Bengal. He obtained a BA with honours in Economics from the University of Dhaka. Tajuddin lost his father at age twenty-two and took over the family responsibilities. Late British India With British rule in India nearing its end and Hindu-Muslim tensions on the rise, in 1940 the political party All-India Muslim League brought about the Pakistan Movement, which demanded a separate state for the Muslims of India. Founded in 1906, in Dhaka, the Muslim League's leadership came mostly from the feudal elites. Headquartered in Kolkata, the Bengal Provincial Muslim League, had had little grassroots organisation or activity in Bengal for a long time. Abul Hashim succeeded Huseyn