Contemporary local police and administrative records for Noakhali and Tippera were extensively lost or destroyed in the displacement and administrative change that followed, so reported figures rest on later witness testimony and compilation rather than a contemporaneous count, and estimates in the secondary literature range from a few hundred to several thousand with no reconciled total.
What would resolve this A study systematically cross-checking surviving colonial police, relief camp and missionary records against local Hindu and Muslim community testimony collected in the years immediately after the riots, of the kind that has been done for the Great Calcutta Killings but not yet completed for Noakhali specifically.
OpenSouth Asian colonial history; Bengal regional historySuranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905 to 1947