Few things concentrate the mind in quite the same peculiar manner as an anniversary; implicit to the idea of remembrance is the need for a sense of narrative and a sense of perspective, which inevitably turns into a demand for context and understanding. Though this year is positively embarrassed with a wealth of centenaries the anniversary that has occupied my mind the most is not one of these, but that of the Seventieth anniversary of the end of British India; of Partition; of the birth of the independent states of India and Pakistan. It was one of the most important – and traumatic – events of the twentieth century yet has received shockingly little attention from historians (alas, not a surprise; the history of the Subcontinent is not fashionable in the West, while in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh the issue is far too intensely political to touch with the sort of security that is usually necessary for solid historical work), meaning that discussion of it tends to lack the sort of context that only a deep historiographical bench can provide. This leads to a tendency for debate and remembrance to occur in a strange bubble outside wider historical narratives; Partition is often presented as a tragedy that came out of a clear sky, almost if it were a historical event outside history. When historical explanations are sought they are typically found in comparative short term, in the vagaries of Imperial policy or in the personality politics of the Nationalist movement. Neither particularly convince. Though there can be little doubt that the Raj handled the matter of communal tension in the most extraordinarily irresponsible manner possible, it plainly did not cause the deep well of bitterness at its heart (one cannot attempt to exploit tensions that do not already exist in some form), however satisfying it would undeniably be to blame everything on Imperial misrule. Similarly, while the extreme personal drama that characterised the relationship between Nehru and Gandhi on one hand and Jinnah on the other was certainly consequential it does not explain how the idea of Pakistan went from being an intellectual project to a demand worth killing and dying for within such an extraordinarily short period of time; such relationships surely only prove fateful if the situation is already dangerous.
What, then, can explain it? I must stress that this is not my field and it is possible that I may be about to make a lengthy series of embarrassing errors, but my view would be that in order to understand Partition it is necessary to understand Pakistan, by which I mean not the country that emerged out of the chaos, but the idea of it. The story is well known; how the poet Iqbal spoke before the assembled delegates of the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad, how he informed them of what they already knew (that Muslims formed a distinct community with interests quite apart from those of the Hindu majority; that in an independent India they would be subject to laws passed by that same Hindu majority; that ultimately this was far more objectionable than being subject to laws passed by the alien British; that this was, as Jinnah had recently argued, a problem of great difficulty), and proposed to them a radical solution (political independence for Muslims), how this won them over, how this profound message combined with Jinnah’s adroitness at exploiting an increasingly fraught political situation to win over the support of an overwhelming majority of India’s Muslims. Two things are particularly significant here; the first is the fact that although Iqbal’s solutions were new and radical the problems (as he and other Indian Muslims saw them) that he identified were not, while the second is that once his solution acquired a serious foothold in the imaginations of ordinary Muslims it very quickly became hegemonic; we can infer from this that they agreed with both his analysis and his solution. This may seem like a rather banal point but it is not; Iqbal’s dream tapped into the deep fears and hopes of millions, and it is quite reasonable wonder why, as had this not been so then the idea of Pakistan could not have lain at the heart of one of the least anticipated and most consequential mass political movements in history.
To answer this I think we need to think in terms of the longue durée, of history – in this case mostly cultural history – moving at a slow pace beneath the ebb and flow of political events. But in order to reach this point, oddly enough, we only need to go back to the 1870s, to the same part of India – modern Uttar Pradesh – where Iqbal gave his speech, and to focus our attention on another intellectual project.
For the wellspring of all the independent Muslim political movements in the Subcontinent was the Aligarh Movement – a Higher Education-led drive for the modernisation and renewal of all aspects of Islamic culture in North India that emerged in the 1870s; typically for such a movement the purpose of modernisation was a desire to preserve past glories – and many of the problems that preoccupied Iqbal, Jinnah and the entire Muslim League also preoccupied its founding figure, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. One of the most important historical figures that you’ve never heard of,* he was an essentially conservative man, concerned at what he saw (correctly) at the collapse of Islamic political power and cultural prestige in India during his lifetime, and dedicated his life to turning the tide. He was not, it must be noted, concerned at the loss of cultural and political power to the British – he believed in co-operating with the Imperial authorities and had supported them during the events of 1857 – but to the Hindu majority. His fierce opposition to growing demands for the recognition of Hindi catapulted him to national fame and political prominence, and his reason for this – that Hindi was the language of uncouth peasants while Urdu was the language of civilisation – is where we find our way into Pakistan’s peculiar longue durée. Except in Bengal where the situation was reversed,** Indian Muslims accepted as a given their cultural superiority over their Hindu neighbours. This was quite understandable: from the High Middle Ages until the 17th century, the bulk of the Subcontinent had been ruled by a succession of Islamic empires and over time such political and cultural power had accumulated to both Islamic dynasties and – even if largely in the sense of reflective glory – to the Muslim population in wider society that it is reasonable to write of an Islamic Ascendency in India; a lengthy period in which not only political leadership, but nearly all high culture was exclusively Islamic in character, and in which the culture of the majority was pushed firmly to the margins. This can be observed not in the remarkably rich legacy of Islamic art and literature from these centuries (the product of courtly patronage on a scale that puts the Medici to shame), but in the built environment of North India, where cultural hegemony found physical expression in public architecture, notably – and to this day extremely controversially – in the construction of imposing mosques on the sites of deliberately demolished Hindu temples. In contemporary India advocates of Hindutva see this as a period of darkness and national humiliation; to Khan and to those who followed in his footsteps – a long list that includes both Iqbal and Jinnah – it was a golden age, the memory of which it was the duty of the modern Muslim to preserve. Seen from this perspective, the real tragedy of Indian history, therefore, was not the arrival of the East India Company (as regrettable as that may have been) but the dismemberment of the Mughal Empire by the Maratha kingdoms. Islamic cultural ascendency could not survive the end of Islamic political power entirely intact, but could (and did) survive after a fashion; indeed, the Maratha kings acknowledged the Mughal Emperor as their social superior, even as they inflicted repeated humiliations upon the increasingly nominal Empire. It could survive the conquest of the entire subcontinent by commercially-minded foreigners. It could even survive a serious Hindu religious and cultural revival so long as political power remained neutral (which in practice meant foreign occupation, however odious and commercially-minded). What it could obviously not survive was a Hindu revival in a state in which political power was wielded by the majority. Khan’s dismissal of Hindi as a language of the vulgar and the hickish may strike us as extraordinarily snobbish (because it was!) but it was rooted in an understanding that the history of Islam in India -and so also of Indian Muslims – had turned into a long defeat; one that Khan was determined to resist or at least delay.
It should not be forgotten that the cultural legacy that inspired Khan and those that followed him was deeply resented by many Hindus. As the Hindu revival gathered steam, harsh voices began to be heard, culminating the foundation of a new political movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, in 1925, five years before Iqbal rose to speak at Allahabad. The RSS believed – and believes – in creating a Hindu cultural ascendency in India, and in destroying those ‘foreign’ elements in society that had oppressed Hinduism for so long; in this context Muslims were regarded as every bit as foreign as the British. Such voices were far from dominant, but they were loud and Jinnah was adept at drawing a link between the RSS and Congress in the minds of ordinary Muslims. It is easy to see why the nominally secular Congress and its platform of an independent and democratic India appeared to be such a threat, at first to intellectuals and then to the wider Muslim population. Genuine majority rule would open up the possibility of the long defeat of Indian Islam turning into a rout and ending in subjugation. That this should cause great fear must be seen as natural; that proposed deliverance inspired great fervour and excitement can only be regarded as inevitable. That the idea of Pakistan, once uttered, should sweep all before it as the triumph of Congress loomed ever closer should therefore not be seen as a shock; Pakistan did not emerge out of a vacuum, but out of nearly a thousand years of history. This does not mean that Partition was inevitable, but it does mean that it could only have been averted if the fears that led to the idea of Pakistan could have been successfully accommodated within a unified India. And that, at least, is not a question that can be answered with a focus on the longue durée.
1. Unless you happen to be Pakistani in which case the name, at least, will be extremely familiar.
2. With important consequences for the fate of Pakistan; attempts to impose ‘superior’ Urdu on the Bengalis of ‘East Pakistan’ was a major cause of the tensions that led to civil war and birth of Bangladesh.
The Republic of the Broken Dolls 