Colonial History of India

[acharya]

TIME LINE OF COLONIAL PERIOD



1498 – Vasco De Gama lands in India via the searoute During this time there existed an elaborate Indian ocean economy.

1599 – English East India Company formed

1602 – Dutch East Indian Company formed.

1658 – French East Indian Company formed

1707 – Death of Aurangzeb and end of Mughal rule

1785 – Robert Clive in India



1835 – Maculay plans for civilizing the natives so that a class of people is created who think and do exactly like their masters. His words were to this effect: I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values,people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.

(Source: The Awakening Ray, Vol. 4 No. 5, The Gnostic Centre )

The main philosophy was to incrementally indoctrinate the children with principles that are sympathetic to colonisers philosophy. Make future generations weak in mind, body and spirit. Avoid teaching children the basic facts about their own history. Teach them that natural aggression is wrong and docile submission is right. Teach them that any basis of a moral foundation, like the principles of religion, is a weakness to be avoided in the name of freedom and also redefine the concept of patriotism to support colonisers views.



1853 - Sir Arthur Cunningham was the first to archeologicaly examine Harappa in 1853 and 1856. Finding some Kushana coins in the site, he attributed the city to the Kushana period ( Imam 1966) It is shocking to note that about one hundered miles of the Lahore-Multan railway was ballasted by bricks retrieved from the ruins at Harappa by rapacious railroad contractors; “ No invader of India had ever so ruthlessly and wantonly destroyed her ancient remains as did the railway contractors in the civilized 19th century ” ( Edwin Bryant – Quest for the origins of the vedic culture Page 331-332)

This made the Anglo Saxon realize that the Indians have the remains of civilization just like the Mesopotamia. The big plan for India was created to change the course of history of India. The British by this time were already doing research on all the other ancient civilization such as Egypt, Mesopotamia etc



1857 – First War of independence- the sepoy mutiny made British feel against the Muslims of India and also fear of them in the future. This laid the groundwork for a divide and rule policy for the Indian sub-continent. After the war, Whitehall assumed direct responsibility for the administration of India, ending 250 years of rule by the British East India Company. This war changed the resolve of the British towards Indians and made them racist towards the native population. Till then the practice of marriage with the local women was considered normal ( especially punjabis and Muslims) and mixed blood was not frowned upon. After the change in attitude the British made sure that they segregated the native population from themselves and their family and created a class system for previleges and favor.



1863 – Max Muller proposes the Aryan Invasion Theory – Probably due to the absence of any civilization finding this concocted theory was proposed and it took a life of its own. Since the native version of the history was discarded the Harappan phase of Indian civilization was brushed aside.The major



1867 - Creation of Deoband Muslim school so that ashrafs can come closer to the rest of the local Muslim converts and create a united Muslim front against the British. Till then the ashrafs looked themselves as the higher and the ruling class. Syed Ali starts the Aligarh Muslim education center to bring Muslims to the forefront of the european education. Deobandis were Muslim reformers who setup the first madrassahs for the purpose of training future clerics.



1875 – First seals of Indian civilization found by Sir Alexander Cunningham in 1875( Source: Ancient Civilizations by Hugh Bowden) – This made the Anglo Saxons realize that the Indians have the remains of civilization just like the Mesopotamia. The big plan for India was created to change the course of history of India by influencing the elite class of the indian soceity and to shape future generations, control the schools. The British by this time were already doing research on all the other ancient civilization such as Egypt, Mesopotamia etc. They had for the last few centuries already studied the islamic civilization( the first Arabic chair in the west was set up in 1630s). Indus civilization was not pursued rigorously in case a large section of Indians get nationalistic feelings.



The British had committed a great mistake in 1857 by accidentally uniting Moslems and Hindus against them in some areas by their policies. They were more careful in their game after that. However, they saw that the true danger to their dominance were the educated Hindus who were in possession of both Western and traditional Indic knowledge. This was the class that could easily challenge them as it was still wedded to the Hindu ways and capable of using the power of the newly acquired Western knowledge against the British. Sir John Stratchey (FInance minister 1874):

“The existence side by side of these (Hindu and Muslim) hostile creeds is one of the strong points in our political position in India. The better classes of Mohammedans are a source of strength and not weakness. They constitute a comparatively small but an energetic minority of the population whose political interests are identical with ours.” Sir James Caird of Thanjavur, 1879: "there was no class except Brahmins, which was so hostile to the English."



1881 – The first census in British India done. This is a massive project to really classify the largest human group into various classes by their origins and social strata supposidly for benign motive. This has helped the british and later the west to target individual groups for various reliogious and military purposes.



1885 – Indian National Conference formed as a tool of the British government to influence the course of the Independence movement and for the emancipation of the suffering Indians. The main reason for forming this organization is to create a platform to dissipate the nationalistic sentiments and to control the nature of the debate and pace of the changes in the political class of the Indians. The political conciousness of the hindus could be moulded and controlled with such platform. The terms of debate between the Hindus and Muslims were also influenced with the help of key people in the party as it evolved in the next 50 years.

The main philosphy was to shape the political philosophy, infiltrate the government: Whenever and wherever possible place those sympathetic to your philosophy into office at all levels—the higher, the better—so they can sway the direction of the country within every function of government, promising solutions and benefits for all. In such a way you can tilt legislation toward incrementally increasing the control of and dependency on government—a government that you are shaping.



1906 - split of Bengal during Great Game at the heights between the Russians and the British in the Eurasian landmass. The British needed an ally who would be able to resist the thrust of the Tsars. Russian expansion started in 1582 and continued to central asia and the pacific till late 1700s. The next target of the British was Tibet and British were worried about Tibet coming under the influence of Russia. The plan was to keep India under the British dominion for the next 500 years and was expressed in commonwealth speeches in early 1900-1910.



1911 – Capital shift from Calcutta to New Delhi. This was to reduce the increasing demands for independence in the enlightened Bengal which had the most interaction with the west . This was a diversion so that the seat of power should be perceived similar to the Mughal empire. This also broke the deep intellectual nationalist discourse in Bengal and weakened it. The ultimate aim is to make sure that the Muslims would also start seeing a Muslim homeland in Indian sub-continent.



1917 – First World war. Fall of Ottoman empire and creation of middle eastern states under the direct influence of the British. British looked at the Muslims of the middle east and the Muslims of the India as one and buitl relationship with the arabs and the ashrafs of the sub-continent.



1920s - Discovery of mohenjedaro, harrapa – final confirmation of the existence and history of Indian civilization. This may have made the British to push through the plans for division of India.



1930 – Plans to divide the country hatched when the middle east was secure after the first world war and Saudi arabia was already a state. The assessment of the colonial powers was that the history of the natives has been discovered with archeology and they would find their true belonging. It would be difficult to keep the country colonized for a long time.



1939 – Second world war – British still to recover from the first world war and willing to lessen their burden in the empire.



1940 - Lahore resolution for a separate Muslim homeland. Secretly British were siding with the Muslim league/ashrafs to create a homeland for them for future collaboration. There is increasing evidence that Lahore resolution was made in that location and time so that the future homeland of the Pakistan will have Punjab as the cultural/political and military center.



1947 – Indian Independence/partition. And Pakistan formation.

1971 – Split of Pakistan the largest Muslim nation into Pakistan and Bangladesh

[acharya]

Three fateful days of partition — I

Col (Retd) Riaz Jafri

Soon after World War-II, Winston Churchill — who had won the war for the British — was defeated in the general elections and Mr Atlee became the new Prime Minister of England. The Independence Movement in India under the stalwarts like Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru and many others had gained such a momentum that it made the British realize that they could no longer hold India in bondage to the crown. India had to be liberated sooner or later.

However, in their heart of hearts they also knew that they could not afford to leave India as a unified nation which could with its immense human and economic resources soon become a superpower challenging their (British) and other Western countries’ authority in deciding the world affairs. Atlee decided to act sooner rather than later and announced Independence for India in less than two years’ time — by June 1948. Such haste in the transfer of power, though viewed by some gullible Indians as a mark of victory for them was actually to serve the British sinister designs. They took 7 long years to transfer the tiny territory of Hong Kong to the Chinese and the transfer was so smooth, methodical and in order that not a leave stirred when it took place. Whereas in case of India, the largest exodus of the human populace in the entire history of the mankind took place and millions lost their life in the process.

Not only that, at least Pakistan if not Bharat was not ready or trained for the self-governance. Churchill is on record in the House of Commons as the Leader of Opposition to warn, “Not to throw millions of teeming wretched to the vultures”, for, in his opinion India was not ready by then for the Independence.

On the home front, despite Jinnah’s Two-Nation Theory, The Pakistan Resolution of March 1940 and the Muslim League’s demand for separate home land for the Muslims, their leaders had agreed to the Cabinet Mission Plan of Three Zone Formula — Zones A, B & C under One India. Zone ‘A’ was to constitute Assam & Bengal, ‘B’ the present Pakistan with undivided Punjab and Kashmir and the C the Central (remaining) India. The Federal Government was to have the portfolios of Defence, Foreign Affairs and Currency, and the confederating units were to have the rest. Every thing seemed to be working amicably and the semblance of the Unity of India was not threatened, probably much to the dismay of the British rulers. Then, around July 1946, Pandit Nehru became the President of All India Congress (AIC) Party. Till then Maulana Abul Kalam Azad had been holding the office of the President of the AIC for the last seven years. God alone knows, why did Pandit Nehru in his very first Press conference on July 10th, 1946 in Bombay within a few days of becoming the President of the AIC, in reply to a journalist’s question, “ So, after all Congress has agreed to the partitioning of India?”, declare, “ It will be for the future Constituent Assembly of India to decide what form of Government it will have, a Federation or a Confederation ?” That sent a big shock down the spine of the Muslims whose reaction was unanimous and spontaneous. Constituent Assembly of India — to be — will certainly have Hindu majority and could bulldoze any bill they wanted. The very concept of the Autonomous Confederating Units was at stake. With the British gone, Muslims felt unsafe and totally at the mercy of the Hindus.

Therefore, henceforth nothing short of full-fledged Pakistan was acceptable to them. That was the end of any hope of United Independent India. Atlee’s Government, as if waiting for the opportunity pounced upon it. Now, not only will it grant independence to India but also bifurcate it into two not-so-friendly a neighbours for all time to come. Lord Wavell the Viceroy of India was replaced by the Earl of Burma — Lord Louis Mountbatten, and entrusted with the task of, ostensibly, transferring power to India but actually dividing it into two countries. The speed with which he set off is most surprising if not intriguing. February 47 or so he takes over as Viceroy of India. March 47 he makes a dash to London to get the Independence date advanced by almost a year (from June 1948 to August 1947). June 3rd 47 an announcement is made that Pakistan had been accepted and that India will become independent. Night 14/15 August — less than two and a half months later - India is divided!

The only logical thing he did was to create or carve out Pakistan at 2359 hours on 14th August out of united India before grant of independence to it at 2400 hours the same night. Had India been made independent before the creation of Pakistan then it would have been up to the Government of Independent India to let Pakistan come into being or not. Chances are Pakistan would not have been there. Pakistan, though it came into being only a minute before India became independent, celebrates its National Day on 14th August whereas India does it on the 15th. One, however, wonders as to why does Pakistan celebrate the Independence Day ? It was born sovereign, free and independent and was never a slave country under the British rule like India.

Pakistan should, therefore, celebrate its Birthday or Creation Day instead of the Independence Day! Mountbatten, an uncle of the then Phillips Mountbatten and now the Duke of Edinburgh Prince Phillips - husband of the Queen Elizabeth II, was an egocentric royalty and wanted to go down the history as the last Viceroy of undivided India and the first and the only Governor General of the two dominions of both India and Pakistan. Whereas Pandit Nehru had agreed to his ambition, Muhammad Ali Jinnah declined to accept it on the grounds that how could he justify the independence or the self-rule to the common man when they saw the British Governor General still at the top. It is a common knowledge now that Lady Mountbatten - who had found the charming person of handsome Kashmiri Pandit irresistible was greatly instrumental in influencing her paramour’s decision of accepting Mountbatten as the first GG of India. She not only paid Pandit Jee back gladly and willingly bodily, but also by getting many a decision changed in favour of India against Pakistan from her husband. (A love letter from her to Pandit Jee fell into the hands of Liaquat Ali Khan, who went excitedly to Muhammad Ali Jinnah and suggested its publication to gain political mileage. Quaid admonished Liaquat Ali Khan sternly saying, “we are fighting on principles and not prying on the private lives of our opponents”. Tear it down, he ordered and torn it was.) Mountbatten in any case had not much love lost for Jinnah or Jinnah’s Pakistan, whom he rated though highly principled yet an arrogant and unbendingly rigid politician.

This made the task of the AIC further easy. One Mr Menon (not Krishana Menon) — then a Secretary in the Viceroyalty — is purported to have disclosed many a crucial content of important documents to Mr Nehru who armed with such beforehand inside knowledge could manoeuvre the negotiations with the British to his advantage. It was in these surroundings that Pakistan came into being on the night of 14/15 August 1947 but most surprisingly without its boundaries demarcated or drawn by the Boundary Commission. However, from the revenue and other records of the Government of the undivided Punjab which were in its Provincial Capital Lahore, it was fairly evident that which Districts and their parts would go to India and what parts would accede to Pakistan. In fact such an exercise had been going on for quite sometime and the population on both sides of the expected boundary line was mentally prepared to either migrate or stay behind. Much of the District Ferozepur and most of the District Gurdaspur were believed to become part of Pakistan. As such almost none from here crossed over to the other side.

The entire city of Gurdaspur including the Government buildings like District Headquarters, Municipal Office, District Hospital, all were flying Pakistan Flags. Little did they know of the horrendous fate awaiting them resulting from the sinister plans being hatched behind the closed doors of the Viceragal Lodge in New Delhi. The map demarcating the boundary in Punjab between India and Pakistan was laid on a table and being scrutinized. “Strategically important Head Sulemanki must come to India, irrespective of the fact that the canals emanating from it irrigate only lands in Pakistan”, said some one. So, a line was moved 7 miles further away in order to keep it in India. Never mind if most of Ferozepur comes to India this way! “How would one go to Srinagar from India by road, asks some one else there ?” “There is no land contiguity”. Only a road from Pathan Kot can connect the way to Sri Nagar.

E-Mail: Jafri@rifiela.com

[Guest]

[quote name='acharya' date='Aug 13 2003, 04:46 AM'] Three fateful days of partition — I

Col (Retd) Riaz Jafri

[/quote]

Is this the same clown who wrote in one of the Paki paper that Aug 14th was Pakistan's birthday not independence day as Pakistan was never ruled by British?

[Guest]

Came across a list of books banned by British during the freedom movement. Not sure if this should go in the Book Folder or here.



ENGLISH

• Phase of Indian Struggle by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee (list of his speeches during the Cripps Mission)
  
  
• India in Transition by Manabendra Nath Roy (regarding communists interpretation of political situation in India)
  
  
• Why Cripps Failed by M Subramanyam Documented account about the causes of the failure of Cripps Mission
  
  

ASSAMESE

• Samajtantravad Kiya Lago by Pannalal Dasgupta (What is Socialism)
  
  

BENGALI

• Bidrohi Rushiya by Amulya Chandra Adhikari (About impact of Russian revolution on India's freedom struggle)
  
  
• Biplabi Abani Mukherjee by Rakhal Chandra Ghosh (biography of Abani Mukherjee)
  
  
• Yug Bani by Kazi Nazrul Islam (collection of nationalistic articles)
  
  

GUJARATI

• Aajkalno Sudharo Ke Ramaniy by Bhayankarta (novel espousing the need for social reformation in India)
  
  
• Krantini Chingario by Niranjan (collection of articles on independence movement)
  
  

HINDI

• Baghi ki Beti by Munishwardutt Avasthi (collection of revolutionary stories)
  
  
• Gadar by Charam Rishi (revolutionary novel)
  
  

MARATHI

• Sangeet Maharan Pratap Singh Natak by Anant Waman Barve (Drama)
  
  
• Sobha by V S Joshi (Novel)
  
  

ORIYA

• Dasabarshara by Harekrishna Mahatab (history of national movement between '21 to '31)
  
  

PUNJABI

• Jivan Britante;Master Motta Singhji by Gurumukh Singh (Biography)
  
  

SINDHI

• Bandi Jiwan by Rijumal Bhawan Das Agnani (about conditions of revolutionaries in jail)
  
  
• Jinnah ka jawab by Chandra Gupta (Jinnah's reply to British on partition - I'm curious as to how this made it into the list)
  
  

TAMIL

• Viduthalai Por by C N Annadurai (Biography of E V Ramaswamy Naicker)
  
  

TELUGU

• Bharate Swatantra Prathama Yuddhamu by P S Acharaya (Biographies of freedom fighters who had take part in the 1857 war of independence)
  
  
• Purnaswtantram by C E Andrews (Need for freedoms)
  
  

URDU

• Qowl-e-Faisal (Statement by Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad in a Culcutta court and details of his arrest)
  
  
• Tarikh-e-Azad by Imdad Sadri (History of Indian National Army)
  
  
• Aseeran-e-Watan by Mushtaq Lukhnawi (Conditions of jails in UP and Punjab)
  
  

[Guest]

My own interest in colonial history is limited to the actual life of the people, rather than the politics and events. I have always been fascinated by the fact that a handful of goras managed to rule such a vast country for so long. I want to know what my ancestral Hindoo was like, what he thought, how he lived, why he allowed to happen what did happen. What was the englishman like? Having lived in UK for many years, I know them as they are today, but what about the typical gora sahab of 1760? Was it really like Lagaan or not?



I am always looking for books on the life of the common man and his master during those times. So far I have come across only one - "British Life In India", an anthology of sorts, published by Oxford India Paperbacks, edited by R.V. Vernede.



Does anyone else share this feeling that if the British came to India today they would be thrown back into the Arabian sea? Was colonization and empire a phenomenon of the middle ages only? Don't want to start on the Iraq angle, as that seems to be no different from the Muslim invasion of India, but on the insidious insinuation of a few opportunists into a society that led to total domination later. Anyone seen the serial "V" from the 70s? If you exchange the aliens for the British, it would fit the colonial scenario very well.



Anybody know of any other sources/books on the everyday life under colonial rule?

[acharya]

[url="http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1857nov/britind.htm"]http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1857nov/britind.htm[/url]



N O V E M B E R 1 8 5 7







British India

by Charles Creighton Hazewell





THE year 1757 was one of the gloomiest ever known to England. At home, the government was in a state of utter confusion, though the country was at war with France, and France was in alliance with Austria; these two nations having departed from their policy of two centuries and a half, in order that they might crush Frederic of Prussia, England's ally. Frederic was defeated at Kolin, by the Austrians, on the 18th of June, and a Russian army was in possession of East Prussia. A German army in British pay, and commanded by the "Butcher" hero of Culloden, was beaten in July, and capitulated in September. In America, the pusillanimity of the English commanders led to terrible disasters, among which the loss of Fort William Henry, and the massacre of its garrison, were conspicuous events. In India, the English were engaged in doubtful contest with the viceroy of Bengal, who was supported by the French. Even the navy of England appeared at that time to have lost its sense of superiority; for not only had Admiral Byng just been shot for not behaving with proper spirit, but a combined expedition against the coast of France ended in signal failure, and Admiral Holburne declined to attack a French fleet of Louisburg. No wonder that the British people readily believed an author who then published a work to establish the agreeable proposition, "that they were a race of cowards and scoundrels; that nothing could save them; that they were on the point of being enslaved by their enemies, and that they richly deserved their fate." Such a succession of disasters might well discourage a people, some of whom could recollect the long list of victories which commenced with Blenheim and closed with Malplaquet, and by which the arrogance of the Grand Monarque had been punished.



Had the insurgent Sepoys delayed action but a few weeks, they might have inaugurated their movement on the very centennial anniversary of the birth of British India.



There is nothing like the rule of the English in India to be found in history. It has been compared to the dominion which Rome held over so large a portion of the world; but the comparison has not the merit of aptness. The population of the Roman Empire, in the age of the Antonines, has been estimated at 120,000,000, including that of Italy. The population of India is not less than 150,000,000, without counting any portion of the conquering race. Rome was favorably situated for the maintenance of her supremacy, as she had been for the work of conquest. Her dominion lay around the Mediterranean, which Italy pierced, looking to the East and the West, and forming, as it were, a great place of arms, whence to subdue or to overawe the nations. Cicero called the Hellenic states and colonies a fringe on the skirts of Barbarism, and the description applies also to the Roman dominion; for though Gaul and Spain were conquered from sea to sea, and the legions were encamped on the Euphrates, and the valley of the Nile was as submissive to the Caesars as it had been to the Lagidae, yet the Mediterranean was the basis of Roman power, and a short journey in almost any direction from it would have taken the traveller completely from under the protection of the eagles. Not so is it with British India. From no European country is India so remote as from England. The two regions are separated by the ocean, by seas, by deserts, and by some of the most powerful nations. Their sole means of union are found in the leading cause of their separation. England owes her Indian empire to her empire of the sea. India will be hers just so long, and no longer, as she shall be able to maintain her naval supremacy. Those who predict her downfall in the East, either as a consequence of the natives throwing of her rule, or through a Russian invasion, forget that she entered India from the sea, and that until she shall have been subdued on that element it would be idle to think of dispossessing her of her Oriental supremacy. Were the long cherished dream of Russia to be realized, -- a dream that is said to have troubled the sleep of Peter, and which certainly haunted the mind of Catharine, -- and Russian proconsuls ruling on the Ganges, India could no more be to Russia what she has been to England, than the Crimea, had he kept it, could have been to Louis Napoleon what it is to the Czar. The condition of Indian dominion is ocean dominion.

But the great Aurungzebe was then on the throne of Delhi; and though the Moghul empire had declined somewhat from the standard set up by Akbar and maintained by Shah Jehan, the fighting merchants were soon taught that they were but as children in the hands of its chief. They were driven out of Bengal, and Aurungzebe thought of expelling them from his whole empire. The punishment of death was visited upon some of the East India Company's officers and servants by the Moghul. This severe lesson made a deep impression on the English. They resumed their humble position as traders on sufferance. They never thought of conquest again. It was not until every man who had been concerned in that business had long been in his grave, that the English dared so much as to think of making another war.

Every nation condemns conquest, and every nation with power to enter upon career of conquest rushes eagerly upon it. The harshest condemnation that has visited England because of her Indian successes has proceeded from nations who have never been backward in seizing the lands of other nations. She has been stigmatized as a usurper, and as having destroyed the independence of Indian states. The facts do not warrant these charges. She has rarely had a contest with any power which was not as much an intruder in India as herself. The Moghul dynasty was as foreign to India as the East India Company, or the house of Hanover; and the viceroys sent to rule over its vast and populous provinces had the same bases of power as were possessed by Clive, and Hastings, and Wellesley, and Bentinck, and Ellenborough, and Dalhousie. The Moghuls obtained Indian dominion by conquests that were rendered easy by Indian troubles; and this is precisely the history of England's Oriental dominion. What difference there is, is favorable to England. The Moghuls were deliberate invaders of India; the founder of that dynasty being an adventurer who sought an empire sword in hand, and won it by violence which no man had provoked. Baber was to India what the Norman William was to England. He long contemplated the conquest of the country, showing a wolf-like perseverance in hunting down his prey. For two-and-twenty years he had his object in view, and invaded India five times before he obtained the throne of Delhi.



It is yet too early to attempt to account for the rebellion of the Bengal army. That rebellion took the world by surprise, and nowhere more so, it would seem, than in England. A remarkable proof of this is to be found in the tone and language of the debate that took place in the British House of Commons on the 27th of July, in which Mr. Disraeli, Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Mr. Whiteside, Mr. T. Baring, Sir T. E. Perry, Mr. Mangles, Mr. Vernon Smith, and others, participated. That debate was most lively and interesting; and the reading of the ample report in the "Times" revives the recollection of the great field-days of the English senate. Mr. Disraeli's speech is a masterpiece, and would have done honor to times when eloquence was far more common than it is now. Yet the conclusion to which the careful reader of the report must come is, that neither Mr. Disraeli, nor the Premier, nor the President of the Board of Control, nor the Chairman of the Directors of the East India Company, nor any other of the speakers, had a definite idea of the cause of the sudden mutiny of the Sepoys. It is impossible not to admire Mr. Disraeli's talents, as displayed in this speech; and equally impossible is it to find in that speech anything, that an intelligent observer of Indian affairs can regard as settling the question, Why did the Sepoys of the Bengal army mutiny in 1857? Everything that he brought forward as a cause of the mutiny was distinctly proved not to be worthy of the name of a cause. Yet the men who could show that he had failed to clear up the mystery could themselves throw no light upon it. The government was especially ignorant of all that it should have known; and there is something almost ludicrous in the tone of the speech made by the President of the Board of Control.

The Mahometan rule was displaced by the British rule. The Mahometans were for centuries the aristocracy of India, standing to the genuine Indians in pretty much the same relation that the Normans held to the Saxons in England; only it is but justice to them to say, that they rarely bore themselves so offensively towards the Indians as the Normans were accustomed to bear themselves towards the English. They have never lost the recollection of their former statue, or ceased to sigh for its restoration. Nor is the time so very remote when they were yet great in the land. Old men among them can recollect when Tippoo Saib was treated as an equal by the English, and have not forgotten how powerful was his father, Hyder. Some few aged Mussulmans there may be yet living who heard from their sires or grandsires, who saw it with their mortal eyes, of the glories of the magnificent Aurungzebe, ere the Persian, or the Affghan, or the Mahratta had carried fire and sword into Shahjehanabad. Two not over-long lives would measure the whole interval of time between the punishment of the English by Aurungzebe and the mutiny at Meerut. Time enough has not yet elapsed to cause the Mahometans to forget what they have been, or to cease to hope that they may yet surpass their fathers.

[acharya]

Misreading Partition Road Signs



Hamza Ali Alvi



[About the author: Dr. Alvi is a retired academic and scholar from

Pakistan, who had held many academic and research positions

including UCLA, University of Denver (USA), University of Leeds

(UK), Reserve Bank of India, and so on. Due to his left leaning, he

was banned from Canada in 1972. For more information, please see

[url="http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sangat/HAMZABIO.htm"]http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/s...at/HAMZABIO.htm[/url]]





There are sadly many issues that stand in the way of a happier

relationship between India and Pakistan. Hopefully we, the people of

India and Pakistan, will find a way to resolve our differences to

inaugurate a new future of mutual friendship. Our different

perceptions of our shared history have, perhaps, contributed in some

measure to create barriers of prejudice between us. What is offered

here is only a modest attempt by a sociologist-cum-social

anthropologist to highlight some issues that could be looked at

again. It is not an alternative history.



The roots of the movement that culminated in the creation of

Pakistan lay in the 19th century crisis of the then dominant

Muslim `ashraf' (upper classes) of northern India, the descendents

of the immigrants from central Asia, Arabia and Iran.1 The crisis

was precipitated by the new Anglo-vernacular language policy of the

colonial regime that displaced Persian, the ashraf language. Two

different components of the ashraf were affected. The first of these

was the class of state officials, who had to take to English

education that was now needed for government jobs. We shall call

them the `salariat'. In a society without industrialisation and

professional management in the private sector, it was to the state,

the biggest employer, that the demands of this class were addressed.



The `salariat' was closely associated with the new English educated

professionals, especially in law for, parallel with the new language

policy, a new statute law was enforced. The salariat and the new

professionals (in law, medicine and other fields) shared a common

education and the emerging Anglo-vernacular culture. They formed a

relatively cohesive social stratum. In Gramsci's language, they were

an `auxiliary' class; not the biggest class in numbers but the most

articulate. They were at the heart of an intellectual ferment.

Members of this group, not infreque! ntly, were the sons (sometimes

daughters too) of landlords or rich peasants, who could afford to

put them through the higher education that they needed. This created

close links between the salariat, the new professionals and the

other classes.



The Muslim salariat of the early 19th century, brought up on Persian

rather than English, had begun to lose ground to the members of

certain Hindu service castes who took to the English language more

readily. The rivalry that ensued was not between all Hindus and all

Muslims, but only between the Muslim and the Hindu salariats, the

Muslim ashraf versus the Hindu service castes, such as the khatris,

kayasthas and Kashmiri brahmins in northern India or the kayasthas,

brahmins and baidyas in Bengal. The Muslim ashraf, therefore, began

asking for safeguards and quotas in jobs for the Muslims. They were

able to mobilise wide support in the society, especially through

their organic links with the landlords and r! ich peasants.

Religious ideology played no part in this nor did the rest of the

Muslim and the non-Muslim society have any direct stake in the

salariat politics. The Congress, speaking for the Indian salariat in

general (and the Hindu service castes in particular), voiced demands

for the `Indianisation' of the services, when top jobs were the

preserve of the British Indian bureaucracy.



Another component of the ashraf were the ulama, religious scholars,

who were steeped in Arabic and Persian learning and shari'a

(Islamic) law. They too came from the same general background as the

salariat and the new professionals. But their interests conflicted,

especially with regard to their attitudes towards the English

language and the scientific culture. Before, prospective members of

the Muslim salariat would be educated in Persian and Arabic at their

madrasas (religious seminaries). With the switch to English, that

clientele dropped off. The more prestigious among the ulama would!

issue religious decrees (fatwas) and mediate in disputes between the

members of the community. The introduction of the statute law,

written in English, displaced this role. Not surprisingly, the ulama

were militantly opposed to the English language, the culture of the

rulers and, indeed, the colonial regime itself. They bitterly

opposed the professionals, the salariat, and the Muslim

educationists for accepting English education and western learning.

The ulama and the mullahs were initially militant. They were subdued

after the suppression of the National Revolt of 1857 and retreated

into their seminaries. The Khilafat Movement led by Gandhi, who

implanted the religious idiom in modern Indian Muslim politics,

activated them again in 1918.



There was also a third component of the Muslim ashraf, namely, the

landlords, whose livelihoods were not affected directly by the new

language policy. The Muslim and the Hindu landlords received

government favours in return for their sup! port. Some landlords, as

individuals, did join the Muslim League or the Indian National

Congress, possibly motivated by the problems faced by their kinsmen

in the salariat or among the new professionals. This was not without

their ha1ving to face pressure or sanctions from the colonial

authorities for doing so.



The Muslim salariat and professionals, looked down upon the poor

Muslims, who were either urban artisans, notably weavers (the

julahas) or peasants. Some of the ulama did reach out to the poor.

But instead of grappling with their problems, all that they did was

to whip them up into religious frenzies. In the United Provinces

(UP), some lawyers from the julaha background did set up the `Mu'min

Ansar Party' and the `All-India Mu'min Conference' but these had

little impact on the national politics.



Sir Syed Ahmad Khan pioneered the cause of English education as well

as scientific thought amongst the Indian Muslims. The Muslim

reformers elsewhere in India emulated his work. Muslim educational

associations were set up everywhere. The ulama, hard hit by the

impact of the new Anglo-vernacular language policy, were bitterly

hostile to Sir Syed Ahmad's movement. He was misrepresented and

reviled by them in every possible way. His role and character have

been grossly misrepresented in the Indian nationalist literature

because of his opposition to the Indian National Congress. He

deserves to be judged more objectively.



Bankim Chandra Chatterjee has been highly acclaimed by some scholars

as a pioneer of Indian nationalism.4 Despite its offence to the

Muslim sensibilities, the Congress has adopted his song Vandé

Mataram as an anthem. It is instructive to compare his views with

those of Sir Syed Ahmad. Leaving aside, for the moment, Bankim's

violent hostility towards the Muslims, one aspect of his thought is

quite striking. He had declared that the British were not `our

enemies and we sho! uld not fight them'. Instead, he had stressed

that the British possessed knowledge that `we should acquire if we

ourselves were to progress'. Bankim (1838-94) was advocating a

generation later what Sir Syed Ahmad (1817-98) had preached before

him.



Bankim's classic play `Anandamath' sets out his ideas. T W Clark

describes it is the most important statement that Bankim made and

offers a translation of the final chapter. 5 Satyananda, the hero,

has killed in battle all the Muslim officers (Muslim soldiers having

all fled). The British remained. At that moment `He' (the voice of

Satyananda's Master, that of Bankim himself) orders Satyananda to

cease killing for only the British are left. Satyananda is

puzzled. "Why do you order me to cease?" he asks. To this `He'

replies: "your task is accomplished. The Muslim power is destroyed.

There is nothing else for you to do." Satyananda persists. "The

Muslim power has indeed been destroyed. But the domi! nion of the

Hindus has not yet been established. The British still hold

Calcutta." `He' replies: "The Hindu dominion will not be established

now". At this, Satyananda exclaims: "My Lord, if the Hindu dominion

is not going to be established now, who will rule?" `He'

replies: "The English will rule …Physical knowledge has disappeared

from our land. … So we must learn it from the foreigners. The

English are wise in this knowledge. And they are good teachers.

Therefore, we must make the English rule. …Your vow is fulfilled.

You have brought good fortune to your mother. You have set up a

British government. …There are no foes now. The English are friends

as well as rulers. And no one can defeat them in battle."



Bankim was advocating English education and accepting the British

rule just as Sir Syed Ahmad had done earlier. Bankim is honoured

while Sir Syed Ahmad is reviled for saying the same thing. This

extraordinary difference reveals the intellectual biases underlying

the Indian nationalist thought. There is, of course, a marked

difference between Sir Syed Ahmad and Bankim in one respect. As

Bankim's admirer Clark notes, "Bankim's references to Muslims are

generally unfriendly, and in many places unmistakably hostile." That

stands in marked contrast to Sir Syed Ahmad's attitude to the other

community.



Writing under the title `Bonds between Hindus and Muslims', Sir Syed

Ahmad says: "Centuries have passed that we two have lived on the

same earth, have eaten the produce of the same land, drunk the water

of the same rivers, breathed the air of the same one country. Hindus

and Muslims are not strangers to each other. As I have said many

times before, India is a beautiful bride and Hindus and Muslims are

its two eyes. Her beauty demands that her two eyes shall be

undamaged, whole (salamat) and equal".6 That was his call for Hindu-

Muslim Unity. We find no hostility towards the Hindus in his

writings. In his social life! too, he was free of communal

antipathy. He had many close Hindu friends. On the occasion of the

bismillah (an important rite of passage) ceremony of his four-year-

old grandchild, he made the boy sit in the lap of his close friend

Raja Jaikishandas, which was symbolic of their brotherly relations.7

His disagreement with the Congress is quite another kind of matter.



Sir Syed Ahmad based his opposition to democracy on a sociological

argument. Whereas, he argued, the English society is made up of free-

acting individuals, who are unconstrained by `community' loyalties,

in India, individuals are enclosed within institutionalised

communities. In this political arena, they do not (cannot) act as

free individuals for the society demands that they support

candidates of their own community. A Muslim has to vote for a fellow

Muslim and a Hindu for a fellow Hindu. That, he said, was a fact of

the Indian culture. Therefore, until the society and culture became

individualised (which may h! appen in time), democracy is unsuitable

for India. Given the cultural imperatives that would mean a

permanent majority of the Hindus over the Muslims. He concluded that

for the time being, it was useful to have the British as neutral and

impartial referees. He may be criticised for his faith in the

British impartiality. But he felt that there was no alternative.



Sir Syed Ahmad, unlike the generation of the Indian nationalists who

came after him, had no idea of the exploitative and destructive

impact of the colonial rule on India. Nevertheless, he was aware

that the British Indian bureaucracy was racist, rude and arrogant.

Himself a member of the ashraf aristocracy, he believed (naïvely)

that it was the aristocratic birth and breeding that made the

difference. He once said: "England is so far from us that we cannot

verify if some of these rude bureaucrats are not really sons of naïs

(barbers)." The pages of his journal Tahzib-al-Akhlaq are full of

trenchant criticism of the B! ritish Indian bureaucrats who

misbehaved towards the Indians. Maulana Mohammad Ali, in his

presidential Address at the Cocanada Congress meeting in 1923, gave

fulsome praise to Sir Syed Ahmad as a man of dignity and dealt

(inter alia) with the charge of servility towards the British. He

said: "A close study of his [Sir Syed Ahmad's] character leads me to

declare that he was far from possessing the sycophancy with which

some of his political critics have credited him".



Sir Syed Ahmad is not above criticism. Occasionally, he derisively

referred to the Bengal Congress's `bhadralok' politicians, who

attacked him, as `babus'. But surely that was no more than political

tit-for-tat! More serious is the matter of his conservative attitude

to women's education. For a man who had boldly taken on the

conservatives on most issues, it is a great pity that he did not do

better on this score. His views on this are quite unacceptable

today. Finally, even worse, was his `aristocratic' disdain for the

non-ashraf and the poor. Referring to the membership of the

viceroy's legislative council, he expressed his deeply rooted class

(caste?) prejudices when he said: "it is essential for the viceroy's

council to have members of a high social standing. Would our

aristocracy like that a man of low caste or insignificant origin,

though he may be a BA or MA and have the requisite ability, be in a

position of authority above them and have the power of making laws

that affect their lives and property?"



He was, after all, a product of his class and his times.



Sir Syed Ahmad is said to have had close affinity with Raja Ram

Mohan Roy, who himself was a great thinker and a rationalist. It has

been suggested that he was a regular reader of Roy's writings (in

Persian). Troll writes that "the personality and work of Ram Mohan

Roy were a formative influence in Sayyid Ahmad Khan's life… The

parallels between the ideas and working methods o! f the two men

could be mere coincidence, or the effects of a common historical

situation or perhaps a result of Sir Sayyid being directly

influenced by Ram Mohan Roy and his monotheistic Brahmo Samaj."9 Sir

Syed Ahmad, in turn, relates how, as a young boy, he looked with

great admiration, and from a respectful distance, at the famous

Bengali reformer, when the latter visited the Mughal Emperor in

Delhi in 1830 (ibid, p 60). It might be said that with the social

changes brought about by the colonial transformation of the Indian

society and with the rise of colonial capitalism,10 rationalism and

monotheistic ideas flourished all over India in the late 19th

century. This was also, for instance, the case with the Prarthana

Samaj of Ranadé and Bhandarkar in Maharashtra. These rationalist

movements attracted the English educated upper classes of India.



By the end of the 19th century, the newly educated Muslims began to

make their concerns felt. Mohsin-ul-Mulk (Sir Syed Ahmad's not ! so

distinguished successor at Aligarh) arranged a meeting of Muslim

notables with the viceroy on October 1, 1906 at Simla, where they

represented the Muslim demands to Lord Minto. In the eyes of the

Indian nationalists the mere fact of that meeting is a proof of a

British conspiracy to entice the Indian Muslims away from the

nationalist movement to pursue a policy of divide and rule.

Unfortunately, this has had the effect of making the Indian

nationalist historians impervious to all evidence of the material

facts behind theMuslim movement. In his presidential address at the

Cocanada Congress meeting, Maulana Mohammad Ali rashly spoke of the

Simla delegation as a `command performance'. This was taken to mean

that the Muslim movement was nothing more than a creation of the

colonial government's policy of `Divide and Rule'. It may well be

that Mohammed Ali had uttered this phrase on an impulse, for which

he was notorious. The Indian nationalist historians, with the rare

exception! of Bimal Prasad, have seized on Mohammad Ali's passing

(and misleading) remark as if it was a complete explanation of the

Indian Muslim politics.



The background to the 1906 delegation to the viceroy was an

announcement by John Morley, the secretary of state for India, that

his government proposed to introduce constitutional reforms in

India. When Mohsin-ul-Mulk heard about it, he wrote to Archbold,

principal of Aligarh College, who was then vacationing at Simla. In

his letter, Mohsin-ul-Mulk emphasised the importance of the occasion

and asked Archbold to inquire whether Minto would receive a

delegation of Indian Muslims, who wished to put before him their

views about the projected constitutional reforms. The viceroy

agreed. That initiative, as Bimal Prasad has emphasised (and

documented), came entirely from Mohsin-ul-Mulk; not even from

Archbold, let alone the British. Mohammad Ali's phrase `command

performance' was baseless and mischievous.



When Mohsin-ul-Mulk got t! he green light from Simla, a Memorial was

prepared and discussed with some Muslim leaders at Lucknow. The big

issue of the day that concerned both the viceroy and the Muslims of

the new province of East Bengal and Assam was the powerful ongoing

agitation to annul the Partition of Bengal. Nawab Salimullah of

Dacca and Nawab Ali Choudhury insisted at Lucknow that the Memorial

should ask for an assurance that the Partition would not be

annulled. But Aligarh was not interested in that issue, which was

not even mentioned in the Memorial. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca,

therefore, refused to join the delegation although Nawab Ali

Choudhury did.



The viceroy too appears to have been disappointed that the Bengal

Partition issue was not included in the Memorial. Minto took it up

on his own bat. In his reply, he reminded "the Mahomedan community

of Eastern Bengal and Assam [that they] can rely as firmly as ever

on British justice and fair-play." The delegation had asked for

separate elector! ates and a fairer quota of representation in the

viceroy's council, his executive council, in provincial councils and

on senates and syndicates of the Indian Universities. They had

reiterated the demand for a Muslim University. They sought a Muslim

quota in the government service and the appointment of Muslim judges

on the Bench. These were all predictable demands of the Muslim

salariat and professionals. In response, Lord Minto "promised …

nothing, except sympathy."12 So much for the `command performance'!



A word about the separate electorates. The Muslim candidates in

elections complained of difficulty in getting elected, even from

Muslim majority constituencies. Due to the property and tax

qualifications, Muslim voters were far fewer than their proportion

in the population. The Simon Commission Report points out that in

the `governor's provinces' of India, the average franchise extended

to no more than 2.8 per cent of the population. This proportion was

heavily weighted i! n favour of those who owned property. The Report

says: "Adoption of property qualifications as a basis for the

franchise gave a predominance and sometimes a monopoly of votes to

certain classes of the population. …In the Central Provinces, the

brahmin and the bania have in proportion to their numbers not less

than 100 times as many votes as the mahar." The report speaks

of "the total exclusion of … the under-tenants in Bengal". Separate

electorates were a defence against such non-representation.

Conversely, joint electorates would have the advantage of drawing

minorities into the mainstream of political life. Separate

electorates could be looked upon, at best, as a short-term remedy.



Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, sidelined by the Simla deputationists,

tried to retrieve his initiative by calling a meeting (to coincide

with the meeting of the Muslim Education Society) in Dacca in

December 1906 to start an All India Muslim political association. On

December 30,! the All India Muslim League was founded. But, to his

chagrin, the Aligarh-UP group, led by Aligarh's Viqar-ul-Mulk,

hijacked the new organisation by taking all the top posts in the

executive committee, leaving Nawab Salimullah of Dacca high and dry

again.



The early Congress was not very different; its demands were similar,

namely, (1) the Indianisation of the services and promotion of

Indians to higher positions within the service; and (2) greater

representation of Indians in governing bodies, such as the viceroy's

executive council. These demands were identical to those of the

Muslim salariat and the new professional classes but applied in a

wider context. Neither party really represented the urban and rural

labouring poor. The so-called `mass politics' that emerged after

Gandhi, sought no more than to make the peasant speak in the name of

the Congress. He did little to make the Congress speak in the name

of the peasant. By declaring that the landlords were the `tru!

stees' for the peasantry,13 Gandhi put forward a philosophy that

reduced the peasantry to zero. The Congress claim of a `mass basis'

is a myth. There was a basic similarity in the class bases and

demands of both the Muslim League and the early Congress.



The Muslim movement was not the only one of its kind in India.The

Dravidian movement in south India was very similar to it.14 InTamil

Nadu, the brahmins dominated the salariat and the professions.

Although the Brahmins were three-four per cent of the population of

the Madras Presidency, they monopolised the government services and

places on the local boards. The non-brahmins, or the dravidians as

they called themselves, rebelled against the brahmin dominated

political and social system. Their sense of a separate identity was

promoted by the discovery by the linguists during the first two

decades of the 20th century that all four southern languages, Tamil,

Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, formed a distinct, dravidian,

linguist! ic group, quite independent of the northern Indian

Sanskrit that came to the south with the brahmins.Thus grew a sense

of the Dravidian identity. The birth of the Dravidian Movement is

dated to November 1916, when an organisation was formed which

eventually evolved into the anti-brahmin Justice Party. E V

Ramaswami Naicker, who was known as the Periyar, initiated a

Dravidian national movement with secessionist objectives. At the

Madras session of the Muslim League, he was seated in a place of

honour on the platform. His secessionist movement did not succeed as

he was unable to rally people other than those of Tamil Nadu. But

his movement transformed the politics of Tamil Nadu.



The Muslim League, set up in 1906, went through far reaching changes

from about 1910. A more radical generation of Muslim Leaguers had

come up, very different in their mood. There was a shift too in the

social base of the League. There was an increased participation in

it from the more modest strata of ! the society. Far fewer of them

were from the substantial landed families."The great majority (of

them) belonged to the class which occasionally had a small pittance

in rents from land but, generally, in order to survive, had to find

employment in service or the professions."15 The Muslim League had

found its enduring class base, even though some landlords (like the

Raja of Mahmudabad) and also some businessmen played a part in it.

Instead of government patronage, the new Muslim League earned its

hostility. We are told that the Raja of Mahmudabad "became more

cautious after governor Meston threatened to take away his

taluqdari `sanad' in 1916."



The centre of gravity of the Muslim League shifted away from the

Aligarh conservatives to a relatively more radical leadership based

in Lucknow, though the bulk of them were educated at Aligarh. By

1912, the energetic and radical Wazir Hasan, took over as general

secretary. A new phase began in the polit! ical style of the League

and it's attitude towards the Congress. As Rahman puts it: "The

growing number of young professional men in the ranks of the Muslim

League helped to produce reorientations in the League's relation

with the Hindu community".16 By 1910, the Muslim League Constitution

was revised, bringing it in line with that of the Congress, except

for the League's commitment to separate electorates and weightage

for the Muslims. There was by now a realisation in the Muslim League

that they would not make much headway against the British unless

they built a united front with the Congress. Calls for Hindu-Muslim

unity were reiterated.



The Muslim League looked for someone who could build bridges between

the League and the Congress. Jinnah was the obvious choice. Although

not a member of the Muslim League, he had participated, by

invitation, in the meeting of the Muslim League Council in 1912,

where proposals for a new (more radical) Muslim! League constitution

were formulated. Jinnah had made several suggestions that were

accepted.17 Jinnah had a high standing in the Indian National

Congress and was ideally placed to bring the two movements together.

In October 1913, when Wazir Hasan and Maulana Mohammad Ali were in

London to see the secretary of state for India (who, in the event,

refused to see them), they took the opportunity to meet Jinnah. The

two persuaded him to join the Muslim League and work for the

Congress-League Unity. Jinnah agreed, provided that his commitments

to the Congress would remain.



Soon after joining the Muslim League in October 1913, Jinnah worked

hard for the Congress-League unity, which was sealed by the Lucknow

Pact and adopted at a Joint Session of the Congress and the League

in 1916.18 By virtue of the Pact, the Congress accepted some Muslim

demands, including separate electorates with specified province-wise

weightage for the ! Muslims that proved to be controversial. The

Muslim minority provinces, like UP, were given a bigger share of

seats than that provided under the Morley-Minto Reforms. This was

done at the cost of Bengal, which had a Muslim population of 52 per

cent but was given a share of only 40 per cent of seats, and Punjab,

which had a Muslim population of 54.8 per cent but was given a share

of only 50 per cent. The United Provinces with a Muslim population

of only 14 per cent was given a share of no less than 30 per cent.

After all the UP elite were running the show.



The justified criticism of the Lucknow Pact should not make us

underestimate its achievements. It succeeded in bringing the

Congress and the Muslim League together on a single platform to

fight British Imperialism. It was the Muslim League and Jinnah who

had initiated that bid for unity. Jinnah was a unifier and not a

separatist, as generally suggested. He was to persist in that

difficult role, d! espite setbacks, for a quarter of a century until

the point was reached when, despite all his efforts, unity was no

longer an option.



The Lucknow Pact also covered shared demands of the Congress and the

League vis-a-vis the colonial government. The pact sought a majority

of elected members in legislatures. It demanded that in the

provinces, four-fifths should be elected members and only one-fifth

nominated, and that the members of councils should be `elected

directly by the people on as broad a franchise as possible'.

Likewise, it provided that four-fifths of the members of the

Imperial legislative council should be elected. It demanded that

half of the members of the governor-general's executive council be

Indians elected by elected members of the Imperial legislative

council. Thus contrary to the popular opinion, the Lucknow Pact was

not just about concessions to the Muslim League. It also spelt out

the basis on which the Congress and the Muslim League could work

togethe! r as close allies. The significance of the Lucknow Pact is

greater than is generally supposed.



The contentious part of the Lucknow Pact was its acceptance of

separate electorates. Jinnah had always preferred joint electorates.

At the annual Indian National Congress of 1910, he moved a

resolution rejecting separate electorates for local bodies. But

after he joined the Muslim League, having failed to persuade his

colleagues to accept joint electorates, he acquiesced in what the

party demanded. He was probably also influenced by the fact that

after the Morley-Minto reforms had enacted separate electorates,

senior Congress leaders were reconciled to the idea. As Bimal Prasad

points out, in 1911 Gokhalé "again made it clear that in his opinion

separate electorates for the Muslims were necessary in view of the

failure of sufficient numbers of Muslims to get into the legislative

councils…" (op cit, p 123).



By the end of the first world war, there was a radical change in!

the Muslim movement, when the ulama were activated and brought

centre stage. The Khilafat movement (1918-1924), in the hands of

Mahatma Gandhi, torpedoed the new political dynamic of the joint

struggle of the Muslim League and the Congress against the colonial

rule that was set in motion by the Lucknow Pact. It also undermined

the secular leadership of the Muslim League. Instead, it helped to

mobilise one section of the Sunni ulama, namely, the hardliner

Deobandis, on the basis of some false assumptions about the post-

war `hostility' of the British towards the Ottoman sultan, their

khalifa. The movement capitalised on the pan-Islamic sentiments

amongst the Indian Deobandi Muslims. These sentiments were centred

on the role of the Ottoman Sultan as the `Universal Khalifa'. It

ignored the fact that the Ottoman Sultan was not recognised as the

Khalifa by the populist Barelvi tradition of the Indian Sunni Islam

(arguably, the majority of Indian Muslims). T! he Barelvis, like the

Arab nationalists, rejected the claims of the Ottoman Sultan to be

the Khalifa on the doctrinal ground that he was not of Quraysh

descent.



The Khilafat movement got off the ground after Gandhi decided to

take it over, becoming, in his own words, the `dictator' of the

movement. Leaders of the movement, like Abdul Bari of Firangi Mahal,

Ansari, Shaukat Ali and Mohammd Ali, sought guidance from him for

every action.20 It is difficult to discuss critically the role of

Mahatma Gandhi, a man who became a saint. But until the end of first

world war, Gandhi had yet to establish himself as a major Indian

political leader. His early moves can best be understood in the

context of his attempts to achieve that end. He became the

undisputed leader of the Indian nationalist movement by the time he

had finished with the Khilafat and the non-cooperation movements.

Gandhi's movement undermined the secular leadership of the Muslim

League an! d, for the time being, established the mullahs in that

place. Gandhi even helped the mullahs to set up a political

organisation of their own (in 1919), namely the Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-

Hind, which was reincarnated in Pakistan as the Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-

Islam, the extreme hardliner fundamentalists who were instrumental

in the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.



Thanks to Gandhi, the Khilafat movement implanted the religious

idiom in the modern Indian Muslim politics for the first time. A key

moment in that was when Ansari organised an invasion of the Delhi

Session of the All Indian Muslim League in 1918 by the mullahs.

Ansari, chairman of the AIML reception committee, convened a meeting

of the ulama with the help of the seminaries at Deoband and Firangi

Mahal, on the day preceding the AIML annual conference, without the

knowledge of his Muslim League colleagues. They met at the Fatehpuri

mosque in Delhi.21 At that meeting, mullah fanaticism was whipped

up, preparing them for the take over next day. The mullah invasion

of the League meeting (referred to, absurdly, by some authors as an

advent of the `masses') came as a surprise to the League leadership.

When the resolutions about Khilafat were brought forward, it became

clear that there was little point in arguing about the substantive

issues with the mullahs.



Jinnah, realising that, raised some legalistic and procedural

objections. But he knew that the game was lost. To make his point he

staged a walkout from the meeting. It was agreed that the Raja of

Mahmudabad and Wazir Hasan would not walkout with him. They stayed

behind to fight moves to remove them from their positions of

president and general secretary of the AIML. Many of the mullahs

drifted away after passing the controversial resolutions and the two

league leaders were comfortably re-elected. Both resigned a few

months later because they could not work with the mullah infested

League.



Directly, as a ! reaction to the Khilafat movement and the

politicisation of religion, there followed in the 1920s a long

period of the worst communal rioting that India had ever known. In

1924, the Turkish Republican Nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal

abolished the Ottoman Khilafat. The Khilafat Committee, which for a

time had become more influential than the League, disintegrated in

total confusion. The political influence of the Ulama `declined

swiftly' and the Muslim League returned to its secular concerns. It

must be emphasised that it was only after the partition that Islamic

ideology began to be fostered in Pakistan; it was attributed

retrospectively to the Muslim League to justify the claim that

Pakistan was created to establish an Islamic state. The fact is that

the rare attempts to place `Islamic ideology' on the agenda of the

Muslim League were firmly scotched by the leadership.22 The Indian

Muslim movement was driven by the concrete objectives of the social

grou! ps that were involved, rather than by some abstract ideology.



Jinnah soon reappeared on the Muslim League platform. According to

Khaliquzzaman, "the time had come to reinforce the Muslim League as

the Khilafat Committee was on its last legs. …We decided to invite

Jinnah, who had attended only one meeting of the Council of the

League in Calcutta in 1919, after his walkout in December 1918, to

preside over the Muslim League session at Lahore in May 1924."23

However, by that time the nature of the Indian provincial politics

and the centre of gravity of power in the Muslim League had changed

radically.



When the Muslim League was set up, the League's role was that of a

pressure group to articulate the Muslim demands. The Montagu-

Chelmsford `reforms' completely altered the dynamics of Indian

politics and brought about a shift away from the Muslim minority

provinces (e g, the UP ) to the Muslim majority provinces, where the

Muslims could form provincial governments. Under ! dyarchy,

ministers now had some power, however limited, to dole out resources

and jobs. Political leaders and parties were no longer confined to

being just pressure groups. They could now dispense patronage. The

influence of the salariat in the Muslim minority provinces declined.

The Muslim majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal, notably the

former, acquired a new importance. David Page offers an excellent

account of this, especially of the emergence of the Punjabi

dominance in the Indian Muslim politics.24



There was now a new logic to the role of political parties and

politicians. What is not so widely perceived is that there were also

shifts in the class base of Muslim politics, which was different in

Punjab and in Bengal. The feudal classes were dominant in Punjab.

The Punjabi Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landlords joined with the

powerful biraderies (extended families) of the jat peasants of east

Punjab (led by Choudhry Chhotu Ram) under the unionist ! Party. A

remarkable man, Sir Fazl-i-Husain, who was from an urban middle

classbackground but who understood the needs of the feudal classes,

led that party. Sir Faz-i-Husain also made a point of patronising

the very weak Muslim salariat in Punjab, especially those from rural

background. The majority of the urban population in Punjab consisted

of the Hindu salariat, professionals and traders, who were the

mainstay of the Hindu Sabha. The Punjab Muslim League barely

existed. Fazl-i-Husain allied with it also because it had its uses.

He was a skilful, pragmatic politician who practised political

accommodation as long as his basic interests were taken care of.

Along with his feudal constituents, he was favoured by the colonial

regime and this greatly strengthened his hands.



Jinnah and Fazl-i-Husain and his Unionist Party, each had something

to offer to the other. They entered into a tacit alliance, though

they detested each other. It was a marriage of convenience. The

Unionist P! arty was a secular, inter-communal regional party of the

Punjabi landed magnates, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and the biraderis of

the well-off Jat peasants of East Punjab.25 The Punjabi landed

magnates were parochial and hankered after the autonomy of Punjab

within the Raj. They were doing very well from the patronage of the

colonial regime, to which they were completely loyal. Due to the

fragility of their inter-communal and feudal alliance with in

Punjab, they did not see any wisdom in extending themselves beyond

Punjab because that would import problems into their comfortable set

up. Jinnah's Muslim League was a channel through which they could

relate to the all India developments, but on the Unionist terms. Sir

Fazl-i-Husain and his successor Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan made it a

point to keep the Punjab Muslim League under their tight control.



Jinnah badly needed the deal with the Unionists. He could not claim

to be the spokesman of all the Indian Muslims if he could not say

th! at Punjab was behind him. He needed the Unionists to announce

that theirs was a Muslim League government. It mattered little if

everyone knew that this was a fiction. He did not seek power over

Punjab. His single concern was to legitimise the `representative'

role of the All India Muslim League.The Punjab Muslim League itself

barely existed. As late as February 1940, Khaliquzzaman was to

report that "we also discussed the formation of a Muslim League in

Punjab" (op cit p 233).



Some influential Unionists even dreamt of an independent dominion of

Punjab. Sir Sikandar Hayat met Winston Churchill at Cairo in the

summer of 1941-1942 (sic), as Noor Ahmad has reported.26 On his

return, Sikandar Hayat told his cabinet colleagues that he had put

it to Churchill that loyal Punjab deserves to be given the option of

being an independent dominion or be included in an independent

dominion with Sindh, Baluchistan and NWFP (provinces that Punjab

could easily dominate). He said that he did no! t know if Churchill

was persuaded of this but that it was significant that in his March

1942 proposals Churchill had included the option that provinces be

allowed to opt for separate dominion status. Some Unionists expected

that they would be allowed to form an independent Punjab `with Hindu

and Sikh support', for which Khizr Tiwana held on to his premiership

to the bitter end.



The picture in Bengal was quite different. Bengal was a land of

(mainly Muslim) small peasants. When the East Bengal Muslim League

was first set up in 1911, its leadership was in the hands of the

Urdu/Persian speaking immigrant Muslim ashraf, such as the Dacca

Nawab family, who were remote from the Bengal peasants. By the end

of first world war , the more dynamic Bengali professionals,

presumably from the rich peasant rather than the zamindar

background, became the leaders. Amongst them was Fazlul Haq, who was

to play an important role in mobilising the support of the rich pe!

asants. The peasantry or the `praja' ranged from quite large tenants

(`jotedars'), who had their land cultivated by sharecroppers

(`bhargadars'), especially in north Bengal, to small holders, often

with tiny holdings, who predominated in the `Active Delta' in the

south. Virtually all sections of the overwhelmingly Muslim Bengal

peasantry and the salariat, along with the urban poor, were badly

hit by the economic conditions in the aftermath of first world

war.27 The insertion of Bengali agriculture into the global economy,

by virtue of Bengal's dependence on jute as a cash crop, had made

the province highly vulnerable to fluctuations in the market.



These economic pressures brought about a radicalisation of the

Bengal Muslim politics. There was an urgent case for reform of the

tenancy laws. Following the province-wide agitationfor reform of

theTenancy Act, the colonial government introduced a TenancyBill in

1923 to amend the Act. The radical element in the Bengal Muslim

salar! iat leadership, with the jotedars and the small peasants,

supported the Bill. But, sadly, the Congress-Swaraj Party, a Hindu

zamindar dominated party in Bengal, successfully killed the bill.

Despite its radical rhetoric, the Bengal Congress leadership

shamefully backed the parasitical zamindars.



By the late 1920s, Fazlul Haq and other new generation Muslim

leaders plunged into mobilising the Bengali tenants. The Indian

nationalist historians have played down the class aspect of the

struggle (vis-a-vis Zamindars, mainly Hindus) and tend to represent

the Bengali peasant struggle as a `communal' issue. However, against

the background of a `spontaneous' praja (tenant) movement in the

1920s, the Nikhil Banga Praja Samity (All -Bengal Tenants' Party)

was organised by Fazlul Haq and the new political leadership. The

Bengal Provincial Muslim League also came under their control. The

Muslim Zamindars, hostile to this movement, together with some top

professionals organised a Uni! ted Muslim Party (with Suhrawardy as

its secretary and Khwaja Nazimuddin as one of its stalwart members)

to oppose it. Jinnah's main concern, as in Punjab, was to maintain

the claim of the All India Muslim League (and himself) to be the

sole representative of the Indian Muslims. He tried to mediate

between the two sides in the name of Bengal unity, but was

unsuccessful. The Nikhil Banga Praja Samity changed its name in 1936

to the Krishak Praja Party and prepared to contest the 1937

elections. Zamindari abolition without compensation was at the top

of the KPP manifesto.



The KPP, with its petty bourgeois leadership, failed to mount a

sufficiently strong campaign amongst the poor peasantry, and won

only slightly more than 30 per cent of the seats. Their excuse was

that the voting rules were too restrictive. That was not true for,

in 1946, with the same voting qualifications, the Muslim League

General Secretary, Abul Hashim, organised a landslide! victory for

the Muslim League. Under the 1935 act, a person who paid six annas

(one rupee being 16 annas) under the Village Chowkidari Act was

entitled to vote. That was a low limit that gave the poor peasants

(but not the landless) the vote. In 1937, the landlords dominated

the Muslim League, which won almost 30 per cent of the Muslim seats,

with independents taking 35 per cent. The Muslim League then settled

for a coalition government with the KPP, with Fazlul Haq as the

Prime Minister. That was just about enough to sustain the claim that

the AIML and Jinnah were the sole representatives of the Indian

Muslims. Bengal was the only province where the Muslim League (under

the Dacca Nawab family) got respectable results in the 1937

elections. It did quite badly elsewhere.



When the Simon Commission was appointed, the Indian public opinion

rejected it universally. Jinnah saw that as an opportunity for a

united struggle against the colonial rule. After consultation with

the Cong! ress president, Srinivas Iyengar, he convened a meeting of

30 prominent Muslim leaders to consider the Muslim position on the

future constitution. What emerged came to be known as the Delhi

Muslim Proposals.28 To get over the main hurdle in the way of unity

with the Congress, Jinnah used all his powers of persuasion to get

his Muslim colleagues to accept joint electorates (which he himself

preferred) on the condition that the Muslim representation in Punjab

and Bengal shall be in accordance with the population and that in

the central legislature the Muslim representation shall not be less

than a third. This was also conditional on the acceptance by the

Congress that (1) Sindh shall be separated from Bombay and

constituted as a separate province; and (2) Reforms shall be

instituted in the NWFP and Baluchistan to place them on the same

footing as the other provinces in India. The package was to be

accepted or rejected as a whole.



Many Muslim leaguers, not unreasonably, bel! ieved that the joint

electorates would work against them. Sir Muhammad Shafi, Fazl-i-

Husain's protégé, got the Punjab group to split the party and

organise their own separate `Muslim League' session in Lahore. Shafi

rightly held that Jinnah had underestimated the opposition among the

Muslims to the abandonment of separate electorates. Although most

members of the League Council stuck loyally with Jinnah at that

critical time, they had their reservations about this issue.

Announcing the Delhi Muslim proposals, Jinnah himself acknowledged

that "the overwhelming majority of Mussalmans firmly and honestly

believe that (separate electorates) are the only method by which

they can be secure".29 Also, the Shafi League and the Unionists were

not prepared to boycott the Simon Commission. Fazl-i-Husain was

determined to isolate Jinnah but failed.



The Delhi Muslim proposals were considered by the (Motilal) Nehru

Committee, which was appointed in February 1928 by the Delhi All

Parties Conference "to determine the principles of the constitution

of India". The committee recommended adult franchise with joint

electorates. It also recommended the reservation of seats for the

Muslims in the Muslim minority provinces, but not in the majority

provinces (Punjab and Bengal), with similar reservation of seats for

the Hindus in the NWFP where they were in a minority. The committee

strongly recommended the separation of Sindh from Bombay and normal

provincial status for the NWFP and Baluchistan. But at a convention

at Lucknow in August 1928, where the Muslim League was not

represented,30 the committee's original recommendations were

effectively reversed at the behest of the Hindu Mahasabha, which

dominated the Lucknow meeting.



At the subsequent 10 day Calcutta Convention in December 1928, a

battle royal ensued between the Muslim League and the Hindu

Mahasabha over those issues. Sadly, despite its earlier support, the

Congress did not honour its own commitment! s about Sindhh,

Baluchistan and the NWFP. The Congress delegates just kept silent

and watched the show. The Mahasabha vetoed further discussion of the

proposal, on the ground that this was settled at Lucknow. The Muslim

League, claimed Jinnah, was not represented at Lucknow. But,

tragically (as one might now say with the benefit of the hindsight)

the Congress went along with the Mahasabha, betraying the principles

that the Nehru Committee had spelt out. The Hindu Mahasabha would

sooner accept separate electorates than agree to the democratic

reorganisation of the provinces.



For Jinnah, this betrayal by the Congress was a terrible blow. He

had staked all for the sake of unity and had even isolated himself

from his Muslim supporters by abandoning joint electorates. The

breakdown of his marriage at that time no doubt compounded his

bitterness and sense of isolation. This was a turning point and the

subsequent developments led inexorably to the final parting.



After the ! failure of the Muslim League and the victory of the

Congress in the 1937 elections, there was bitterness among the

Indian Muslims at what they perceived to be the communal

partisanship of the rightwing Congress ministries that were

installed in the provinces. These factors came together to bring

about a total collapse in Jinnah's (and the Muslim League's) belief

in the good faith of the Congress and its independence from the

Mahasabha, especially in matters concerning the Muslims.



Now, faced with a situation in which the Hindu Mahasabha could wield

a veto over the Congress decisions, Jinnah was bitterly

disillusioned. The mood for cooperation and unity with the Congress

gave way to one of hostility. The Indian Nationalist historians tend

to explain these developments purely in terms of Jinnah's personal

ambition and his `intransigence', which are taken as axiomatic. If

we dispassionately look at Jinnah's role in Indian history, what we

find is his consistent pursuit of nati! onal unity on the basis of

agreed demands, even at a grave risk to his position. The breaking

point for Jinnah came with the betrayal at Calcutta, and there was

no turning back.



There was little hope left now of achieving any understanding with

the Mahasabha dominated Congress, as far as the Muslim issues were

concerned. Thoughts turned to the idea of a separate homeland. This

was the climate in which the 1940 `Pakistan Resolution' was passed.

Its full implications are not obvious, especially in Pakistan. One

can only be mystified by the fact that the Resolution says nothing

about the shape that the centre would take. Some scholars believe

that this was done to allow for some space for later negotiation.

But what options were there? The future direction was `over-

determined' by the anxieties and concerns of the feudal barons of

Punjab. For them, the Partition was the only acceptable option. The

situation was already beyond the powers of even such a formidable

negotiator ! as Jinnah. The die was cast.



There were by now unmistakable signs that the British were well and

truly on the way out. In their place loomed the spectre of the rule

of the Congress Party, which was firmly committed to radical land

reform. If the Congress came to power in Punjab and Sindh, it would

break up the feudal structures there. The Cambridge educated Mumtaz

Daulatana was the first to jump off the sinking Unionist ship in

1943. Others soon followed. Their option was to take over the Muslim

League and work for the partition of India. The preoccupation of the

feudal classes with the danger of land reforms, in case they were to

find themselves under a Congress government,was confirmed to me in

February 1951 in Dacca by Feroze Khan Noon, who was then the

governor of East Pakistan. In the course of an informal conversation

over lunch, to which he had invited me, when Nehru's name came up in

the conversation, he said to me: "Jawaharlal comes from a good

family. But he ! has surrounded himself by communists. They are out

to destroy the great landed families of India. Thank god, they

cannot touch us here."



By 1945, most Unionists had moved over to the MuslimLeague in time

to contest the forthcoming elections from their own constituencies.

In Sindh, it was likewise. In October 1942, Jinnah had given his

blessings to a ministry of big landlords, which was formed by Ghulam

Husain Hidayatullah in the name of the Muslim League. That ministry

continued. Jinnah despised and detested them all but he had no other

option. It was the power of the landed magnates of the Indus plain

and the powerful campaign in Bengal leading to the landslide victory

in the 1946 elections that created Pakistan. Religious ideology

played no part in this, as indeed, it had never done, except during

the brief interlude of the Gandhi led Khilafat movement. The role of

the `pirs' (saints) of Punjab and Sindh in the elections has

prompted some historians to jump to the con! clusion that it

signified the religious appeal of the Pakistan slogan. Nothing could

be further from the truth. The pirs in question were big landowners

in their own rights and had jumped on to the Muslim League bandwagon

because they were concerned about the Congress's plans for land

reforms. However, due to their religious power, the pirs did

instruct their followers to vote for the Muslim League candidates.



There is a myth too about the `Aligarh students' who travelled round

Punjab and Sindh to mobilise the peasants for Pakistan. A group of

Aligarh students did go round (some of whom I personally know). The

landlords or their lawyers managed their tour. They would give a

speech or two in district or sub-district towns. Only the very

naïve, who have no idea of how the Punjabi and Sindhi feudal society

works, will take this to mean `mass ncontact'.



The picture in Bengal was very different. The Muslim feudal families

had led the Bengal Muslim Lea! gue since its inception. This was

challenged by the rise of Fazlul Haq and the KPP, which had a base

among the rich peasants. After the 1937 elections, the KPP and the

Muslim League formed a coalition government. This was an `alliance'

of conflicting class interests. Fazlul Haq was soon isolated. By

this time (in 1938), H S Suhrawardy, a minister in the government,

had assumed the charge of the Muslim League organisation. In 1943,

Abul Hashim, a man who professed a confused mixture of socialism and

Islam, was elected as the party's secretary. Suhrawardy and Abul

Hashim played key roles in the unsuccessful attempt to create an

united independent Bengal with the support of the Sarat Bose faction

of the Bengal Congress and Jinnah. The Congress leadership vetoed

the plan. During the 1945-46 elections, when Suhrawardy kept himself

in Calcutta, Abul Hashim, organised an extraordinary campaign

amongst the poor peasants of Bengal on economic issues. This res!

ulted in a massive and unprecedented landslide victory for the

Muslim League. Religious ideology played no part in it.



In Bengal, the peasants, who were overwhelmingly Muslim, were

enmeshed in the colonial (globalised) cash economy. Their immediate

conflict was with the traders and moneylenders, who were

overwhelmingly Hindu. It is a tribute to the Bengali Muslim League

leadership, especially to Abul Hashim, who concentrated on the

economic issues and did not allow the elections to degenerate into a

Hindu-Muslim communal conflict – though in some places such

incidents did occur. The issues that were brought to the fore in the

election campaign included the peasant demand for settlement of the

accumulated debt owed to the moneylenders. The people were also

promised some protection from the traders who manipulated prices.

There was also the demand for the abolition of zamindari without

compensation, a promise fulfilled in 1951.



Unlike in 1937! , these elections reached down to the poor peasants.

The Bengal Muslim League won 114 seats out of the 121 Muslim seats

(as against only 39 in 1937). However, Abul Hashim had served his

purpose for the powerful rightwing politicians. By February 1947,

they appointed another man as acting general secretary of the League

and Abul Hashim found himself in his village in Burdwan. The Dacca

Nawab family was back in the saddle.



The stage was now set for the partition. The East Bengal, Punjab and

Sindh elections demonstrated that Islamic ideology did not play any

part in the success of the Muslim League and the creation of

Pakistan. Could the Partition have been avoided? This is a favourite

question of our Indian friends. It is not a useful question anymore.

History does not retrace its steps. We must look forward and ask

ourselves what we can do to live in peace and friendship with each

other.



Address for correspondence: halavi@c...



Notes



The Muslim ashraf were concentrated in UP and Bihar. With the decay

of the pre-colonial state that they dominated (especially in the

18th century) and with the rising power and prosperity of Bengal

under the East India Company (EIC), many Muslim ashraf migrated

eastwards, and found employment in Murshidabad or with the EIC and

settled down in West Bengal. They took with them their languages,

Urdu and Persian. There were few Muslim ashraf elsewhere in India,

except for Hyderabad under the Nizam.

A vivid picture of the divided family interests and relationships is

portrayed, with great empathy, by (the late) Khadija Mastoor in her

prize winning Urdu novel Aangan, which has been published in an

English translation under the title The Courtyard, Lahore, 2001.

W Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India, London, 1946, pp 228-29.

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World,

London, 1986, Ch 3: `The Moment of Departure – Culture and Power in

the Thought of Bankim Chandra', pp 54 ff.

A translation of the relevant parts of Anandamath by T W Clark will

be found in The Role of Bankim Chandra in the Development of

Nationalism, in C H Phillips (ed) Historians of India, Pakistan and

Ceylon, London, 1961, p 442 ff.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, `Hindu aur Musalmanon mein Irtibat' (Bonds

Between Hindus and Muslims), Maqalat-e-Sir Syed, Vol 15, Lahore

1963, p 41.

David Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation, Delhi, 1996, p 302.

The Indian Annual Register, 1923, Vol I, p 25.

C W Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, OUP, Karachi and Delhi, 1979, p 18,

note 75.

For the concept of colonial capitalism c f (1) Hamza Alavi, `The

Structure of Colonial Social Formations', Economic and Political

Weekly, Vol XVI, Nos 10, 11, and 12, Annual Number, 1981, (2) Hamza

Alavi, `India: Transition to Colonial Capitalism' in Hamza Alavi,

Doug. McEachern et al, Capitalism and Colonial Production, Croom

Helm, London 1982, also published in Journal of Contemporary Asia,

Vol 10, No 4, 1980.

Bimal Prasad has dealt with the story of the 1906 delegation

objectively and accurately in Pathways to India's Partition, Vol II,

A Nation within a Nation, Dacca, 2000, pp 100 ff. Bimal Prasad's

three volume work – of which the third volume is elusive – seems to

be one of the best studies so far done on the `Pakistan Movement'.

Earlier, Francis Robinson also dealt with it in the same scholarly

way in Separatism Among Indian Muslims, Delhi, 1993, pp 142 ff.

Francis Robinson, op cit, p 147.

Cf John R MacLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress,

Princeton, 1977, ch 7, Congress and Landlord Interest, pp 211 ff.

Based on Eugene F Irschik's Politics and Social Conflict in South

India, Berkeley, 1969; and M R Barne

[Hauma Hamiddha]

[quote name='acharya' date='Sep 17 2003, 06:31 AM'] Misreading Partition Road Signs

Satyananda, the hero,  has killed in battle all the Muslim officers (Muslim soldiers having all fled). The British remained. At that moment `He' (the voice of  Satyananda's Master, that of Bankim himself) orders Satyananda to  cease killing for only the British are left. Satyananda is puzzled. "Why do you order me to cease?" he asks. To this `He'  replies: "your task is accomplished. The Muslim power is destroyed. [/quote]

Notice his not to subtle misinterpretation of Vankimchandra's work. Of course Vamkimchandra was expressing what is at the heart of the Hindu psyche. It is not without reason that something the sermon of the gItA is placed just before the bhArata war. In the Hindu world view for each physical battle the one has to have a corressponding mental development.



Also note how he underlines the Islamist opposition to vande mAtaraM. This is natural for it directly emerges from the image of bhAratI, the tutelary goddess of the Vedic Indo-Aryans from which the land drew its name. Vankim Chandra clearly recognized the difference between the different foes of India.

[acharya]

The man who mapped India



JOHN ROSS





WELL educated and well connected, Colin MacKenzie was an exceptional soldier who combined active service with a passion for geography and natural history.



Although born in the Western Isles, he spent much of a remarkable career in India, where he managed to bridge cultures and learned to value the history and knowledge of territories being annexed into the British Empire.



MacKenzie produced the first accurate modern maps of the Indian sub-continent and his research and collections laid the foundations for Asiatic studies in almost every field.



Despite his achievements, he is relatively unknown in his home town of Stornoway.



But a documentary to be broadcast this week hopes to raise awareness of his significant work and makes a case for some of a huge collection of artefacts to be put on display in the islands.



MacKenzie, or Cailean MacCoinnich in Gaelic, was born in 1754 into the upper echelons of Lewis society - the Seaforth MacKenzies. He worked first as a customs officer in Stornoway but, aged 28, joined the East India Company as an officer in the engineers.



His mentor, Lord Napier of Merchiston, supplied him with his first subject of research into Hindu culture - Indian mathematics and the Hindu system of logarithms. MacKenzie later wrote a biography of John Napier, the inventor of natural logarithms and an ancestor of Lord Napier.



For the rest of his life, MacKenzie used his military career and salary as a captain, major and finally colonel, to finance his researches into Indian and Javan history, religion, philosophy, art, ethnology, folklore and mathematics.



He hired highly-educated Brahmin assistants who, as well as being trained in the Western science of surveying and cartography, researched ancient Indian manuscripts for him and opened his mind to the worlds of Indian thought and culture.



Later he was to spend two years in Java, during the brief period before 1815 when it was part of the British Empire, and reached Bali where he spoke out against the institution of slavery.



In 1799, he played a pivotal role in the battle of Siringpatnam in the Mysore district, which removed the most powerful tribal leader, Tipu Sultan, and paved the way for the Mysore survey between 1800 and 1810 which MacKenzie led.



During this survey, a massive team of draughtsmen and illustrators collated material on historic architectural sites, Hindu caste customs, folk tales, plant life and detailed mapping of the region, an unprecedented volume of work which, to this day, sits virtually undiscovered.



MacKenzie survived nearly 40 years in situations where many other Westerners perished in the heat or through disease and, despite a continuous longing for his homeland, he never returned to the islands. He is buried in Calcutta, where he died in 1821.



A substantial section of his life’s work is now found in the British Museum and the British Library, both in London.



Calum Angus Mackay, a director of Mactv, a Stornoway-based independent television company which made the programme, said: "He was very much a man of vision, but MacKenzie is not very well known at all and that was part of the attraction of making the programme.



"Before he died he had sent money home to build a family memorial and there is almost a mini temple in the cemetery outside Stornoway. But neither he, nor his brother or sister, had any children and so there were no natural heirs to carry on the family history.



"There is a large collection held in London and the question can be asked should some of that material come to Stornoway because there is masses of it which has never seen the light of day. But during the filming we also met art dealers and curators in India who feel they should have the collection back.



Cailean MacCoinnich is produced by Mactv and funded by Comataidh Craolaidh Gaidhlig, the Gaelic broadcasting committee. It will be shown tomorrow on BBC2 at 6:30pm.



[url="http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/scotland.cfm?id=1029302003"]http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/scotland.cfm?...m?id=1029302003[/url]

[acharya]

The Destruction of the Indian System of Education



Kum. B. Nivedita



(Adapted from a speech given under the auspices of

Vivekananda Study Circle, IIT-Madras in Jan 1998.)



Introduction



During the time of the East India Company and later, in the British rule, there seem to have been two motives working in the minds of the rulers: plundering the wealth of this land and the 'white man's burden ' of civilizing the natives (the term used by them to refer to all Indians). We shall see, how in order to achieve these ends, the British so cleverly played their cards that even after fifty years of independence we still continue to exist in a state of stupor, unable (and even unwilling!) to extricate ourselves from one of the greatest hypnoses woven over a whole nation.



Perhaps many of us do not know that India was the richest land till the British came here. Whereas Britain's share in world exports before was only 9% as against India's share of 19% today our share is only 0.5%. Most of the foreigners came to India in search of her fabulous wealth. Ernest Wood, in the book "A Foreigner defends Mother India" states, "In the middle of the eighteenth century, Phillimore wrote that 'the droppings of her soil fed distant regions'. No traveller found India poor until the nineteenth century, but foreign merchants and adventurers sought her shores for the almost fabulous wealth, which they could there obtain. 'To shake the pagoda tree' became a phrase, somewhat similar to our modern expression 'to strike oil'."



In India 35% to 50% of village lands were revenue free and that revenue was utilised for running schools, conducting temple festivals, producing medicines, feeding pilgrims, improving irrigation etc. The British in their greed brought down the revenue free lands down to 5%. When there was a protest they assured Indians that the government would create an irrigation department to take care of irrigation, an educational board to take care of education. etc. The initiative of the people was destroyed. But the rulers found to their chagrin, that though they had conquered this nation, it was still strongly rooted in its own culture. They found that as long as the nation was aware and even proud of its traditions, their 'white man's burden' remained as 'heavy and cumbersome as ever'! India had, at that time, a very well spread system of education and that system had to be made ineffective for their purposes. Now, most of us are taught to believe that the education was in the hands of the Brahmins and in Sanskrit medium and that the other castes had no education. But here are the facts about how the British destroyed the Indian educational system and made one of the most literate nations illiterate.



In the Round- table conference in 1931, Mahatma Gandhi in one of his speeches said, "The beautiful tree of education was cut down by you British. Therefore today India is far more illiterate than it was 100 years ago." Immediately, Philip Hartog, who was a parliamentarian stood up and said, "Mr.Gandhi, it is we who have educated the masses of India. And therefore you must take back your statement and apologise or prove it." Gandhiji said he would prove it. But the debate did not continue for lack of time. Later one of his followers, Shri Dharampal, went to the British museum and examined the reports and archives. He published a book "The Beautiful Tree" where this matter has been discussed in great detail. By 1820, the British had already destroyed the financial resources that supported our educational system- a destruction that they had been carrying out for nearly twenty years. But still the Indians persisted in continuing with their system of education. So, the British decided to find out the intricacies of this system. Therefore a survey was ordered in 1822 and was conducted by the British district collectors. In the survey it was found that the Bengal presidency had 1 lakh village schools, in Madras there was not a single village without a school, in Bombay, if the village population was near 100, the village had a school. Teachers as well as students of all castes were in these schools. The Brahmins accounted 7% to 48% of the teachers, and the rest of the teachers in any district, came from other castes. Further all children had their education in their mother tongue.



The equivalent of the present day primary education lasted 4 to 5 yrs. We all know that it is universal primary education that is important for taking the nation ahead, not just a few getting higher education. The British administrators admired the dedication and capacity of the Indian teachers. By the time the students came out of the schools they had acquired the capacity to be competitive, and to understand and have proper insight into their own culture. One Mr.Bell, a Christian missionary in Madras took the Indian system of education back to England, and introduced it there. Until then, only the children of the nobles were given education there and he started education for the masses in England. So, we gather that it is from India that the British adopted the system for educating the masses.



The Cause of Degradation: The Downward Filtration Method.



But what happened in India? Foreign Christian missionaries even resented the nominal amount of one lakh rupees kept aside for the education of Indians. The British cut down the financial resources and brought in several regulations one after the other- regulations like "there has to be a 'pucca' building etc. That was not the end. They invited T.B. Macaulay to decide how to divert the money, what should be the medium of instruction and the mode of educating the Indian. He made English the medium of instruction and diverted the money for English education. G.D.Trevelyan writes in "Life of Lord Macaulay"(vol 1 pg164) "A new India was born in 1835". What Alexander, Ashoka and the western missionaries had failed to do was accomplished by Macualay's educational minutes, decreeing that India was to receive through English education, the language of the West. "The very foundations of her ancient civilization began to rock and sway. Pillar after pillar in the edifice came crashing down." But Macaulay did a more harmful thing, which is not generally known. He adopted the "downward filtration method" for educating the Indians. What is this method? The problem facing Macaulay was that Indians were numerous and The British were a handful. How were they going to educate the Indians? How could this nation be weakened so that in self-forgetfulness it would support the British Raj?



The story goes that once when he was in Ooty, in his residence, he saw an Indian officer coming and touching the feet of a peon sitting outside his office (which was near his residence.) and was obviously surprised. Why was an officer touching the feet of a peon? He was told, "You don't know, this Indian society is a peculiar one. Here the Brahmins are respected and the peon belongs to that caste." The changes that Macaulay brought after this are well documented and authenticated in books. The downward filtration method was formulated according to which the forward caste (even this was much later) was given preference in schools. To put it in his own words," But it is impossible for us with our limited means to educate all in English. We must at present do our best to form a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect.' To gauge how much he succeeded in his mission, we only need to look into the history of the Indian educated classes since that time onwards. The fact is that we have not tackled the Macaulayian issue even after Independence, and graver still, few realise that the problem exists at all. The system of giving preference to Brahmins in the govt. and missionary run schools went on for nearly hundred yrs. In the meantime other castes practicing any trade had lost their business due to the flooding of Indian markets with British goods and also due to the deliberate strangulation of their business by the British. Due to the land policy of the British, born out of their greed, the farmers had become landless labourers in their own lands, and the landlords the cruel stooges of the British. The systematic destruction of the Indian system of education deprived certain castes of education. Thus over a hundred years these castes had become impoverished and ignorant and the Brahmins who were supposed to lead the society became distorted in their understanding of things, due to foreign education.



The Designs of Macaulay Frustrated



In Macaulay's letter dated 12th Oct., 1836, he wrote to his father:



"Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully; we find it difficult to provide instruction to all. The effect of this education on Hindus is prodigious. No Hindu who has received an English education ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respected classes 30 years hence. And this will be effected without our efforts to proselytize; I heartily rejoice in the prospect'



That was the confidence with which they set out. But the missionaries, after years of toiling in vain realised that their efforts of proselytization had not been successful. So after some years there was a conference of missionaries in India in 1882. They sat together and discussed the effects of their education on the Brahmins. They found that though to an extent they were successful in taking away the Brahmins from their ideals, their conversion had not taken place. A decision to slowly target the other castes and tribals in their educational institutions, was taken. Till the British started ruling India most of the castes were educated and prosperous but the delicate policies of the British are responsible for their later condition. The Brahmins who were supposed to set the standards of behaviour in the society were targeted, and when they strayed away from their path they were blamed for the condition of the other castes. The point to note here is that they are responsible not because they kept all the education to themselves, as is generally believed, but because they allowed themselves to be intellectually corrupted by the British and because they entered into all the professions practiced by other castes. They also took on government jobs thus paving the way for competition and hatred among castes in the society. Today they stand discredited in general, and are no longer considered to be the examples to be followed. But although the Brahmins became corrupted, it is to the credit of all the other castes that though they too were targeted, they stood firm, and thus foiled the designs of the British.



But as the poison induced by Macaulay continues to weaken this nation, we hardly even care to know about "Indian thinking", Indian problems and Indian models and solutions to these problems. The best brains and the best energies are concentrated on evolving and applying western models and solutions. We seem to know less and less about our own nation. After all how does a nation die? One way is by physical destruction as the Europeans who settled in America destroyed whole civilizations there. Another is that people lose faith in their own way of life, their philosophies, their principles, their thought currents etc., and the nation is destroyed. Take for example, the Greek and Roman civilizations. What great civilizations they were! But there came a time when the intelligentsia lost faith in their own way of life, in their own wisdom. They adopted a totally different philosophy in their lives and where are these nations and their civilizations now? In a sense, in the museums and monuments!



Compare that with India! The land with the most ancient cultural continuity, the oldest living nation Greece did not physically die. People did not die. People now in Greece, Italy and Persia are the descendants of those who were the originators of those great civilizations. But today if we ask them what are the ideals that sustained their nation they would say," we do not know, it is in the books; it is in the museum; you may refer to it better there." That is how a nation is destroyed, rather mummified. Now these countries are nothing more than geographical or political entities trying to evolve a nation out of their statehood. How does a nation get weakened? A nation gets weakened when the ignorance of the people about their own roots increases, or when they become ashamed of themselves or of their forefathers. Actually that is where real regression of a nation starts. A nation which wants to forget about itself and imitate other nations cannot redeem itself but is on the path of self-destruction. The regression is there in our nation at present. And if we truly do not want to weaken ourselves as a nation, we need to extricate our educational system out of its Macaulayian traits, and obtain a fresh and untainted understanding of our ideals; for these have held us together as a nation for nearly ten thousand years. Then put them up for renewed enquiry before the younger generations so that if at all they are imbibed, they are expressed with feelings that become stronger, nobler and grander with time.



© Vivekananda Study Circle, IIT-Madras



[url="http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/kbn001.html"]http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/kbn001.html[/url]

[acharya]

[url="http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles.html"]http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles.html[/url]

[acharya]

Such mischievous mislabelling has of course been used in other parts of India too. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, missionaries made it a habit to refer to the Bible as Vedam in literature, popular songs etc., and even got this meaning entered in Tamil dictionaries. In southern Tamil Nadu, Christians call themselves Vedakaran (“the People of the Vedas”) and a Church is Vedakovil (“the temple of the Veda”), while the Hindus are called Ajnanigal (“the Ignorant People”). This has gone so deep into the psyche of the people that Hindu villagers themselves speak of the Church as Vedakovil, of Christians as Vedakaran and of themselves as Ajnanigal.





[url="http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/kbn002.html"]http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/kbn002.html[/url]

[Guest]

A really good example of the colonial experience in contemporary times is the experience of Iraq - sorry I meant Eye-rak.



[url="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/international/middleeast/28CLAN.html?hp"]Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change[/url]

"Americans just don't understand what a different world Iraq is because of these highly unusual cousin marriages," said Robin Fox of Rutgers University, the author of "Kinship and Marriage," a widely used anthropology textbook

He and his children see their neighbors when praying at Sunni mosques, but none of them belong to the kind of civic groups or professional associations that are so common in America, the pillars of civil society that observers since de Tocqueville have been crediting for the promotion of democracy.

Cousin marriage was once the norm throughout the world, but it became taboo in Europe after a long campaign by the Roman Catholic Church. Theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas argued that the practice promoted family loyalties at the expense of universal love and social harmony. Eliminating it was seen as a way to reduce clan warfare and promote loyalty to larger social institutions — like the church.

"The tribes were convinced that they had made a free and Arab Government, and that each of them was It," Lawrence wrote in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" in 1926. "They were independent and would enjoy themselves a conviction and resolution which might have led to anarchy, if they had not made more stringent the family tie, and the bonds of kin-responsibility. But this entailed a negation of central power."

The prevalence of cousin marriage did not get much attention before the war from Republicans in the United States who expected a quick, orderly transition to democracy in Iraq. But one writer who investigated the practice warned fellow conservatives to stop expecting postwar Iraq to resemble postwar Germany or Japan.



"The deep social structure of Iraq is the complete opposite of those two true nation-states, with their highly patriotic, cooperative, and (not surprisingly) outbred peoples," Steve Sailer wrote in The American Conservative magazine in January. "The Iraqis, in contrast, more closely resemble the Hatfields and the McCoys."

The more educated and urbanized Iraqis have become, Dr. Hassan said, the more they are likely to marry outsiders and adopt Western values.

And then finally....

"Japan and India have managed to blend traditional social structures with modern democracy, and Iraq could do the same," said Stanley Kurtz, an anthropologist at the Hoover Institution. But it will take time and finesse, he said, along with respect for traditions like women wearing the veil.



"A key purpose of veiling is to prevent outsiders from competing with a woman's cousins for marriage," Dr. Kurtz said. "Attack veiling, and you are attacking the core of the Middle Eastern social system."

Become educated/urbanized which means westernised really. And you know what time and finesse will bring ?? You got it - missionaries. St. Xavier's in Baghdad baby.. <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':lol:' /> By the time the regime change business is done, these Iqbals and Mohammeds will hate themselves more then anybody else..

[Guest]

[url="http://www.media-watch.org/articles/0300/60.html"]Arun Shourie exposes ICHR Scandals[/url]



Title: Arun Shourie exposes ICHR scandals

Author: N.S. Rajaram

Publication: BHARATIYA PRAGNA

Date: MARCH 2000 VOLUME 2 NUMBER 3



ICHR is in the news again, not for any scholarly contribution but

for political reasons, which is a fair reflection of its benighted

career under 'secularist' domination. From all the sound and fury

emanating from 'scholars' and their allies in the media, the average

reader may be excused for thinking that high principles are at

stake.



The reality is quite different: it is only a diversionary tactic

meant to save themselves from exposure as venal men and women,

caring nothing for truth and capable of stealing both money and

research. This is clear from Arun Shourie's thoroughly documented

"Eminent Historians". True to character, the English language media

has taken up their side without even mentioning their record, or

even Shourie's expose.



Here is the real story behind one of the major controversies. The

Government of India funded the ICHR to produce a comprehensive

multi-volume work on the Freedom Movement, to be called 'Towards

Freedom'. The importance of the project is not in dispute,

especially as the British produced a multi-volume work on the

transfer of power giving their version of the story. But the

'eminent historians' of the ICHR failed to produce the work even

though the funds allotted to the project were spent.



As Shourie points out: "An afterword is in order to this sorry tale

of the Towards Freedom Project. As far as history writing is

concerned, few things could have been more important than to bring

alive for subsequent generations what our leaders felt and did in

the long struggle to wrest freedom for the country. And just see how

these eminences have handled this responsibility: a project which

was to have been completed in five years and a few lakhs has been

dragged for twenty-seven years, a crore and seventy-odd lakhs have

been gobbled up in its name - and the volumes are still said to be

on their way. This is gross dereliction - independent of what the

volumes will contain, and what they would have left out."

[Correction: it seems the amount was more like four crores (forty

million).]



It is worth noting that an earlier effort on the history of the

Freedom Movement headed by the great historian R.C. Majumdar was

aborted by vested forces within the Congress. What was Majumdar's

crime? He refused to bend history to suit the interests of the

Congress. It was given to a greatly inferior scholar, one Tarachand,

who produced a worthless tract. Fortunately, Majumdar had the will -

and the scholarship - to produce without any sponsors the

magisterial three-volume "History of the Freedom Movement in India"

(Firma KLM, Calcutta). Majumdar went on to observe: "... It is an

ominous sign of the times that Indian history is being viewed in

official circles in the perspective of recent politics. The official

history of the freedom movement starts with the premise that India

lost independence only in the eighteenth century and had thus an

experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries.

Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of

India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely

changed masters in the eighteenth century."



Returning to the Towards Freedom project, some of the details

ferreted out by Shourie are enlightening. Several historians claimed

that they worked on various projects in an 'honorary capacity',

implying that they took no money for their work. This was a

subterfuge. They invariably took substantial sums of money at the

beginning of the project, but were not given the final installment

due upon the completion of the project, for the simple reason they

never did complete the project.



This can be illustrated with a case involving a leading historian -

no doubt eminent as well - Bipin Chandra. This 'eminent historian'

was sanctioned Rs 75,000 for the year 1987-88 for the assignment

entitled 'A History of the Indian National Congress'. By 1989, he

had been given Rs 57,500 with the balance (Rs 17,500) to be paid

after the completed manuscript was submitted. He did not receive the

balance due because he never cared to submit any manuscript. Upon

inquiry, Shourie was told by the ICHR that the remaining balance is

yet to be paid because a "formal manuscript in this regard is yet to

be received." In other words, Bipin Chandra had taken whatever money

he could without producing anything. This is not the full story

however. Shourie writes (pp 15-16):



"Later I learnt that the Rs 75,000/- which had been allotted to this

"eminent historian" for this project - "the Oral History Project" -

had been but a part, a small part of the total take. Bipin Chandra

was given in addition Rs Two Lakhs by the ICSSR and Rs Four Lakhs

through the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Neither institution

received any manuscript from him." In other words, this eminent

historian was like a scam operator, taking money promising future

gains, and then disappearing with the cash. The sums involved will

seem small when compared to the crores and scores of crores looted

by politicians and scamsters. But if they stole relatively small

sums of money, it is only because that was all they could lay their

hands on. It was not thrift but lack of opportunity that prevented

them from scaling Boforsian heights.





It was not just money they stole, but also other people's research

as the following episode involving Irfan Habib and his protege

Tasneem Ahmad shows. In the year 1976-77, the late Dr. Paramatma

Saran, one of India's most distinguished medieval historians,

submitted to the ICHR the English translation (with annotations) of

the Persian work Tarikh-i-Akbari by Arif Qandhari. Soon the

manuscript mysteriously disappeared from its archives until it

resurfaced nearly twenty-five years later under bizarre

circumstances. In response to repeated inquiries by Dr. Saran's

son-in-law, and even an official inquiry, the Deputy Director of the

Medieval Unit of ICHR - one Tasneem Ahmad - reported that the

manuscript was "submitted but not traceable." The official inquiry

also somehow got killed, because of the involvement of a galaxy of

'eminent historians', notably Irfan Habib.



A case of utter irresponsibility - one might say - but the story is

only beginning. The very same 'submitted but not traceable'

manuscript was submitted as a Ph.D. dissertation by none other than

Tasneem Ahmad, the Deputy Director of the Medieval Unit of the ICHR!

He even had the temerity to publish it under his own name with a

foreword by Irfan Habib who showered fulsome praise on his protege.

"What it [Tarikh-i-Akbari] needed," wrote the eminent historian

Irfan Habib in his Foreword to the stolen work "was a full-scale

English translation. This has been provided by Dr. Tasneem Ahmad in

a very competent manner, aiming at faithful accuracy and at a

critical assessment of the information here received by comparing it

with that offered by other sources."



The 'eminent' Professor Habib of the Aligarh Muslim University,

twice Chairman of the ICHR and five times its member, did not stop

there. He lauded the pilfered work as a "notable contribution to the

National celebration of the 450th Anniversary of Akbar's birth. I

feel confident that it would reinforce the interest in Akbar's age

widespread among those who have a care for the long process of the

creation of a composite culture and a unity that together constitute

what is India." Habib's is now one of the loudest voices complaining

about the politicization of the ICHR! Of course, "Brutus is an

honourable man."



As we examine the work of these 'eminent historians' and their modus

operandi, plagiarism and corruption - though heinous in themselves -

are not their worst sins. They are guilty of the far greater sin of

'corruption of the spirit' - as Veda Vyasa called it - of forging an

ideology and methodology built around institutionalized lying. It is

an ideology that simply refuses to acknowledge the existence of

truth. Whatever suits their self-interest is held up as truth - to

be imposed on the nation.



In this context, it is worth recording what Koenraad Elst had to say

about Sita Ram Goel's Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them (Volume

II). Elst observed: "If this book ever gets the publicity it

deserves, negationist ['secularist'] historians will find it

difficult to show their faces in public. They stand exposed, and

only their control of the media can save their reputation by

censoring their career-long efforts at history falsification."



That day has hopefully dawned with the breaking of the 'secularist'

monopoly over the ICHR and other institutions. And the 'secularist'

noise about the Towards Freedom Project and cries of

'Saffronization' are nothing but diversionary tactics meant to save

themselves from exposure and public disgrace. Thanks to Shourie's

Eminent Historians, they can run but cannot hide.

[Guest]

[url="http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_411883,000900040001.htm"]56 years after freedom, Bhonsles still fighting Empire[/url]

Sarita Kaushik

Nagpur, October 10



Fifty-six years after India gained independence from British rule, a royal family from Nagpur continues to wage its battle against the Empire.



The Bhonsles are fighting a 150-year-old legal suit against Britain, and the Lord's Bank of England, in a London court for the return of illegally sold assets worth billions.



The seeds were sown in the late 19th century, when the British attacked Nagpur, then ruled by the Bhonsles. After Bhonsles were defeated, the British victors turned looters. An estimated 14 trucks of Gold and 125 trucks of Silver, apart from a horde of ornaments, precious and semi-precious stones, rich treasures, horses and elephants were looted and sent to Kolkata.



Records reveal that they were auctioned at Kolkata. From their proceeds was born the Lord's Bank in England!



Mudhoji Raje Bhonsle, scion of the senior Bhonsle Palace here, told Hindustan Times that the then ruler, Janoji Raje Bhonsle, decided to take the matter to court. In around 1855 he petitioned before a court in England for the return of his property.



Mudhoji Raje says that the assets at the time of their loot were estimated by the Bhonsle records at around Rs 3.50 crores. Eight generations later, Mudhoji Raje is unwilling to hazard a guess of their present worth.



In between, the legal wrangle has been eventful if not decisive. Lower courts twice ordered payment of certain sums to the Bhosle Trust -- established to oversee the upkeep of 1300 temples in Nagpur. The first such directive came during Janoji's time and the second during Raghuji Raje's. But no jewellery has ever been returned, laments Mudhoji Raje.



The Bhonsles are represented by London's Gandhi Law Firm, Mudhoji Raje says. During Raghuji Raje's period, the case was even represented by renowned freedom fighter and social worker Dadabhai Nooroji, he adds.



It was during this time that an olive branch was extended to the Bhonsles. Some part of this wealth could be returned if some descendents of the Bhonsle's considered settling in Britain, the court said. The Bhonsle's have currently applied for removal of this condition in their petition.



"Only recently a junior court actually recognized the Bhonsle right and the illegality of de-possessing the erstwhile royal family of its assets, but it has referred its judgment for validation to the Higher Court," Mudhoji says. "Recently" in this case means 25 to 30 years ago.



Mudhoji may have waited for a long time, but says he has a "gut feeling" that it is close to "settlement time".

[Guest]

Written by a friend (for second generation hindus in UK). Sorry the present version does not have any references.

------------------------------------------------





The Legend of Chatrasal Bundela



Lacerating across the heart of India stretches a wild and untamed land known as the Chambal valley and beyond to Bundhelkhand which houses an equally untamed and proud people. With a rugged love of independence and pride they have a long history of resistance and struggle against oppressors and are even celebrated in numerous films in the Indian Film Industry as the ‘honourable bandits’.



The people of the region say that the only offering that they can make the Goddess of the River is their blood and that their land has always cried out for it. Throughout their history they have remained unsubdued by successive waves of invaders and oppressors with even the British Army moving only with great care through their land.



The most celebrated of their warriors, revered to this day, is Chatrasal Bundela, a young man of 18 years who challenged one of the mightiest empires of the world in 1665. The Mughal Empire was at its zenith of power and glory when the puritanical Islamic emperor, Aurangzeb, began to unleash the full flow of Islamism over India. Taking up the inspiration of the Maratha warrior Shivaji, Chatrasal gathered the hardy Bundela warriors to his side to raise the banner of Hindu freedom.



His father, Jujhar Singh had raised the banner for freedom a generation earlier but was killed in battle with the Mughals after himself killing the favourite of the emperor, Abu Fazl.



The freedom loving people of Bundelkhand however refused to submit and kept raising their heads and fought for freedom. A deadly struggle, which eventually spread over nearly fifty years, then ensued with wave after wave of Mughal and Pathan attacks over the land being beaten back. Each successive invasion brought with it the desecration of Hindu temples and population, including cold-blooded murder of unarmed civilians, the rape of women and slavery for captured women and children. This only redoubled the Bundela intensity for the fight for freedom and vengeance.



The ‘Jizyah’ tax or Islamic poll tax upon the Hindus was imposed by the Mughals. The Maulvis who came to collect in Orchha, the capital of Bundelkhand, had their severed heads sent back to the Emperor with pages of the Koran stuffed in them as a sign of the Bundelas contempt for the Mughal’s fanaticism. The emperor himself led a huge expedition to Bundhelkhand to smash the ‘idol worshippers’ in 1684 but was forced to retreat without achieving any lasting successes, leaving behind trails of horror and destruction but still failing to subdue Chatrasal and the Bundelas.



From there onwards the Maratha attacks began to shake and then crumble the Mughal empire and, following the death of Aurangzeb, the Bundelas steadily began to gain ground over their Muslim adversaries. The cream of the Mughal generals were sent one after the other to subdue the Bundelas but all their campaigns ended up in failure.



Eventually in a last desperate attempt the famous Pathan warrior Muhammad Khan Bhangash was sent with his fighters in 1730 and engaged in a final struggle. The now aged Chatrasal with his sons and warriors drew the Pathans into battle and with the help of the Maratha Peshwa Baji Rao they won a final victory over the Mughals in 1730 expelling them finally from their lands.



The relentless wars of the past half century eventually ended with Chatrasal dying a free man leading a free people: an inspiration to successive generations of Hindus and an apt lesson that freedom is not something that can ever be taken for granted but must be maintained by endless and continuous vigilance. It shows us that the endless waves of cruelty and barbarity unleashed on the Hindus failed to destroy or subdue their innate love for freedom and dharma. When nation after nation from the edge of Europe to the very borders of India had their past obliterated by waves of genocidal and fanatical attacks by the votaries of the ‘One’ and ‘Only True’ ‘God’ which swept through Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, the Hindus survived. Not only survived, but struggled and fought and clung to their dharma as all around fell and their cultures and ways of life were forgotten and relegated to the museum.



Published by Shakti Marg

[Guest]

I am not sure if this is the appropriate thread for these articles <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':o' /> . Admins please move to the appropriate thread if needed (same with the previous post). Thank you. Regards. <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':o' />



---------------------------------





Vasudev Balwant Phadke (1845 – 1883)



What the Indian Sepoys tried to do in 1857, the Marathas in three bitter wars and the Sikhs tried in 1840, but failed, one man attempted: to take on the mighty British Empire single handed.

Much of his doings are recorded in his own diary, written while hiding in a Hindu temple from the police. He describes how his feeling were stirred by the terrible famine that gripped western India in 1876/77 and realised that the miseries of India were the consequences of foreign oppressive rule.



Hence in true Hindu spirit he took a vow to stir armed rebellion and destroy the British power in India and re-establish Hindu Raj. For this he did not turn to the effeminate upper classes of India, who could not and cannot revert to such direct action but instead he turned to the sturdy rural Marathas who formed the bulk of the famous Hindu Maratha cavalry that had smashed the pride of Afghans and Mughals and only subsided after three wars with the British.



Here he found ready and able soldiers ‘First of all I went to Narooba Wada to perform my prayers and then coming and going on the road I turned the peoples minds against the British … I wished to ruin them. From morning to night, bathing, eating, sleeping I was brooding on this and I could get no proper sleep.



‘At midnight I would awake and think how the ruin of the western oppressors would be achieved until I was as one mad. I learnt to fire at targets, to ride and sword and club exercise. I had a great love of arms and always kept two guns and swords’



Phadke began to raid and cut the communications of the British and to raid their treasury. From Dhamari to Khed his fame began to collect. With each raid his monetary position increased, as did the numbers of followers in his desperate cause.



‘A child being born does not at once become a man but grow little by little and I saw my struggle with the British as such, from collecting small bands of raiders, to looting the treasuries to raising a band then an army of men for freedom … If I find that there is no success in this world then I shall go to the next to plead for the people of India’



The British government had put a price on his head by now but his following was gradually spreading. At the village of Ghanur he fought an engagement with the British army following which Phadke announced a reward for the killing of each European on a sliding scale depending on that mans position.



For some time he kept up a heroic unequal struggle with the British and their Pathan underlings under Abdul Haque.



Eventually after a fierce fight he was captured in Hyderabad on 21 July 1879. He was charged for waging war against the British government which was proved by his own diary and his statements in court.



There was great public enthusiasm during his trial and vast crowds collected daily to hear him speak to the point where the British were taken aback by his appeal to the common man.



A newspaper ‘Deccan Star’ in 1880 wrote ‘In the eyes of his countrymen, Vasudev Balwant Phadke did not commit any wrong … he showed spirit in trying to relieve the miseries of his countrymen … [and] by sacrificing himself he has averted the danger which sooner or later must follow intolerable oppression. We must consider him a harbinger of good fortune for India’



Realising that he was far too dangerous an individual to remain in India he was transported for life to prison in Aden. He was fettered and placed in solitary confinement. Nevertheless on 13 October 1880 this undaunted man pulled off the door by its hinges and escaped. Unfortunately, he was shortly captured again.



Realising that life was now intolerable and unable to live under the bondage of the hated British he went on hunger strike and this noble son of India died on 17 February 1883.



Here was a single man standing out against what was one the most powerful empires the world has ever seen. The seeds he left grew into a mighty banyan tree with its shoots all over the nation within a short period of time. Soon the guns were booming for freedom all over from the Chaperkar brothers in Maharasthra, the Ghadr movement in



Punjab to the revolutionaries in Bengal. He can, with justice, be called the father of militant nationalism and Hindutva in India. It is unfortunate that the stories of such heroes came to be negated under the Nehruivian regime which self-righteously took all credit for India’s independence movement.









Published by Shakti Marg

[Guest]

It is unfortunate that 50 years after Independence we know little about gentlemen like these, thanks to the whitewash of the Congress party.

[Guest]

[quote name='Kaushal' date='Oct 15 2003, 06:43 PM'] It is unfortunate that 50 years after Independence we know little about gentlemen like these, thanks to the whitewash of the Congress party. [/quote]

I'm not surprised. Afterall, how many years did it take for Congress to recognize contribution of Sardar Patel? Bharat Ratna after some 40+ years for person of Patel's stature! :furious

[acharya]

Misreading Partition Road Signs



Hamza Ali Alvi







[About the author: Dr. Alvi is a retired academic and scholar from Pakistan, who had held many academic and research positions including UCLA, University of Denver (USA), University of Leeds (UK), Reserve Bank of India, and so on. Due to his left leaning, he was banned from Canada in 1972. For more information, please see [url="http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sangat/HAMZABIO.htm"]http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/s...at/HAMZABIO.htm[/url]]





There are sadly many issues that stand in the way of a happier relationship between India and Pakistan. Hopefully we, the people of India and Pakistan, will find a way to resolve our differences to inaugurate a new future of mutual friendship. Our different perceptions of our shared history have, perhaps, contributed in some measure to create barriers of prejudice between us. What is offered here is only a modest attempt by a sociologist-cum-social anthropologist to highlight some issues that could be looked at again. It is not an alternative history.



The roots of the movement that culminated in the creation of Pakistan lay in the 19th century crisis of the then dominant Muslim ‘ashraf’ (upper classes) of northern India, the descendents of the immigrants from central Asia, Arabia and Iran.1 The crisis was precipitated by the new Anglo-vernacular language policy of the colonial regime that displaced Persian, the ashraf language. Two different components of the ashraf were affected. The first of these was the class of state officials, who had to take to English education that was now needed for government jobs. We shall call them the ‘salariat’. In a society without industrialisation and professional management in the private sector, it was to the state, the biggest employer, that the demands of this class were addressed.



The ‘salariat’ was closely associated with the new English educated professionals, especially in law for, parallel with the new language policy, a new statute law was enforced. The salariat and the new professionals (in law, medicine and other fields) shared a common education and the emerging Anglo-vernacular culture. They formed a relatively cohesive social stratum. In Gramsci’s language, they were an ‘auxiliary’ class; not the biggest class in numbers but the most articulate. They were at the heart of an intellectual ferment. Members of this group, not infrequently, were the sons (sometimes daughters too) of landlords or rich peasants, who could afford to put them through the higher education that they needed. This created close links between the salariat, the new professionals and the other classes.



The Muslim salariat of the early 19th century, brought up on Persian rather than English, had begun to lose ground to the members of certain Hindu service castes who took to the English language more readily. The rivalry that ensued was not between all Hindus and all Muslims, but only between the Muslim and the Hindu salariats, the Muslim ashraf versus the Hindu service castes, such as the khatris, kayasthas and Kashmiri brahmins in northern India or the kayasthas, brahmins and baidyas in Bengal. The Muslim ashraf, therefore, began asking for safeguards and quotas in jobs for the Muslims. They were able to mobilise wide support in the society, especially through their organic links with the landlords and rich peasants. Religious ideology played no part in this nor did the rest of the Muslim and the non-Muslim society have any direct stake in the salariat politics. The Congress, speaking for the Indian salariat in general (and the Hindu service castes in particular), voiced demands for the ‘Indianisation’ of the services, when top jobs were the preserve of the British Indian bureaucracy.



Another component of the ashraf were the ulama, religious scholars, who were steeped in Arabic and Persian learning and shari’a (Islamic) law. They too came from the same general background as the salariat and the new professionals. But their interests conflicted, especially with regard to their attitudes towards the English language and the scientific culture. Before, prospective members of the Muslim salariat would be educated in Persian and Arabic at their madrasas (religious seminaries). With the switch to English, that clientele dropped off. The more prestigious among the ulama would issue religious decrees (fatwas) and mediate in disputes between the members of the community. The introduction of the statute law, written in English, displaced this role. Not surprisingly, the ulama were militantly opposed to the English language, the culture of the rulers and, indeed, the colonial regime itself. They bitterly opposed the professionals, the salariat, and the Muslim educationists for accepting English education and western learning. The ulama and the mullahs were initially militant. They were subdued after the suppression of the National Revolt of 1857 and retreated into their seminaries. The Khilafat Movement led by Gandhi, who implanted the religious idiom in modern Indian Muslim politics, activated them again in 1918.



There was also a third component of the Muslim ashraf, namely, the landlords, whose livelihoods were not affected directly by the new language policy. The Muslim and the Hindu landlords received government favours in return for their support. Some landlords, as individuals, did join the Muslim League or the Indian National Congress, possibly motivated by the problems faced by their kinsmen in the salariat or among the new professionals. This was not without their ha1ving to face pressure or sanctions from the colonial authorities for doing so.



The Muslim salariat and professionals, looked down upon the poor Muslims, who were either urban artisans, notably weavers (the julahas) or peasants. Some of the ulama did reach out to the poor. But instead of grappling with their problems, all that they did was to whip them up into religious frenzies. In the United Provinces (UP), some lawyers from the julaha background did set up the ‘Mu’min Ansar Party’ and the ‘All-India Mu’min Conference’ but these had little impact on the national politics.



Sir Syed Ahmad Khan pioneered the cause of English education as well as scientific thought amongst the Indian Muslims. The Muslim reformers elsewhere in India emulated his work. Muslim educational associations were set up everywhere. The ulama, hard hit by the impact of the new Anglo-vernacular language policy, were bitterly hostile to Sir Syed Ahmad’s movement. He was misrepresented and reviled by them in every possible way. His role and character have been grossly misrepresented in the Indian nationalist literature because of his opposition to the Indian National Congress. He deserves to be judged more objectively.



Bankim Chandra Chatterjee has been highly acclaimed by some scholars as a pioneer of Indian nationalism.4 Despite its offence to the Muslim sensibilities, the Congress has adopted his song Vandé Mataram as an anthem. It is instructive to compare his views with those of Sir Syed Ahmad. Leaving aside, for the moment, Bankim’s violent hostility towards the Muslims, one aspect of his thought is quite striking. He had declared that the British were not ‘our enemies and we should not fight them’. Instead, he had stressed that the British possessed knowledge that ‘we should acquire if we ourselves were to progress’. Bankim (1838-94) was advocating a generation later what Sir Syed Ahmad (1817-98) had preached before him.



Bankim’s classic play ‘Anandamath’ sets out his ideas. T W Clark describes it is the most important statement that Bankim made and offers a translation of the final chapter. 5 Satyananda, the hero, has killed in battle all the Muslim officers (Muslim soldiers having all fled). The British remained. At that moment ‘He’ (the voice of Satyananda’s Master, that of Bankim himself) orders Satyananda to cease killing for only the British are left. Satyananda is puzzled. “Why do you order me to cease?” he asks. To this ‘He’ replies: “your task is accomplished. The Muslim power is destroyed. There is nothing else for you to do.” Satyananda persists. “The Muslim power has indeed been destroyed. But the dominion of the Hindus has not yet been established. The British still hold Calcutta.” ‘He’ replies: “The Hindu dominion will not be established now”. At this, Satyananda exclaims: “My Lord, if the Hindu dominion is not going to be established now, who will rule?” ‘He’ replies: “The English will rule …Physical knowledge has disappeared from our land. … So we must learn it from the foreigners. The English are wise in this knowledge. And they are good teachers. Therefore, we must make the English rule. …Your vow is fulfilled. You have brought good fortune to your mother. You have set up a British government. …There are no foes now. The English are friends as well as rulers. And no one can defeat them in battle.”



Bankim was advocating English education and accepting the British rule just as Sir Syed Ahmad had done earlier. Bankim is honoured while Sir Syed Ahmad is reviled for saying the same thing. This extraordinary difference reveals the intellectual biases underlying the Indian nationalist thought. There is, of course, a marked difference between Sir Syed Ahmad and Bankim in one respect. As Bankim’s admirer Clark notes, “Bankim’s references to Muslims are generally unfriendly, and in many places unmistakably hostile.” That stands in marked contrast to Sir Syed Ahmad’s attitude to the other community.



Writing under the title ‘Bonds between Hindus and Muslims’, Sir Syed Ahmad says: “Centuries have passed that we two have lived on the same earth, have eaten the produce of the same land, drunk the water of the same rivers, breathed the air of the same one country. Hindus and Muslims are not strangers to each other. As I have said many times before, India is a beautiful bride and Hindus and Muslims are its two eyes. Her beauty demands that her two eyes shall be undamaged, whole (salamat) and equal”.6 That was his call for Hindu-Muslim Unity. We find no hostility towards the Hindus in his writings. In his social life too, he was free of communal antipathy. He had many close Hindu friends. On the occasion of the bismillah (an important rite of passage) ceremony of his four-year-old grandchild, he made the boy sit in the lap of his close friend Raja Jaikishandas, which was symbolic of their brotherly relations.7 His disagreement with the Congress is quite another kind of matter.



Sir Syed Ahmad based his opposition to democracy on a sociological argument. Whereas, he argued, the English society is made up of free-acting individuals, who are unconstrained by ‘community’ loyalties, in India, individuals are enclosed within institutionalised communities. In this political arena, they do not (cannot) act as free individuals for the society demands that they support candidates of their own community. A Muslim has to vote for a fellow Muslim and a Hindu for a fellow Hindu. That, he said, was a fact of the Indian culture. Therefore, until the society and culture became individualised (which may happen in time), democracy is unsuitable for India. Given the cultural imperatives that would mean a permanent majority of the Hindus over the Muslims. He concluded that for the time being, it was useful to have the British as neutral and impartial referees. He may be criticised for his faith in the British impartiality. But he felt that there was no alternative.



Sir Syed Ahmad, unlike the generation of the Indian nationalists who came after him, had no idea of the exploitative and destructive impact of the colonial rule on India. Nevertheless, he was aware that the British Indian bureaucracy was racist, rude and arrogant. Himself a member of the ashraf aristocracy, he believed (naïvely) that it was the aristocratic birth and breeding that made the difference. He once said: “England is so far from us that we cannot verify if some of these rude bureaucrats are not really sons of naïs (barbers).” The pages of his journal Tahzib-al-Akhlaq are full of trenchant criticism of the British Indian bureaucrats who misbehaved towards the Indians. Maulana Mohammad Ali, in his presidential Address at the Cocanada Congress meeting in 1923, gave fulsome praise to Sir Syed Ahmad as a man of dignity and dealt (inter alia) with the charge of servility towards the British. He said: “A close study of his [Sir Syed Ahmad’s] character leads me to declare that he was far from possessing the sycophancy with which some of his political critics have credited him”.



Sir Syed Ahmad is not above criticism. Occasionally, he derisively referred to the Bengal Congress’s ‘bhadralok’ politicians, who attacked him, as ‘babus’. But surely that was no more than political tit-for-tat! More serious is the matter of his conservative attitude to women’s education. For a man who had boldly taken on the conservatives on most issues, it is a great pity that he did not do better on this score. His views on this are quite unacceptable today. Finally, even worse, was his ‘aristocratic’ disdain for the non-ashraf and the poor. Referring to the membership of the viceroy’s legislative council, he expressed his deeply rooted class (caste?) prejudices when he said: “it is essential for the viceroy’s council to have members of a high social standing. Would our aristocracy like that a man of low caste or insignificant origin, though he may be a BA or MA and have the requisite ability, be in a position of authority above them and have the power of making laws that affect their lives and property?”



He was, after all, a product of his class and his times.



Sir Syed Ahmad is said to have had close affinity with Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who himself was a great thinker and a rationalist. It has been suggested that he was a regular reader of Roy’s writings (in Persian). Troll writes that “the personality and work of Ram Mohan Roy were a formative influence in Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s life… The parallels between the ideas and working methods of the two men could be mere coincidence, or the effects of a common historical situation or perhaps a result of Sir Sayyid being directly influenced by Ram Mohan Roy and his monotheistic Brahmo Samaj.”9 Sir Syed Ahmad, in turn, relates how, as a young boy, he looked with great admiration, and from a respectful distance, at the famous Bengali reformer, when the latter visited the Mughal Emperor in Delhi in 1830 (ibid, p 60). It might be said that with the social changes brought about by the colonial transformation of the Indian society and with the rise of colonial capitalism,10 rationalism and monotheistic ideas flourished all over India in the late 19th century. This was also, for instance, the case with the Prarthana Samaj of Ranadé and Bhandarkar in Maharashtra. These rationalist movements attracted the English educated upper classes of India.



By the end of the 19th century, the newly educated Muslims began to make their concerns felt. Mohsin-ul-Mulk (Sir Syed Ahmad’s not so distinguished successor at Aligarh) arranged a meeting of Muslim notables with the viceroy on October 1, 1906 at Simla, where they represented the Muslim demands to Lord Minto. In the eyes of the Indian nationalists the mere fact of that meeting is a proof of a British conspiracy to entice the Indian Muslims away from the nationalist movement to pursue a policy of divide and rule. Unfortunately, this has had the effect of making the Indian nationalist historians impervious to all evidence of the material facts behind theMuslim movement. In his presidential address at the Cocanada Congress meeting, Maulana Mohammad Ali rashly spoke of the Simla delegation as a ‘command performance’. This was taken to mean that the Muslim movement was nothing more than a creation of the colonial government’s policy of ‘Divide and Rule’. It may well be that Mohammed Ali had uttered this phrase on an impulse, for which he was notorious. The Indian nationalist historians, with the rare exception of Bimal Prasad, have seized on Mohammad Ali’s passing (and misleading) remark as if it was a complete explanation of the Indian Muslim politics.



The background to the 1906 delegation to the viceroy was an announcement by John Morley, the secretary of state for India, that his government proposed to introduce constitutional reforms in India. When Mohsin-ul-Mulk heard about it, he wrote to Archbold, principal of Aligarh College, who was then vacationing at Simla. In his letter, Mohsin-ul-Mulk emphasised the importance of the occasion and asked Archbold to inquire whether Minto would receive a delegation of Indian Muslims, who wished to put before him their views about the projected constitutional reforms. The viceroy agreed. That initiative, as Bimal Prasad has emphasised (and documented), came entirely from Mohsin-ul-Mulk; not even from Archbold, let alone the British. Mohammad Ali’s phrase ‘command performance’ was baseless and mischievous.



When Mohsin-ul-Mulk got the green light from Simla, a Memorial was prepared and discussed with some Muslim leaders at Lucknow. The big issue of the day that concerned both the viceroy and the Muslims of the new province of East Bengal and Assam was the powerful ongoing agitation to annul the Partition of Bengal. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca and Nawab Ali Choudhury insisted at Lucknow that the Memorial should ask for an assurance that the Partition would not be annulled. But Aligarh was not interested in that issue, which was not even mentioned in the Memorial. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, therefore, refused to join the delegation although Nawab Ali Choudhury did.



The viceroy too appears to have been disappointed that the Bengal Partition issue was not included in the Memorial. Minto took it up on his own bat. In his reply, he reminded “the Mahomedan community of Eastern Bengal and Assam [that they] can rely as firmly as ever on British justice and fair-play.” The delegation had asked for separate electorates and a fairer quota of representation in the viceroy’s council, his executive council, in provincial councils and on senates and syndicates of the Indian Universities. They had reiterated the demand for a Muslim University. They sought a Muslim quota in the government service and the appointment of Muslim judges on the Bench. These were all predictable demands of the Muslim salariat and professionals. In response, Lord Minto “promised … nothing, except sympathy.”12 So much for the ‘command performance’!



A word about the separate electorates. The Muslim candidates in elections complained of difficulty in getting elected, even from Muslim majority constituencies. Due to the property and tax qualifications, Muslim voters were far fewer than their proportion in the population. The Simon Commission Report points out that in the ‘governor’s provinces’ of India, the average franchise extended to no more than 2.8 per cent of the population. This proportion was heavily weighted in favour of those who owned property. The Report says: “Adoption of property qualifications as a basis for the franchise gave a predominance and sometimes a monopoly of votes to certain classes of the population. …In the Central Provinces, the brahmin and the bania have in proportion to their numbers not less than 100 times as many votes as the mahar.” The report speaks of “the total exclusion of … the under-tenants in Bengal”. Separate electorates were a defence against such non-representation. Conversely, joint electorates would have the advantage of drawing minorities into the mainstream of political life. Separate electorates could be looked upon, at best, as a short-term remedy.



Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, sidelined by the Simla deputationists, tried to retrieve his initiative by calling a meeting (to coincide with the meeting of the Muslim Education Society) in Dacca in December 1906 to start an All India Muslim political association. On December 30, the All India Muslim League was founded. But, to his chagrin, the Aligarh-UP group, led by Aligarh’s Viqar-ul-Mulk, hijacked the new organisation by taking all the top posts in the executive committee, leaving Nawab Salimullah of Dacca high and dry again.



The early Congress was not very different; its demands were similar, namely, (1) the Indianisation of the services and promotion of Indians to higher positions within the service; and (2) greater representation of Indians in governing bodies, such as the viceroy’s executive council. These demands were identical to those of the Muslim salariat and the new professional classes but applied in a wider context. Neither party really represented the urban and rural labouring poor. The so-called ‘mass politics’ that emerged after Gandhi, sought no more than to make the peasant speak in the name of the Congress. He did little to make the Congress speak in the name of the peasant. By declaring that the landlords were the ‘trustees’ for the peasantry,13 Gandhi put forward a philosophy that reduced the peasantry to zero. The Congress claim of a ‘mass basis’ is a myth. There was a basic similarity in the class bases and demands of both the Muslim League and the early Congress.



The Muslim movement was not the only one of its kind in India.The Dravidian movement in south India was very similar to it.14 InTamil Nadu, the brahmins dominated the salariat and the professions. Although the Brahmins were three-four per cent of the population of the Madras Presidency, they monopolised the government services and places on the local boards. The non-brahmins, or the dravidians as they called themselves, rebelled against the brahmin dominated political and social system. Their sense of a separate identity was promoted by the discovery by the linguists during the first two decades of the 20th century that all four southern languages, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, formed a distinct, dravidian, linguistic group, quite independent of the northern Indian Sanskrit that came to the south with the brahmins.Thus grew a sense of the Dravidian identity. The birth of the Dravidian Movement is dated to November 1916, when an organisation was formed which eventually evolved into the anti-brahmin Justice Party. E V Ramaswami Naicker, who was known as the Periyar, initiated a Dravidian national movement with secessionist objectives. At the Madras session of the Muslim League, he was seated in a place of honour on the platform. His secessionist movement did not succeed as he was unable to rally people other than those of Tamil Nadu. But his movement transformed the politics of Tamil Nadu.



The Muslim League, set up in 1906, went through far reaching changes from about 1910. A more radical generation of Muslim Leaguers had come up, very different in their mood. There was a shift too in the social base of the League. There was an increased participation in it from the more modest strata of the society. Far fewer of them were from the substantial landed families.“The great majority (of them) belonged to the class which occasionally had a small pittance in rents from land but, generally, in order to survive, had to find employment in service or the professions.”15 The Muslim League had found its enduring class base, even though some landlords (like the Raja of Mahmudabad) and also some businessmen played a part in it. Instead of government patronage, the new Muslim League earned its hostility. We are told that the Raja of Mahmudabad “became more cautious after governor Meston threatened to take away his taluqdari ‘sanad’ in 1916.”



The centre of gravity of the Muslim League shifted away from the Aligarh conservatives to a relatively more radical leadership based in Lucknow, though the bulk of them were educated at Aligarh. By 1912, the energetic and radical Wazir Hasan, took over as general secretary. A new phase began in the political style of the League and it’s attitude towards the Congress. As Rahman puts it: “The growing number of young professional men in the ranks of the Muslim League helped to produce reorientations in the League’s relation with the Hindu community”.16 By 1910, the Muslim League Constitution was revised, bringing it in line with that of the Congress, except for the League’s commitment to separate electorates and weightage for the Muslims. There was by now a realisation in the Muslim League that they would not make much headway against the British unless they built a united front with the Congress. Calls for Hindu-Muslim unity were reiterated.



The Muslim League looked for someone who could build bridges between the League and the Congress. Jinnah was the obvious choice. Although not a member of the Muslim League, he had participated, by invitation, in the meeting of the Muslim League Council in 1912, where proposals for a new (more radical) Muslim League constitution were formulated. Jinnah had made several suggestions that were accepted.17 Jinnah had a high standing in the Indian National Congress and was ideally placed to bring the two movements together. In October 1913, when Wazir Hasan and Maulana Mohammad Ali were in London to see the secretary of state for India (who, in the event, refused to see them), they took the opportunity to meet Jinnah. The two persuaded him to join the Muslim League and work for the Congress-League Unity. Jinnah agreed, provided that his commitments to the Congress would remain.



Soon after joining the Muslim League in October 1913, Jinnah worked hard for the Congress-League unity, which was sealed by the Lucknow Pact and adopted at a Joint Session of the Congress and the League in 1916.18 By virtue of the Pact, the Congress accepted some Muslim demands, including separate electorates with specified province-wise weightage for the Muslims that proved to be controversial. The Muslim minority provinces, like UP, were given a bigger share of seats than that provided under the Morley-Minto Reforms. This was done at the cost of Bengal, which had a Muslim population of 52 per cent but was given a share of only 40 per cent of seats, and Punjab, which had a Muslim population of 54.8 per cent but was given a share of only 50 per cent. The United Provinces with a Muslim population of only 14 per cent was given a share of no less than 30 per cent. After all the UP elite were running the show.



The justified criticism of the Lucknow Pact should not make us underestimate its achievements. It succeeded in bringing the Congress and the Muslim League together on a single platform to fight British Imperialism. It was the Muslim League and Jinnah who had initiated that bid for unity. Jinnah was a unifier and not a separatist, as generally suggested. He was to persist in that difficult role, despite setbacks, for a quarter of a century until the point was reached when, despite all his efforts, unity was no longer an option.



The Lucknow Pact also covered shared demands of the Congress and the League vis-a-vis the colonial government. The pact sought a majority of elected members in legislatures. It demanded that in the provinces, four-fifths should be elected members and only one-fifth nominated, and that the members of councils should be ‘elected directly by the people on as broad a franchise as possible’. Likewise, it provided that four-fifths of the members of the Imperial legislative council should be elected. It demanded that half of the members of the governor-general’s executive council be Indians elected by elected members of the Imperial legislative council. Thus contrary to the popular opinion, the Lucknow Pact was not just about concessions to the Muslim League. It also spelt out the basis on which the Congress and the Muslim League could work together as close allies. The significance of the Lucknow Pact is greater than is generally supposed.



The contentious part of the Lucknow Pact was its acceptance of separate electorates. Jinnah had always preferred joint electorates. At the annual Indian National Congress of 1910, he moved a resolution rejecting separate electorates for local bodies. But after he joined the Muslim League, having failed to persuade his colleagues to accept joint electorates, he acquiesced in what the party demanded. He was probably also influenced by the fact that after the Morley-Minto reforms had enacted separate electorates, senior Congress leaders were reconciled to the idea. As Bimal Prasad points out, in 1911 Gokhalé “again made it clear that in his opinion separate electorates for the Muslims were necessary in view of the failure of sufficient numbers of Muslims to get into the legislative councils…” (op cit, p 123).



By the end of the first world war, there was a radical change in the Muslim movement, when the ulama were activated and brought centre stage. The Khilafat movement (1918-1924), in the hands of Mahatma Gandhi, torpedoed the new political dynamic of the joint struggle of the Muslim League and the Congress against the colonial rule that was set in motion by the Lucknow Pact. It also undermined the secular leadership of the Muslim League. Instead, it helped to mobilise one section of the Sunni ulama, namely, the hardliner Deobandis, on the basis of some false assumptions about the post-war ‘hostility’ of the British towards the Ottoman sultan, their khalifa. The movement capitalised on the pan-Islamic sentiments amongst the Indian Deobandi Muslims. These sentiments were centred on the role of the Ottoman Sultan as the ‘Universal Khalifa’. It ignored the fact that the Ottoman Sultan was not recognised as the Khalifa by the populist Barelvi tradition of the Indian Sunni Islam (arguably, the majority of Indian Muslims). The Barelvis, like the Arab nationalists, rejected the claims of the Ottoman Sultan to be the Khalifa on the doctrinal ground that he was not of Quraysh descent.



The Khilafat movement got off the ground after Gandhi decided to take it over, becoming, in his own words, the ‘dictator’ of the movement. Leaders of the movement, like Abdul Bari of Firangi Mahal, Ansari, Shaukat Ali and Mohammd Ali, sought guidance from him for every action.20 It is difficult to discuss critically the role of Mahatma Gandhi, a man who became a saint. But until the end of first world war, Gandhi had yet to establish himself as a major Indian political leader. His early moves can best be understood in the context of his attempts to achieve that end. He became the undisputed leader of the Indian nationalist movement by the time he had finished with the Khilafat and the non-cooperation movements. Gandhi’s movement undermined the secular leadership of the Muslim League and, for the time being, established the mullahs in that place. Gandhi even helped the mullahs to set up a political organisation of their own (in 1919), namely the Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Hind, which was reincarnated in Pakistan as the Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Islam, the extreme hardliner fundamentalists who were instrumental in the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.



Thanks to Gandhi, the Khilafat movement implanted the religious idiom in the modern Indian Muslim politics for the first time. A key moment in that was when Ansari organised an invasion of the Delhi Session of the All Indian Muslim League in 1918 by the mullahs. Ansari, chairman of the AIML reception committee, convened a meeting of the ulama with the help of the seminaries at Deoband and Firangi Mahal, on the day preceding the AIML annual conference, without the knowledge of his Muslim League colleagues. They met at the Fatehpuri mosque in Delhi.21 At that meeting, mullah fanaticism was whipped up, preparing them for the take over next day. The mullah invasion of the League meeting (referred to, absurdly, by some authors as an advent of the ‘masses’) came as a surprise to the League leadership. When the resolutions about Khilafat were brought forward, it became clear that there was little point in arguing about the substantive issues with the mullahs.



Jinnah, realising that, raised some legalistic and procedural objections. But he knew that the game was lost. To make his point he staged a walkout from the meeting. It was agreed that the Raja of Mahmudabad and Wazir Hasan would not walkout with him. They stayed behind to fight moves to remove them from their positions of president and general secretary of the AIML. Many of the mullahs drifted away after passing the controversial resolutions and the two league leaders were comfortably re-elected. Both resigned a few months later because they could not work with the mullah infested League.



Directly, as a reaction to the Khilafat movement and the politicisation of religion, there followed in the 1920s a long period of the worst communal rioting that India had ever known. In 1924, the Turkish Republican Nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal abolished the Ottoman Khilafat. The Khilafat Committee, which for a time had become more influential than the League, disintegrated in total confusion. The political influence of the Ulama ‘declined swiftly’ and the Muslim League returned to its secular concerns. It must be emphasised that it was only after the partition that Islamic ideology began to be fostered in Pakistan; it was attributed retrospectively to the Muslim League to justify the claim that Pakistan was created to establish an Islamic state. The fact is that the rare attempts to place ‘Islamic ideology’ on the agenda of the Muslim League were firmly scotched by the leadership.22 The Indian Muslim movement was driven by the concrete objectives of the social groups that were involved, rather than by some abstract ideology.



Jinnah soon reappeared on the Muslim League platform. According to Khaliquzzaman, “the time had come to reinforce the Muslim League as the Khilafat Committee was on its last legs. …We decided to invite Jinnah, who had attended only one meeting of the Council of the League in Calcutta in 1919, after his walkout in December 1918, to preside over the Muslim League session at Lahore in May 1924.”23 However, by that time the nature of the Indian provincial politics and the centre of gravity of power in the Muslim League had changed radically.



When the Muslim League was set up, the League’s role was that of a pressure group to articulate the Muslim demands. The Montagu-Chelmsford ‘reforms’ completely altered the dynamics of Indian politics and brought about a shift away from the Muslim minority provinces (e g, the UP ) to the Muslim majority provinces, where the Muslims could form provincial governments. Under dyarchy, ministers now had some power, however limited, to dole out resources and jobs. Political leaders and parties were no longer confined to being just pressure groups. They could now dispense patronage. The influence of the salariat in the Muslim minority provinces declined. The Muslim majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal, notably the former, acquired a new importance. David Page offers an excellent account of this, especially of the emergence of the Punjabi dominance in the Indian Muslim politics.24



There was now a new logic to the role of political parties and politicians. What is not so widely perceived is that there were also shifts in the class base of Muslim politics, which was different in Punjab and in Bengal. The feudal classes were dominant in Punjab. The Punjabi Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landlords joined with the powerful biraderies (extended families) of the jat peasants of east Punjab (led by Choudhry Chhotu Ram) under the unionist Party. A remarkable man, Sir Fazl-i-Husain, who was from an urban middle classbackground but who understood the needs of the feudal classes, led that party. Sir Faz-i-Husain also made a point of patronising the very weak Muslim salariat in Punjab, especially those from rural background. The majority of the urban population in Punjab consisted of the Hindu salariat, professionals and traders, who were the mainstay of the Hindu Sabha. The Punjab Muslim League barely existed. Fazl-i-Husain allied with it also because it had its uses. He was a skilful, pragmatic politician who practised political accommodation as long as his basic interests were taken care of. Along with his feudal constituents, he was favoured by the colonial regime and this greatly strengthened his hands.



Jinnah and Fazl-i-Husain and his Unionist Party, each had something to offer to the other. They entered into a tacit alliance, though they detested each other. It was a marriage of convenience. The Unionist Party was a secular, inter-communal regional party of the Punjabi landed magnates, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and the biraderis of the well-off Jat peasants of East Punjab.25 The Punjabi landed magnates were parochial and hankered after the autonomy of Punjab within the Raj. They were doing very well from the patronage of the colonial regime, to which they were completely loyal. Due to the fragility of their inter-communal and feudal alliance with in Punjab, they did not see any wisdom in extending themselves beyond Punjab because that would import problems into their comfortable set up. Jinnah’s Muslim League was a channel through which they could relate to the all India developments, but on the Unionist terms. Sir Fazl-i-Husain and his successor Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan made it a point to keep the Punjab Muslim League under their tight control.



Jinnah badly needed the deal with the Unionists. He could not claim to be the spokesman of all the Indian Muslims if he could not say that Punjab was behind him. He needed the Unionists to announce that theirs was a Muslim League government. It mattered little if everyone knew that this was a fiction. He did not seek power over Punjab. His single concern was to legitimise the ‘representative’ role of the All India Muslim League.The Punjab Muslim League itself barely existed. As late as February 1940, Khaliquzzaman was to report that “we also discussed the formation of a Muslim League in Punjab” (op cit p 233).



Some influential Unionists even dreamt of an independent dominion of Punjab. Sir Sikandar Hayat met Winston Churchill at Cairo in the summer of 1941-1942 (sic), as Noor Ahmad has reported.26 On his return, Sikandar Hayat told his cabinet colleagues that he had put it to Churchill that loyal Punjab deserves to be given the option of being an independent dominion or be included in an independent dominion with Sindh, Baluchistan and NWFP (provinces that Punjab could easily dominate). He said that he did not know if Churchill was persuaded of this but that it was significant that in his March 1942 proposals Churchill had included the option that provinces be allowed to opt for separate dominion status. Some Unionists expected that they would be allowed to form an independent Punjab ‘with Hindu and Sikh support’, for which Khizr Tiwana held on to his premiership to the bitter end.



The picture in Bengal was quite different. Bengal was a land of (mainly Muslim) small peasants. When the East Bengal Muslim League was first set up in 1911, its leadership was in the hands of the Urdu/Persian speaking immigrant Muslim ashraf, such as the Dacca Nawab family, who were remote from the Bengal peasants. By the end of first world war , the more dynamic Bengali professionals, presumably from the rich peasant rather than the zamindar background, became the leaders. Amongst them was Fazlul Haq, who was to play an important role in mobilising the support of the rich peasants. The peasantry or the ‘praja’ ranged from quite large tenants (‘jotedars’), who had their land cultivated by sharecroppers (‘bhargadars’), especially in north Bengal, to small holders, often with tiny holdings, who predominated in the ‘Active Delta’ in the south. Virtually all sections of the overwhelmingly Muslim Bengal peasantry and the salariat, along with the urban poor, were badly hit by the economic conditions in the aftermath of first world war.27 The insertion of Bengali agriculture into the global economy, by virtue of Bengal’s dependence on jute as a cash crop, had made the province highly vulnerable to fluctuations in the market.



These economic pressures brought about a radicalisation of the Bengal Muslim politics. There was an urgent case for reform of the tenancy laws. Following the province-wide agitationfor reform of theTenancy Act, the colonial government introduced a TenancyBill in 1923 to amend the Act. The radical element in the Bengal Muslim salariat leadership, with the jotedars and the small peasants, supported the Bill. But, sadly, the Congress-Swaraj Party, a Hindu zamindar dominated party in Bengal, successfully killed the bill. Despite its radical rhetoric, the Bengal Congress leadership shamefully backed the parasitical zamindars.



By the late 1920s, Fazlul Haq and other new generation Muslim leaders plunged into mobilising the Bengali tenants. The Indian nationalist historians have played down the class aspect of the struggle (vis-a-vis Zamindars, mainly Hindus) and tend to represent the Bengali peasant struggle as a ‘communal’ issue. However, against the background of a ‘spontaneous’ praja (tenant) movement in the 1920s, the Nikhil Banga Praja Samity (All -Bengal Tenants’ Party) was organised by Fazlul Haq and the new political leadership. The Bengal Provincial Muslim League also came under their control. The Muslim Zamindars, hostile to this movement, together with some top professionals organised a United Muslim Party (with Suhrawardy as its secretary and Khwaja Nazimuddin as one of its stalwart members) to oppose it. Jinnah’s main concern, as in Punjab, was to maintain the claim of the All India Muslim League (and himself) to be the sole representative of the Indian Muslims. He tried to mediate between the two sides in the name of Bengal unity, but was unsuccessful. The Nikhil Banga Praja Samity changed its name in 1936 to the Krishak Praja Party and prepared to contest the 1937 elections. Zamindari abolition without compensation was at the top of the KPP manifesto.



The KPP, with its petty bourgeois leadership, failed to mount a sufficiently strong campaign amongst the poor peasantry, and won only slightly more than 30 per cent of the seats. Their excuse was that the voting rules were too restrictive. That was not true for, in 1946, with the same voting qualifications, the Muslim League General Secretary, Abul Hashim, organised a landslide victory for the Muslim League. Under the 1935 act, a person who paid six annas (one rupee being 16 annas) under the Village Chowkidari Act was entitled to vote. That was a low limit that gave the poor peasants (but not the landless) the vote. In 1937, the landlords dominated the Muslim League, which won almost 30 per cent of the Muslim seats, with independents taking 35 per cent. The Muslim League then settled for a coalition government with the KPP, with Fazlul Haq as the Prime Minister. That was just about enough to sustain the claim that the AIML and Jinnah were the sole representatives of the Indian Muslims. Bengal was the only province where the Muslim League (under the Dacca Nawab family) got respectable results in the 1937 elections. It did quite badly elsewhere.



When the Simon Commission was appointed, the Indian public opinion rejected it universally. Jinnah saw that as an opportunity for a united struggle against the colonial rule. After consultation with the Congress president, Srinivas Iyengar, he convened a meeting of 30 prominent Muslim leaders to consider the Muslim position on the future constitution. What emerged came to be known as the Delhi Muslim Proposals.28 To get over the main hurdle in the way of unity with the Congress, Jinnah used all his powers of persuasion to get his Muslim colleagues to accept joint electorates (which he himself preferred) on the condition that the Muslim representation in Punjab and Bengal shall be in accordance with the population and that in the central legislature the Muslim representation shall not be less than a third. This was also conditional on the acceptance by the Congress that (1) Sindh shall be separated from Bombay and constituted as a separate province; and (2) Reforms shall be instituted in the NWFP and Baluchistan to place them on the same footing as the other provinces in India. The package was to be accepted or rejected as a whole.



Many Muslim leaguers, not unreasonably, believed that the joint electorates would work against them. Sir Muhammad Shafi, Fazl-i-Husain’s protégé, got the Punjab group to split the party and organise their own separate ‘Muslim League’ session in Lahore. Shafi rightly held that Jinnah had underestimated the opposition among the Muslims to the abandonment of separate electorates. Although most members of the League Council stuck loyally with Jinnah at that critical time, they had their reservations about this issue. Announcing the Delhi Muslim proposals, Jinnah himself acknowledged that “the overwhelming majority of Mussalmans firmly and honestly believe that (separate electorates) are the only method by which they can be secure”.29 Also, the Shafi League and the Unionists were not prepared to boycott the Simon Commission. Fazl-i-Husain was determined to isolate Jinnah but failed.



The Delhi Muslim proposals were considered by the (Motilal) Nehru Committee, which was appointed in February 1928 by the Delhi All Parties Conference “to determine the principles of the constitution of India”. The committee recommended adult franchise with joint electorates. It also recommended the reservation of seats for the Muslims in the Muslim minority provinces, but not in the majority provinces (Punjab and Bengal), with similar reservation of seats for the Hindus in the NWFP where they were in a minority. The committee strongly recommended the separation of Sindh from Bombay and normal provincial status for the NWFP and Baluchistan. But at a convention at Lucknow in August 1928, where the Muslim League was not represented,30 the committee’s original recommendations were effectively reversed at the behest of the Hindu Mahasabha, which dominated the Lucknow meeting.



At the subsequent 10 day Calcutta Convention in December 1928, a battle royal ensued between the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha over those issues. Sadly, despite its earlier support, the Congress did not honour its own commitments about Sindhh, Baluchistan and the NWFP. The Congress delegates just kept silent and watched the show. The Mahasabha vetoed further discussion of the proposal, on the ground that this was settled at Lucknow. The Muslim League, claimed Jinnah, was not represented at Lucknow. But, tragically (as one might now say with the benefit of the hindsight) the Congress went along with the Mahasabha, betraying the principles that the Nehru Committee had spelt out. The Hindu Mahasabha would sooner accept separate electorates than agree to the democratic reorganisation of the provinces.



For Jinnah, this betrayal by the Congress was a terrible blow. He had staked all for the sake of unity and had even isolated himself from his Muslim supporters by abandoning joint electorates. The breakdown of his marriage at that time no doubt compounded his bitterness and sense of isolation. This was a turning point and the subsequent developments led inexorably to the final parting.



After the failure of the Muslim League and the victory of the Congress in the 1937 elections, there was bitterness among the Indian Muslims at what they perceived to be the communal partisanship of the rightwing Congress ministries that were installed in the provinces. These factors came together to bring about a total collapse in Jinnah’s (and the Muslim League’s) belief in the good faith of the Congress and its independence from the Mahasabha, especially in matters concerning the Muslims.



Now, faced with a situation in which the Hindu Mahasabha could wield a veto over the Congress decisions, Jinnah was bitterly disillusioned. The mood for cooperation and unity with the Congress gave way to one of hostility. The Indian Nationalist historians tend to explain these developments purely in terms of Jinnah’s personal ambition and his ‘intransigence’, which are taken as axiomatic. If we dispassionately look at Jinnah’s role in Indian history, what we find is his consistent pursuit of national unity on the basis of agreed demands, even at a grave risk to his position. The breaking point for Jinnah came with the betrayal at Calcutta, and there was no turning back.



There was little hope left now of achieving any understanding with the Mahasabha dominated Congress, as far as the Muslim issues were concerned. Thoughts turned to the idea of a separate homeland. This was the climate in which the 1940 ‘Pakistan Resolution’ was passed. Its full implications are not obvious, especially in Pakistan. One can only be mystified by the fact that the Resolution says nothing about the shape that the centre would take. Some scholars believe that this was done to allow for some space for later negotiation. But what options were there? The future direction was ‘over-determined’ by the anxieties and concerns of the feudal barons of Punjab. For them, the Partition was the only acceptable option. The situation was already beyond the powers of even such a formidable negotiator as Jinnah. The die was cast.



There were by now unmistakable signs that the British were well and truly on the way out. In their place loomed the spectre of the rule of the Congress Party, which was firmly committed to radical land reform. If the Congress came to power in Punjab and Sindh, it would break up the feudal structures there. The Cambridge educated Mumtaz Daulatana was the first to jump off the sinking Unionist ship in 1943. Others soon followed. Their option was to take over the Muslim League and work for the partition of India. The preoccupation of the feudal classes with the danger of land reforms, in case they were to find themselves under a Congress government,was confirmed to me in February 1951 in Dacca by Feroze Khan Noon, who was then the governor of East Pakistan. In the course of an informal conversation over lunch, to which he had invited me, when Nehru’s name came up in the conversation, he said to me: “Jawaharlal comes from a good family. But he has surrounded himself by communists. They are out to destroy the great landed families of India. Thank god, they cannot touch us here.”



By 1945, most Unionists had moved over to the MuslimLeague in time to contest the forthcoming elections from their own constituencies. In Sindh, it was likewise. In October 1942, Jinnah had given his blessings to a ministry of big landlords, which was formed by Ghulam Husain Hidayatullah in the name of the Muslim League. That ministry continued. Jinnah despised and detested them all but he had no other option. It was the power of the landed magnates of the Indus plain and the powerful campaign in Bengal leading to the landslide victory in the 1946 elections that created Pakistan. Religious ideology played no part in this, as indeed, it had never done, except during the brief interlude of the Gandhi led Khilafat movement. The role of the ‘pirs’ (saints) of Punjab and Sindh in the elections has prompted some historians to jump to the conclusion that it signified the religious appeal of the Pakistan slogan. Nothing could be further from the truth. The pirs in question were big landowners in their own rights and had jumped on to the Muslim League bandwagon because they were concerned about the Congress’s plans for land reforms. However, due to their religious power, the pirs did instruct their followers to vote for the Muslim League candidates.



There is a myth too about the ‘Aligarh students’ who travelled round Punjab and Sindh to mobilise the peasants for Pakistan. A group of Aligarh students did go round (some of whom I personally know). The landlords or their lawyers managed their tour. They would give a speech or two in district or sub-district towns. Only the very naïve, who have no idea of how the Punjabi and Sindhi feudal society works, will take this to mean ‘mass ncontact’.



The picture in Bengal was very different. The Muslim feudal families had led the Bengal Muslim League since its inception. This was challenged by the rise of Fazlul Haq and the KPP, which had a base among the rich peasants. After the 1937 elections, the KPP and the Muslim League formed a coalition government. This was an ‘alliance’ of conflicting class interests. Fazlul Haq was soon isolated. By this time (in 1938), H S Suhrawardy, a minister in the government, had assumed the charge of the Muslim League organisation. In 1943, Abul Hashim, a man who professed a confused mixture of socialism and Islam, was elected as the party’s secretary. Suhrawardy and Abul Hashim played key roles in the unsuccessful attempt to create an united independent Bengal with the support of the Sarat Bose faction of the Bengal Congress and Jinnah. The Congress leadership vetoed the plan. During the 1945-46 elections, when Suhrawardy kept himself in Calcutta, Abul Hashim, organised an extraordinary campaign amongst the poor peasants of Bengal on economic issues. This resulted in a massive and unprecedented landslide victory for the Muslim League. Religious ideology played no part in it.



In Bengal, the peasants, who were overwhelmingly Muslim, were enmeshed in the colonial (globalised) cash economy. Their immediate conflict was with the traders and moneylenders, who were overwhelmingly Hindu. It is a tribute to the Bengali Muslim League leadership, especially to Abul Hashim, who concentrated on the economic issues and did not allow the elections to degenerate into a Hindu-Muslim communal conflict – though in some places such incidents did occur. The issues that were brought to the fore in the election campaign included the peasant demand for settlement of the accumulated debt owed to the moneylenders. The people were also promised some protection from the traders who manipulated prices. There was also the demand for the abolition of zamindari without compensation, a promise fulfilled in 1951.



Unlike in 1937, these elections reached down to the poor peasants. The Bengal Muslim League won 114 seats out of the 121 Muslim seats (as against only 39 in 1937). However, Abul Hashim had served his purpose for the powerful rightwing politicians. By February 1947, they appointed another man as acting general secretary of the League and Abul Hashim found himself in his village in Burdwan. The Dacca Nawab family was back in the saddle.



The stage was now set for the partition. The East Bengal, Punjab and Sindh elections demonstrated that Islamic ideology did not play any part in the success of the Muslim League and the creation of Pakistan. Could the Partition have been avoided? This is a favourite question of our Indian friends. It is not a useful question anymore. History does not retrace its steps. We must look forward and ask ourselves what we can do to live in peace and friendship with each other.



Address for correspondence: halavi@cyber.net.pk



Notes



The Muslim ashraf were concentrated in UP and Bihar. With the decay of the pre-colonial state that they dominated (especially in the 18th century) and with the rising power and prosperity of Bengal under the East India Company (EIC), many Muslim ashraf migrated eastwards, and found employment in Murshidabad or with the EIC and settled down in West Bengal. They took with them their languages, Urdu and Persian. There were few Muslim ashraf elsewhere in India, except for Hyderabad under the Nizam.

A vivid picture of the divided family interests and relationships is portrayed, with great empathy, by (the late) Khadija Mastoor in her prize winning Urdu novel Aangan, which has been published in an English translation under the title The Courtyard, Lahore, 2001.

W Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India, London, 1946, pp 228-29.

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, London, 1986, Ch 3: ‘The Moment of Departure – Culture and Power in the Thought of Bankim Chandra’, pp 54 ff.

A translation of the relevant parts of Anandamath by T W Clark will be found in The Role of Bankim Chandra in the Development of Nationalism, in C H Phillips (ed) Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, London, 1961, p 442 ff.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, ‘Hindu aur Musalmanon mein Irtibat’ (Bonds Between Hindus and Muslims), Maqalat-e-Sir Syed, Vol 15, Lahore 1963, p 41.

David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation, Delhi, 1996, p 302.

The Indian Annual Register, 1923, Vol I, p 25.

C W Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, OUP, Karachi and Delhi, 1979, p 18, note 75.

For the concept of colonial capitalism c f (1) Hamza Alavi, ‘The Structure of Colonial Social Formations’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XVI, Nos 10, 11, and 12, Annual Number, 1981, (2) Hamza Alavi, ‘India: Transition to Colonial Capitalism’ in Hamza Alavi, Doug. McEachern et al, Capitalism and Colonial Production, Croom Helm, London 1982, also published in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol 10, No 4, 1980.

Bimal Prasad has dealt with the story of the 1906 delegation objectively and accurately in Pathways to India’s Partition, Vol II, A Nation within a Nation, Dacca, 2000, pp 100 ff. Bimal Prasad’s three volume work – of which the third volume is elusive – seems to be one of the best studies so far done on the ‘Pakistan Movement’. Earlier, Francis Robinson also dealt with it in the same scholarly way in Separatism Among Indian Muslims, Delhi, 1993, pp 142 ff.

Francis Robinson, op cit, p 147.

Cf John R MacLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress, Princeton, 1977, ch 7, Congress and Landlord Interest, pp 211 ff.

Based on Eugene F Irschik’s Politics and Social Conflict in South India, Berkeley, 1969; and M R Barnett’s Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, Princeton, 1976.

Francis Robinson, op cit, p 177.

Matiur Rahman, From Consultation to Confrontation, London, 1970, p 197.

S S Pirzada (ed), Foundations of Pakistan: All India Muslim League Documents, Vol I, 1906-1924, n d (1969?), p 258-59.

For the Text of the ‘Reform Scheme’ (the Lucknow Pact), c f S S Pirzada (ed), op cit, pp 392-97.

See Hamza Alavi, (1) ‘Ironies of History – Contradictions of the Khilafat Movement’ in Mushirul Hasan (ed), Islam, Communities and Nation, Manohar, New Delhi, 1998, and (2) ‘Review Article on ‘Pan Islam in British Indian Politics’ by Naeem Qureshi’ in Pakistan Perspectives, Vol 7, No 1, January-June 2002, Pakistan Studies Centre, University of Karachi.

M K Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol XV, Delhi, 1979, pp 63-64.

A M Zaidi, Evolution of Muslim Political Thought, Vol II, n d, p 122.

Such a move at an AIML conference in 1943 by one A H Kazi was Scotched and a Proposed Resolution about Islamic Ideology was not even moved. C f, S S Pirzada (ed), op cit, Vol II, p 440.

Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan, Lahore, 1961, p 76.

David Page, Prelude to Partition, OUP, Delhi, 1987, pp 114 ff.

A Model of this will be found in M C Pradhan, The Political System of the Jats of Northern India, OUP, Bombay, 1966; for biraderies of Punjabi Muslims c f, Hamza Alavi, ‘The Two Biraderis: Kinship in Rural West Punjab’ in T N Madan (ed), Muslim Communities of South Asia, Revised and Enlarged Edition, New Delhi, 1995.

Noor Ahmad, Martial Law Say Martial Law Tak (in Urdu), Lahore, 1967, pp 203-04.

Taj ul-Islam Hashmi provides an excellent account of conditions in the 1920s, When we find a radicalisation of Bengal Muslim politics in Peasant Utopia: The Communalisation of Class Politics in East Bengal – 1920-47, Dacca, 1994, pp 50 ff.

Indian Annual Register, 1927, Vol I, p 32 ff, for the Delhi Muslim Proposals; IAR 1927, Vol II, p 397 for Resolution on Hindu-Muslim Unity; IAR, 1928, Vol I, p 9 ff, for the text of the Nehru Report and an account of The All Parties Conference.

Indian Annual Register, 1927, Vol 1, p 37.

Indian Annual Register, Vol I, 1928, Jinnah’s speech at the Calcutta All Parties Convention, p 124. At the time of the Lucknow meeting, he had not yet returned from Europe where he had gone with his wife, who was seriously ill. As Wolpert reports the young Chagla ‘accepted the Report’ at Lucknow on behalf of the Muslim League from Motilal. A friend of Jinnah, Chagla did not represent the League and held no office in it.

David Page, op cit, p 190.