Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism : The Colonial Legacy in South Asia 0813387507, 9698133135, 9780367011819

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
1 Introduction
The Case: Similarities
Postcolonial Politics: The Contrast
Theories of Subcontinental Politics
Notes
2 Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: A Gramscian Approach
Gramsci’s Political Theory
Gramsci: Elements of a Synthesis
A Gramscian Methodology
A Final Caveat
Notes
3 The Colonial State and Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism
Colonial Rule and India’s Class Structure
Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communalism
The Colonial State and Democracy
The Colonial Legacy: An Overview
Conclusion
Notes
4 Colonial Hindu Politics: Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism
The Congress and Colonial Politics
State-Class Relationships
Dominant-Subaltern Class Relationships
The Subaltern Classes and Politics
Conclusion
Notes
5 Colonial Muslim Politics: Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism
The Colonial State and the Muslims
The State and the Landlords
Muslim Provincial Politics
The Center-Province Disjuncture
The League and Muslim Politics
Conclusion
Notes
6 Conclusion
The State and Indian Politics
The Dominant and Subaltern Classes and Civil and Political Society
Modes of Political Organization
Political Consciousness: Nationalist Discourses
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
About the Book and Author
Index

Citation preview

Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism

Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism The Colonial Legacy in South Asia Asma Barlas

First published 1995 by Westview Press Published 2018 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, N ew York, N Y 10017 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1995 by Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part o f this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barlas, Asma. Democracy, nationalism, and communalism : the colonial legacy in South Asia / A sm a Barlas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8133-8750-7 (U.S.) ISBN 969-8133-13-5 (Pakistan) l. South Asia— Politics and government. 2. Democracy-South Asia. 3. Nationalism— South Asia. 4. Communalism— South Asia. I. Title DS34l.B35 1995 320.954— dc20

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-01181-9 (hbk)

95-3113 CIP

For Anwar and Iqbal Barlas, my parents, and Demir Mikail Ahmed Barlas, my son

Contents ix

Preface 1

1

Introduction The Case: Similarities, 1 Postcolonial Politics: The Contrast, 3 Theories of Subcontinental Politics, 7 Notes, 16

2

Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: A Gramscian Approach

21

Gramsci’s Political Theory, 21 Gramsci: Elements of a Synthesis, 35 A Gramscian Methodology, 38 A Final Caveat, 42 Notes, 43 3

The Colonial State and Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism

47

Colonial Rule and India’s Class Structure, 48 Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communalism, 61 The Colonial State and Democracy, 71 The Colonial Legacy: An Overview, 86 Conclusion, 89 Notes, 89 4

Colonial Hindu Politics: Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism The Congress and Colonial Politics, 96 State-Class Relationships, 108 Dominant-Subaltern Class Relationships, 110 The Subaltern Classes and Politics, 132 vii

95

viii

Contents

Conclusion, 139 Notes, 140 5

Colonial Muslim Politics: Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism

143

The Colonial State and the Muslims, 144 The State and the Landlords, 154 Muslim Provincial Politics, 157 The Center-Province Disjuncture, 170 The League and Muslim Politics, 171 Conclusion, 188 Notes, 189 6

Conclusion

193

The State and Indian Politics, 193 The Dominant and Subaltern Classes and Civil and Political Society, 197 Modes of Political Organization, 201 Political Consciousness: Nationalist Discourses, 203 Conclusion, 206 Notes, 208 Bibliography About the Book and Author Index

209 229 231

Preface This book grew out of my doctoral thesis, which was completed at the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS), University of Denver, in 1990. In it, I attempted to explore the social origins of modern South Asian politics, specifically, the circumstances leading to the emergence of “democracy’*in India and chronic military rule in Pakistan, a contrast that seemed (and seems) interesting since both India and Pakistan were part of a single state until their freedom from British colonial rule in 1947. However, it was not only theoretical reasons that motivated me to study this contrast, but personal as well. Forced to leave Pakistan in 1983 after then-president General Zia ul Haq illegally terminated my career in the Foreign Service and began to persecute my family for my criticism of him, I have endured the pain and alienation that seems to be the fate of exiles, no matter how congenial the situation in the country of their asylum. Like others in a similar predicament, I was driven to try and make sense of my circumstances by attempting to understand the broader social and political conditions that had engendered them. Although I began by trying to determine why Pakistan had been under persistent military rule since 1958, I soon became interested in ascertaining why India had been able to sustain some form of “democracy” during the same period. My search for an answer, however, proved unsatisfactory. There were only a few comparative studies on India and Pakistan and these raised more questions than they answered. The noncomparative literature, though scholarly and instructive, turned out to offer only partial insights into the contrast as well. I was, therefore, encouraged to venture an analysis of my own based on my reading of Antonio Gramsci. This proved a rash undertaking in a school with no “Gramscians” or “South Asianists” to guide me. Not only did I end up struggling with Gramsci’s cryptic work in lonely splendor, but in seeking to “apply” it, I was forced much further back into history than I had anticipated—into the colonial period itself. As so often seems to happen with graduate students, the end project of my labors thus bore little resemblance to the question that had motivated them. ix

X

Preface

Though my intent in this book remains the same as in the dissertation, I believe my exposition of the problem has benefitted from selflearning and reviewers’ criticisms in the interim. I now realize that not only had I reinvented the wheel in many cases (something my inadequate familiarity with the literature prevented me from learning in time to save me the mortification that follows such discoveries) but also that I had done unwitting violence in the thesis to complicated historical processes because of inadequacies in my theoretical approach and my heavy reliance on views of Indian history that have become increasingly controversial. Accordingly, I have endeavored during the last few years not only to extend my theoretical vision but also to reeducate myself in South Asian history. However, since my training is neither in political theory nor in history but in international studies, I do not claim to have written a theoretical treatise on democracy or an original history of South Asia. Rather, I have drawn upon some theoretical insights to explore the connections between three interpenetrating relationships: of the British, the Hindus, and the Muslims in colonial India, in order to understand their implications for politics. Ventures like these can never be completed without incurring many obligations, and I am happy to acknowledge mine. This study is based mainly on secondary sources, so my greatest intellectual debt is to the authors listed in the bibliography, especially those on whose work I have attempted to build. The process of self-education inherent in undertaking this endeavor was also enabled by dialogues with Hamza Alavi and Syed Bashir Hussain, who sensitized me to the theoretical nuances of the comparison. I am also thankful to Alan Gilbert, David Levine, and John McCamant, members of my dissertation committee whose sharp criticisms, always tempered with intellectual generosity and friendship, helped me more in writing the book than the thesis, since I have understood many of them better only in retrospect. I would also like to thank James Caporaso and Jyotirindra Das Gupta for having taken time out from their preoccupations to offer much-needed guidance and advice. Discussions with Zillah Eisenstein, Naeem Inyatullah, Natalie Medina, Aurangzeb Syed, and Nawfal Umari have helped me to rethink and refine some of my earlier arguments, while William Richter’s comments, as well as those of anonymous reviewers, on the first draft of the manuscript aided me considerably in improving it. Shishir Kumar Jha’s help was invaluable in collecting new material for this book. I am grateful to GSIS and the American Association of University Women (AAUW) for their handsome scholarships that enabled me to complete my doctoral work and to Ithaca College for the grants that permitted me to write the book.

Preface

xi

At Westview Press, I had the good fortune to work with Alison Auch, who not only was consistently supportive but also retained her composure as I extended my deadlines. Lynn Arts and Wayne Davis also rendered valuable help. To Ulises Mejias Button, committed filmmaker, artist, and companero, who provided distractions when I least anticipated or needed them, I am grateful for his patience, for his comments on this manuscript, and for having shared with me some discerning observations on life, art, and politics. For having taught me the value not only of intellectual integrity but also commitment and perseverance, I am indebted to my parents, Anwar and Iqbal, to whom I dedicate this book. I would also like to thank the rest of my family—Rubina, Tamina, Imran, Muneeb, Shariq, Zeba, and Hamza—for their support, which has been a constant source of comfort and reassurance to me. Many people have suffered on my account over the years, but none more than my beloved friend, companion, and son, Demir Mikail, who has paid an especially heavy price for my extended academic commitments. Although I cannot compensate him for the lost time, I would like to make some amends by dedicating this book also to him. Without his love and encouragement, his brilliant insights, and his piquant sense of humor, I could not have survived with my spirit and sanity intact. Asma Barlas

1

Introduction Nearly two centuries (1757-1947) of British colonial rule in the South Asian subcontinent ended with its being partitioned into the states of India and Pakistan in 1947. Within a decade, the latter had degenerated into a “praetorian” state (Gardezi and Rashid, 1983; Richter, 1978) while the former is counted today among the world’s extant “democracies.” In this book I analyze the historical circumstances that have engendered Indian and Pakistani politics in its existing specificity by means of a theoretical and methodological approach drawn from Antonio Gramsci’s works. Prior to specifying this approach, I describe the nature of the problem and why its study is likely to be instructive for theorists of democracy. I then examine some leading theories of Indian and Pakistani politics since it is only on the basis of a critique of these that the strengths of an alternative, Gramscian approach can be appreciated.

The Case: Similarities The contrast between India and Pakistan is striking because at independence they inherited a shared legacy conditioned by over twelve centuries of Hindu-Muslim association and two of colonial rule. Thus, while Britain’s partitioning of the subcontinent left the successor states with unequal assets, they acquired almost identical administrative structures from the Raj. This included a system of governance fashioned by the latter over the course of almost a century with an eye primarily to facilitating its own control. The result was an “overdeveloped" (Alavi, 1973) state dominated by a powerful civil service, the erstwhile steel frame of Empire, not only inimical to the idea of “native” political control, but also able to obstruct it. (It was the locally-recruited segment of this bureaucracy which inherited administrative power in 1947 and which continues to run the show: in India, behind the facade of “democracy”; in Pakistan, openly and in tandem with the military.)2 (Braibanti, 1966; Potter, 1966.) 1

2

Introduction

Similarly, since the Indian and Pakistani militaries were created from the bifurcation of the “British Indian” army (the largest professional volunteer force in the world), they continued to share up to the 1970s3 the same patterns of recruitment, attitudinal biases, and notions of professionalism on the part of their officer corps (Cohen, 1971; 1984). However, whereas in India the army has remained under the thumb of civilian authorities, in Pakistan it has been at the state’s helm since 1958. While India and Pakistan are at differing stages of economic growth, due partly to the uneven nature of capitalist development under colonial rule,4 they are among the top ten industrialized countries in the “Third World” even though they are primarily agrarian societies. Moreover, in spite of the socialist rhetoric of India’s leaders and Pakistan’s brief dalliance with nationalization in the 1970s, both are free-market economies with large private sectors and sizable foreign investments. In both, the state intervenes actively in the economy, often on behalf of private capital (Amjad, 1983; Burki, 1986; Kochanek, 1983; Noman, 1990). However, whereas in India the private sector is strong and independent because of the emergence of a powerful bourgeois class which was able to consolidate its hegemony even before 1947 (Chandra, 1975; Chatterjee, 1993a), in Pakistan, it remains weak and dependent on the state which itself created the conditions necessary for the growth of capitalism after 1947 (Alavi, 1983; Hasan, 1971; Nayak, 1988). As a result, only lately has this class begun to secure its political representation in the state. Notwithstanding pockets of capitalist “modernization,” however, India and Pakistan are also characterized by many features associated with so-called “traditional” societies such as the existence of a large and underdeveloped agrarian sector, high levels of illiteracy, social “backwardness,” and entrenched ethnic, kinship and communal5 loyalties and identities that make the construction of a purely secular nationalism6 problematical (Devji, 1992; Hasan, 1986; Krishna, 1971; Mitra, 1991; Upadhyaya, 1992). Most importantly, at least from the perspective of theorists who emphasize the importance of political processes and institutions to “democracy,” both states achieved their freedom in the wake of successful national struggles (the first avowedly secular, the second ostensibly communal)7led by the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League, the two principal parties of Hindus and Muslims in colonial India. Therefore, both states had seemingly8hegemonic parties in power in 1947. Both parties were dominated by two brilliant but obdurate lawyers noted for their dictatorial miens, M. A. Jinnah and his more acclaimed contemporary, M. K. Gandhi, both of whom died within a year of independence, the latter at the hands of an assassin. Finally, in both

Introduction

3

states, power has devolved on a small oligarchy: in India, on the NehruGandhi dynasty until recently; in Pakistan, on a landlord-militarybureaucratic junta for most of its history (Ahmed, 1978; Alavi, 1983; Gardezi and Rashid, 1983; Waseem, 1989).

Postcolonial Politics: The Contrast Notwithstanding these similarities, however, Indian and Pakistani politics has also been very different. In India, politics has been dominated by a “middle” class,9 conducted through parties, and tended to remain within the framework of procedures associated with electoral democracy. The Congress is still the leading party even though it has splintered into factions and has never won the majority of the popular vote after 1947, having been defeated by left and right-wing parties, both. Yet, its control over the political system has been so pervasive until recently as to render depictions of it as the “one-party” or “Congress-system” (Zins, 1988) entirely credible. The party’s ability to underwrite the social accord necessary for “democracy” has been ascribed not only to its leadership of the national struggle, but also to its noted capacity to accommodate diverse social and political forces in its own ranks. Thus, capitalists and laborers, landlords and peasants, bureaucrats and politicians, women and men, Brahmins and “Untouchables,” Hindus and Muslims, ideologues of the left and the right, conservatives and radicals, and secular and religious intellectuals have all, at one time or another, vied for leverage within it (Andrews and Mookerjee, 1938; Brass and Robinson, 1987; Joshi and Hebsur, 1988; Sisson and Wolpert, 1988). In spite of the contradictions engendered in its policies by this medley, however, the Congress remains “one of the oldest bourgeois parties in the world” and one, moreover, that has exercised “sole power continuously for more years than virtually any party in the West” (Ali, 1977:52). Yet, because of its “all consuming capacity to absorb and synthesize extraneous and even ostensibly incompatible elements,” (Shepperdson and Simmons, 1988:8) it has been able to lay claim to ruling in the name of “the” Indian nation. Popular acceptance (until recently) of this claim has also allowed the state to weather its traumas without falling victim to a military coup so far. Increasingly, however, the party’s unwillingness or inability to make good on the promise of development and democracy, reflected in growing poverty (Kohli, 1987) and authoritarianism (Kothari, 1988) have engendered erosions in its hegemony, a fact that bodes ill for the future of democracy. Thus, not only is agreement on the rules of the game that representative government entails in the process of unravelling (as witnessed by the rise of separatist movements by the Sikhs of the Punjab

4

Introduction

and the Muslims in Kashmir),10 but the ensuing discord has fostered a culture of violence that is inimical to democracy. However, since it is in the interest of the ruling groups to ensure that the legacy of accommodation11 that underpins politics—and, by that token, their own hegemony—is preserved, a watered down form of "democracy” may yet manage to survive in India. Here, of course, one may question the credentials of Indian politics to be democratic even by the thin standards of a representative system for, as Michael Levin (1983: 93) says, the purpose of such a system "is only manifested when widespread participation actually ensues, i.e., the opportunity has not only to be there, it has to be continuously taken up.” While on such views, even the United States would not qualify as a “democracy” because of the political marginalization of the poor, people of color, and women, the problem is much worse in agrarian societies like India and Pakistan where the majority of the population is a peasantry that has been permanently excluded from any meaningful participation in politics, at least of the “official”12 variety. Moreover, the top-heavy and exclusive nature of the Indian state, the social inequities fostered by the Hindu caste system, inordinate poverty, and periodic violence against women and minorities like Muslims, Sikhs and "Untouchables,” have also rendered India a “democracy” more in form than in content. However, too hasty a dismissal of India’s version of democracy runs the risk of disregarding some of the benefits it has conferred on the Indian polity. These include the rule of law (which, admittedly, has been increasingly undermined since the 1970s by what Smitu Kothari [1993: 151] calls "state lawlessness,”) an implicit accord on the way governments are to be run and replaced, and a tradition of pluralism and dissent. While these have failed to prevent violence, including a lethal rash of assassinations and communal brutality, and while ballot-box politics is not necessarily a virtue, in so far as it has deterred military coups, it is not so trivial either, specially in comparison to Pakistan. Second, while "democracy” has not eliminated state repression, it has discouraged it from assuming the almost gratuitous character it has acquired in many postcolonial societies, including Pakistan. Finally, the pluralistic ambience13 has been conducive for opening up some spaces for the emergence of social movements based on women and peasants, like the Chipko, that are engaged in challenging the elitist, gender-biased and ecologically destructive strategies of the state (Shiva, 1989). These struggles, if successful, may induce some liberalization in local politics in the future as well. Unexceptional as these features of Indian “democracy” seem, specially in the West, they acquire significance if one recalls that in Pakistan,

Introduction

5

the last military regime of General Zia ul Haq (1977-1988) not only had its opponents whipped publicly as late as the mid-1980s, but also adopted legislation reducing the status of two women to that of one man for some legal purposes! (Mumtaz and Shaheed, 1987). Military intervention in the country’s politics, which is a standard feature and seems to have acquired a logic of its own by now, dates from 1958 when party politics broke down completely in the postcolonial state. Thus the League, which had successfully led the struggle for Pakistan’s creation, not only failed to institutionalize representative democracy but disintegrated itself soon thereafter due to the early death of Jinnah—the moving spirit behind it and Pakistan’s "founder”—the chronic defections and intrigues of its own officials, and its narrow social base (Callard, 1957, 1970; Campbell, 1963; Sayeed, 1970). Accordingly, while Pakistan also had a brief (1947-1958) parliamentary phase, the experiment proved abortive and owed nothing to the party’s effectiveness. Parliament was a colonial relic, neither popularly elected nor even formally democratic as the numerous governments that rose and fell in rapid succession had their origins not in elections, but in deals and conspiracies among the ruling groups, comprising a landed and official14 class which had inherited the Raj. In spite of their maneuvering, however, these groups were unable to unify or to establish their own hegemony over the state, thereby providing the military an opening to sweep them off the scene in 1958. (However, due to the military’s failure to adopt effective land reforms, the landed class has become part of the junta that has ruled Pakistan since 1947.) (Ahmad, 1971; Ahmed, 1974; Ahmed, 1978; Alavi, 1983; Ali, 1970; Gardezi and Rashid, 1983). Not only was there no popular protest at the coup but it was heralded as a revolution, notably by Modernization theorists, persuaded of the ability of “modernizing elites” to inaugurate an era of political development and "nation-building" (Feldman, 1966). In the event, the generals failed to distinguish themselves as developers of political institutions or the nation. On the contrary, the intolerant and exploitative nature of their rule provoked a civil war with East Pakistan15 that culminated in the dismemberment of the state itself in 1971. Discredited and demoralized by the loss of the majority wing (later Bangladesh) and its own defeat by the Indian military which had intervened on the latter’s behalf, the army retreated to its barracks in 1972. Then ensued a transitory (1972-1977) interlude under Z.A. Bhutto, Pakistan’s first popularly elected prime minister. However, five years into his regime, the generals regrouped, arresting him on charges of electoral rigging and finally executing him on questionable grounds in 1979. Army rule, laced by copious doses of messianism on the part of the last military ruler, Zia, lasted until his death in a plane crash in 1988. Then

6

Introduction

followed another round of elections in which Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, emerged the winner, allowing her to become prime minister—the first woman to hold such a post in a Muslim country. The second Bhutto era, however, turned out to be even more short-lived than the first. Benazir’s government was dismissed from office after twenty-two months by the former president on charges of corruption. The successor civilian regime met a similar fate in mid-1993. Following new elections in the fall, Benazir was once again elected to office, with the army back in its barracks again, at least for now (1994). Even though military rule until Zia’s advent lacked the brutality that has become the hallmark of military regimes elsewhere, it has nevertheless bred a harmful political climate in Pakistan. The army’s ban on political activity in the name of law and order, its subversion of existing constitutions and rule-by-fiat and, under Zia, its abuses of Islamic ideology (Khan, 1985) have thwarted the growth not only of democratic politics but accord on what politics is. In the absence of a shared agenda between the rulers and the ruled, two parallel tendencies have emerged. On the one hand, groups excluded from economic development and political power have launched separatist movements in two out of four provinces, Baluchistan and Sind, both of which have been in the throes of a thinly-disguised civil war for years. On the other, segments of society—specially in the Punjab, which appear to have been the main beneficiaries of rule by a Punjabi-dominated military—have been lulled into inertia. These conflicting tendencies, reflecting a schism between state and society, have rendered the survivor Pakistani state decrepit, its frailty at once masked and betrayed by its authoritarianism.16 Most disturbing about this saga is not only the long history of military rule and the transitoriness of civilian regimes, but how little the two have actually differed in substance.17 First, “democratic” regimes have made few attempts to encourage healthy parties or party politics. In spite of a glut of parties, specially on the eve of an election, the majority are merely shot-gun marriages between dissolute politicians who are united not by an identity of political concerns, but personal ambition. (Typically, it is the defections of these octogenarians—who, Methuselahlike, seem to hover tirelessly in the political arena—from one party to another in search of power, that topples civilian regimes so easily from within state legislatures.) While for election purposes these “parties” are able to hustle support by relying, as Mushahid Hussain (1990:33) laconically puts it, on a “politics of statements,” they do not have lasting organizational ties with the rest of civil society which is why they cannot represent group or class interests in a coherent manner or on a permanent basis.

Introduction

7

Second, politics under “democratic” regimes has involved not accommodation, but the quashing of dissent and pluralism, ends for which regime’s like ZA Bhutto’s deployed the army. Third, these regimes have also abrogated the country’s constitutions when it has suited their purposes thereby reinforcing disorder and corruption. Finally, by failing to adopt effective land reforms, “democratic” regimes have continued to underwrite the social prerogatives of a powerful "feudal" class whose intervention in politics has proved specially baneful to Pakistan (Alavi, 1980). In defense of “democratic” regimes it may be argued that since they have such short life-spans, they are powerless to reverse the long-term tendencies occasioned by military rule. In fact, fear of impending coups encourages politicians to dissipate their energies while in office trying to “feather [their] own nest(s)” as Bhutto once noted with asperity of one of his own appointees, a minister.18

Theories of Subcontinental Politics Since Pakistan is currently going through a “democratic” phase while India appears to be moving towards repression and chaos, and since neither country is an ideal-type democracy or dictatorship, the contrast between them may not seem sufficiently enduring or pronounced to warrant an analysis. However, the reversal in political fortunes occurring in both states at present seems to be the result of conjunctural rather than structural or, as Gramsci would say, organic factors. Thus, in spite of periodic political realignments, the historic bloc19—the “particular configuration of social classes and ideology that gives content to a historical state” (Cox, 1987: 409, n. 10)—in India and Pakistan has not changed significantly since 1947 and this bloc, as noted, is fundamentally different despite the resemblance between the two states in other areas. This is why a comparison permits for an unusually well-defined analysis of the relationship between class and politics not always possible in the “real” world. Yet, few theorists have studied subcontinental politics comparatively. Those who have contend that military rule in Pakistan was prompted by the collapse of democratic institutions whereas the durability of such institutions has prevented a similar occurrence in India (Kukeraja, 1982,1991; Tinker, 1962). Although this line of reasoning identifies the crux of the problem, it highlights the obvious while tending to take for granted reasons for the rapid collapse of “democracy” in Pakistan and its successful institutionalization in India. In this context, there are a number of competing explanations in the non-comparative literature and while these generate only partial insights into the contrast because of their case study approach, it is neces-

8

Introduction

sary to review them in order to clarify the differences between non-class and class-based theories on the one hand, and between orthodox Marxist and Gramscian ones on the other.

Modernization Theory Modernization theorists ascribe Indian democracy to a developed political culture, viable institutions, dedicated elites, unique organizational skills on the part of the Indians, a tradition of compromise and accommodation, the success of the Congress in having institutionalized itself in state and society, and the British role in having bequeathed “tutelary democracy” to India (Bailey, 1963; Brass and Robinson, 1987; Das Gupta, 1898; Palmer, 1961; Weiner, 1957,1967,1987). Conversely, they attribute the breakdown of “democracy” in Pakistan to a backward political culture, unseasoned or corrupt leaders, ethnic and group frictions, weak institutions debilitated further by stresses arising from the exigencies of nation-building20 in a new state, and the alleged incompatibility of Islam and democracy21 (Brecher, 1963; Rose, 1989; von Vorys 1965; Wheeler, 1979; Wilcox, 1977; Wriggins, 1975; Ziring, 1971). Given the almost perfect longitudinal correlation of party and democracy in the two states after 1947, these theorists are right in emphasizing the role of the Congress and the League in political “institutionalization.”22At the same time, they give significant weight to ideological and cultural factors in their analyses, which theorists on the left often ignore. (See below.) Yet, ultimately, their arguments about strong and weak cultures, institutions, and elites, cannot explain why colonial rule endowed one part of the subcontinent (India) with some form of democracy but not the other (Pakistan); why India’s political culture and institutions are more developed than Pakistan’s given their shared economic underdevelopment; why the Indian elite is selfless, enlightened, and democratic, and the Pakistani imprudent, venal and dictatorial; and why the Hindu caste system has proved more conducive to “democracy” than Islam. This is because modernization theory ignores the role of the state, the economy,23 and the class structure24 in shaping political cultures and institutions (Higgot, 1983). However, politics is no longer, if it ever was, a function of “purely political” (Sartori, 1987) considerations. Instead it is the outcome of reciprocal interactions between “three variables: (1) economic growth and structural transformation, (2) state structure and policy, and (3) social class” (Richards and Waterbury, 1990:8). The structure of the state as well as its accumulation strategies are, in turn, likely to be determined largely by its role in the international division of labor, a role determined by the nature and history of its insertion into the global capitalist economy (Roxborough, 1979; Stavrianos, 1981). Yet, these are the

Introduction

9

very variables that modernization theorists have been routinely inspired to ignore25 because of their society-centric focus and their view of politics and economics as unconnected spheres.26 As a result of the nature of its core theoretical assumptions, therefore, modernization theory cannot distinguish between the differing class base of the Indian and Pakistani states. However, it may be argued that since what makes the contrast between them notable is not so much the occurrence of military rule in a postcolonial state as the semblance of “bourgeois democracy” in one, the existence of a “middle” class in India and its absence in Pakistan accounts for their divergent politics.27 Modernization theory, however, has nothing to say about a relationship between class and democracy, not only because of its refusal to recognize the salience of class, but also because of its conceptualization of democracy as the sum of parties, elections, etc., a view that has been criticized both for its narrow empiricism and its “thin” conceptualization of democracy (Barber, 1984; Bowles and Gintis, 1987; Gilbert, 1990; Lukes, 1977; Macpherson, 1973). Finally, the work of this school has been faulted for its Western-centric, teleological, and ahistorical nature (Blomstrom and Hettne, 1984). While its ethnocentrism and evolutionism are not unique (they also surface in Marxist views), the theory’s ahistoricism is less pardonable. As the voluminous literature on colonialism, imperialism, and dependency attests (see Rhodes, 1970, for a sample) the most serious problems of developing societies stem from their colonial history; specifically, from their having been saddled by their alien rulers with dependent—usually monocultural—economies, authoritarian state structures neither of their own making, nor reflecting the autonomous development or choices of their own people, and cultural discourses that colonized not only territories, but minds (Nandy, 1983) as well. To refuse, therefore, to “search out the causes of the present in the past” not only results in a cursory rendition of the former, but also precipitates “a descent into triviality,” to rephrase Eric Wolf (1982: ix). If modernization theory suffers from a lack of historical imagination, mainstream historiography (mainly the work of the Cambridge school, thus called because of its association with the University of Cambridge) is weakened by its adherence to the former’s tenets. Thus, like modernization theorists, the Cambridge historians also focus on the role of elites, institutions and culture/religion in their analyses of colonial politics. To them, the cardinal political dynamic in this period was an attempt on the local elite’s part to win favors and patronage from a benign Raj. They tend, therefore, to depict politics as a web of patron-client networks involving competition between the elites of various towns, localities, and provinces for the “loaves and fishes” of office. They also see the

10

Introduction

Indian national struggle as a “sort of ‘learning process’ ” (Guha, 1988b: 38) through which colonial values were diffused in society, a view that leads many to reject the idea that colonialism was ruinous for India. Finally, since they do not acknowledge a relationship between knowledge and power, they consider the writing of history to be a politically innocuous exercise. This style of historiography, dubbed colonialist or “Namierite” by Irfan Habib (n.d.) (after Namier who used the claims of public figures as the basis for historiography) has been criticized on several grounds. Ranajit Guha (1988b: 38), for instance, maintains that on colonialist-style views what made the Indian elite nationalist was “no lofty idealism addressed to the general good of the nation but simply the expectation of rewards in the share of wealth, power and prestige created by and associated with colonial rule.” Apart from challenging this cynical view of elites, Guha and other subaltern28 scholars have also questioned the extent to which the elites masterminded politics. In this context, they argue that the domain of subaltern class politics “neither originated from elite politics,” nor owed its existence to it. While the two spheres overlapped, the former was nonetheless distinct, spontaneous and imbued with a class and political consciousness (Guha, 1988b: 40). The reason this fact has been lost to mainstream historians is because they fail to realize that the organized knowledge of society as it exists in recorded history is knowledge obtained by the dominant classes in their exercise of power. The dominated, by virtue of their very powerlessness, have no means of recording their knowledge within those instituted processes, except as an object of the exercise of power (Chatterjee, 1988b: 9).

This is why it is necessary to establish the subaltern as a self-conscious historical subject (Spivak, 1988), an exercise that involves not only giving the latter "a subject-position from which to speak,” (Prakash, 1992:175) but also the larger project of “constructing the framework for an Indian historiography rescued from the prisonhouse of colonialist knowledge” with its universalist pretensions (Chatterjee, 1988b: 3). Finally, as these scholars note, the distortions in India’s political-economy derive from the colonial period and cannot be understood without analyzing it.29

Marxist Theories While Marxist theories are grounded in a historical analysis of the colonial political-economy, their adherence to what Gyan Prakash (1992: 178) calls the “master narrative” of the modes of production has occasioned different sorts of problems. Thus, it has led, on the one hand to attempts to fit the history of the colony, in spite of its specificities, into

Introduction

11

this “universalizing narrative.” On the other, it has prompted reductive theorizations of the relationship between class and politics manifest in those theories of Indian democracy30 which present it simply as the outgrowth of a nationalist and progressive bourgeoisie’s struggle against the Raj (Chandra, 1966; Desäi, 1966; Dutt, 1949). However, not only was this class neither nationalist nor progressive in the early stages of its growth, but the tendency to reduce " ‘traditional-conservative’ and ‘functionalmodemist’ ideas to their social roots, i.e., to ‘reactionary’ and ‘progressive’ classes respectively” is wrong in so far as the social forces that could be said to have favoured the transformation of a medieval agrarian society into a rational modem one were not unambiguously nationalist, while those that were opposed to colonial domination were not necessarily in favour of a transformation (Chatterjee, 1993a: 23-27).

As a counter to these oftentimes deterministic views which also ignore the role of not only conjunctural, but also cultural and intellectual factors in shaping politics, Chatterjee (1993a; 1993b) and the other subaltern scholars have tried to arrive at an understanding of Indian democracy by subjecting bourgeois politics and nationalist discourse to a sustained critique, as well as by specifying the role of workers and peasants in the national struggle. In this context, they argue that Indian democracy was the outcome not of a “national-popular” revolution but a “passive”31 one carried out by the Gandhian-led Congress that enabled the bourgeoisie to institute its hegemony over the subaltern groups, but without a frontal confrontation with them. The problem with this argument is that Gramsci (1971:107) used the term passive revolution to describe not only Gandhism but also fascism (Showstack-Sassoon, 1982; Buci-Glucksman, 1982). In other words, the concept refers to the nature of bourgeois hegemony, not to its specific political form. Therefore, to be able to clarify why the Indian bourgeoisie’s passive revolution was a “democratic” one, it is necessary to distinguish between the historical processes that facilitated the emergence of democracy and those that enabled this class to acquire hegemony.32 Second, since a passive revolution usually occurs in situations of actual or potential class strife according to Gramsci, it is necessary to draw out the connections between the class struggles in India and the process of “democratization,” which theorists often do not do. (They tend rather to focus on the role of the subaltern groups in the national struggle.) A final theory of Indian democracy that deserves mention is Barrington Moore, Jr.’s (1966) both because of its initial impact on the literature and because its “no bourgeois, no democracy” dictum continues to exert strong appeal on many South Asian Marxists. According to Moore,

12

Introduction

Indian democracy was the outgrowth of a combination of factors including the positive impact of British policies, the rise of a commercial class skeptical of colonial rule, the absence of a reactionary coalition between the landed and commercial elites (an alliance that encouraged fascism in other countries) and the failure of a peasant revolution to materialize due to the effects of the Hindu caste system. In spite of its rich theoretical insights, however, Moore’s analysis is not entirely accurate. First, there was, in fact, an alliance between the commercial and landed elites cemented by the Congress itself (Chatterjee, 1993a; Kumar, 1988). The question, then, is why this alliance did not occasion fascism in India as well. Second, Moore seems to assume, wrongly, that the absence of a peasant revolution means that there was no peasant insurgency and that it did not impact on bourgeois politics (Dhanagare, 1983). Finally, since he does not distinguish between Hindu and Muslim33 classes and the differing impact of colonial rule upon them, Moore also cannot explain the contrast between India and Pakistan. Theorists who do focus on Muslim politics in the colonial period depict the Pakistan Movement as a reflection of Muslim “bourgeois” nationalism and the League as a party of this class (Smith, 1945, 1946). However, they do not offer much in the way of an analysis of it after 1947. Nor does their bourgeois thesis hold up since postcolonial politics has been dominated for the most part by a landlord-military-bureaucratic junta, a fact some theorists ascribe to the nature of the economy and others to the nature of the state itself. Thus, Hasan Gardezi and Jamil Rashid (1983) link variations in state forms to different stages in the growth of capitalism. However, as Bob Jessop (1990:100-01) says, it is impossible to explain how the “economy in and of itself could determine the overall structural articulation and dynamic of the allegedly superstructural institutional orders of society.” Although, as he notes, the economic base is neither exclusively economic in its elements nor absolutely autonomous [there] can be no institutional guarantees that the legal and political spheres will through their sui generis operation, produce outputs which correspond to [its] needs.

Instead, the outputs will “also depend on specific actions, decisions, forces, strategies etc. within the legal or state system itself” (101). This is why state forms can only be derived through an analysis of the “political history, forms of consciousness, and modes of organization of the classes [since] it is this dynamic which, by defining the forces in the field in concrete terms,” permits such a determination to be made (Vacca, 1982: 56) ,34

Introduction

13

This is also why the other tendency, associated with Hamza Alavi’s (1973) work, to derive the nature of the state from its own "overdeveloped” nature, is also problematical even though it offers the seminal account of class relations in Pakistan. Briefly, his argument is that by establishing a powerful civil and military bureaucracy and preventing the emergence of any single class strong enough to establish its own hegemony in the state, colonial rule paved the way for the military take-over. (According to Alavi there are three contending classes in the postcolonial state: the landlords and local and foreign capitalists.) While he does not explain why the Indian state, though shaped by the same colonial encounter assumed a “democratic” form, elsewhere (1980) he argues that it was because of the advent of a hegemonic bourgeoisie prior to independence. Pace Alavi, however, the social base of the Pakistani state has not changed under military rule: it has remained relatively autonomous of all classes, allowing it to act as a sort of collective capitalist.35 In this context, both he and other theorists (Amjad, 1983; Hashmi, 1973; Hussain, 1981) have documented the U.S. role in the economy following the leeway given by General Ayub Khan’s regime (1958-1968) to the Ford Foundation and Harvard University to frame and implement the country’s economic priorities, a process that concentrated 80 per cent of the national wealth in the hands of a mere twenty-two families. The point of these arguments is that the military and/or the state had to assume the task of capital accumulation that a weak bourgeoisie could not, and that the U.S. probably sponsored the military coup in 1958. A problem with this argument is that implicit in it are views of the military-bureaucratic junta as a “new dominant class [or its opposite] as capital’s puppets,”36 both of which are wrong according to Nicos Mouzelis (1986:214) because they “conflate the economic and political spheres in a highly confusing manner.” The first erases the difference between political and economic power by regarding the holders of the means of domination as a new class which displaces the old dominant classes (here the political absorbs, so to speak, the economic); the latter, following a more conventional Marxist analysis, views the state as a mere reflection of capitalist struggles and interests (here the political is an epiphenomenon of the economic).

This conflation, says Mouzelis (214), can only be avoided by distinguishing between the “modes of production and modes of domination,” which theories of military intervention in Pakistan’s politics fail to do. Not only that, but they also fail to make a persuasive case that the initial coup was instigated by the military’s desire to be capital’s steward or by

14

Introduction

its comprador nature. Hence even though as a result of its policies a bourgeoisie did emerge, and U.S. involvement in Pakistan’s affairs did increase (thereby influencing the course of political and economic development after the 1960s), as Alavi (1973; 1983) argues, the class base of the state did not change under military rule; all that changed was its political form since the same coalition of classes remained in power. In fact, the army continued, albeit in a deeper and more methodical way, the economic37 and foreign policies of earlier regimes making it no more “comprador” in nature than the latter. Second, neither the process of capital accumulation nor the dominant classes were in imminent danger from subaltern class unrest in the 1950s which necessitated the iron fist of military rule. If anything, social unrest (sparked by growing poverty and unemployment resulting from the effects of trickle-up economics) emerged during Ayub Khan’s rule and was the reason for his ouster from office (Ahmed, 1973). In fact, all but one of the reasons that militaries typically intervene in politics was missing: this was the political unity of the ruling groups and their ability to establish their own hegemony in the state, as Alavi has argued.38 However, while theorists of differing persuasions agree that the disunity of the ruling groups in Pakistan has been at the crux of its problems, their frequent tendency to write it off as a function of the (overdeveloped) nature of the state, the (underdeveloped) nature of economy, or the (class) nature of these groups is problematical in that the first two raise the methodological problems noted above while the third, though an accurate description of the ruling class, is essentialist in so far as it implies that only a bourgeoisie can sustain bourgeois “democracy.”39 While there is historical (and tautological) truth to this view, Marxist theory’s investment in the bourgeoisie as the harbinger of democracy is “as much an obstacle to as a source of careful and thoughtful political analysis”40 for various reasons. First, in India’s case, it has encouraged reductionist arguments of the sort noted earlier, leading even the subaltern scholars to conflate bourgeois hegemony with democracy. In Pakistan’s, on the other hand, it has fostered a waiting-for-Godot mentality (the bourgeoisie, when it finally comes of age, is expected to deliver the country from its political malaise) and thereby a disinterest in analyzing the historical genealogy of the landlords’ politics. However, there is no reason to assume a priori that a landed class will be fragmented or inept. In fact Gramsci (1971:156) credited the British landed gentry with being politically “far better organised than the industrialists” as well as being more “ ‘permanent’ ” in its directives and attracting more intellectuals to its fold. This suggests that the strengths or weaknesses of a class derive not so much from its own “nature” as from its political and historical ex-

Introduction

15

periences. In order, therefore, to explain the reasons for the disunity and anti-democratic tendencies of Pakistan’s landed classes it is necessary to examine their political history in the colonial period, the “formative phase” (Sayeed, 1968) of Muslim politics. Second, an uncritical faith in the “democratic” nature of the “middle” classes is curiously innocent of history. The rise of fascism and Nazism and the role of the European bourgeoisie in colonizing the “Third World” (Nandy, 1983) offer ample evidence that democracy is not an ingrained “middle” class virtue. In fact, as I argue in Chapter 4, the Hindu official class itself was not an advocate of democracy at the start of its political career. Finally, a fixation with the bourgeoisie has virtually reduced the "primary discourse of Indian politics to a spiritual biography of the Indian elite” (Guha, 1982:2).41 While the tendency to privilege the role of elites is even more pronounced in modernization theory and mirrors the nature of politics in stratified societies, it denies any agency to the subaltern groups. However, these “people without history [are] as much agents in the historical process as they [are] its victims and silent witnesses” (Wolf, 1982: x). Certainly, the end of colonialism in the Third World and Stalinism in the Second could only have come about to the extent that there were vigorous social movements against them from “below.” Yet, because of our tendency to confuse subalternity with powerlessness, we continue to underrate what Jorge Sanjines (1989:39) calls the “prodigious capacity of the people” to effect change. In spite of these weaknesses, which are not immanent and can be transcended to varying degrees depending on one’s approach, a classbased theory is better suited to explain the contrast between India and Pakistan than a non-class for a number of reasons. First, theories that do not recognize the salience of class would be hard put to explain the affinity between the two states in their non-class features. Second, as noted, the most significant difference between the two states is in the nature of classes politically ascendant within them, a difference only class-based theories acknowledge and can explain. Third, since the social base of the two states has remained the same since 1947, reasons for the ascendancy of a “middle” class in India and a landlord and official class in Pakistan have to be sought in the colonial period which facilitated their dominance. In this context, class-based theories are likely to yield more effective insights as colonial politics itself tended to form along not only religious but also class lines. Thus, not only did the colonial state construct different types of alliances with different classes thereby helping to sharpen the salience of class identities, but local politics was also characterized by the advent of “middle” class parties like the Congress, as well as by trade unions and peasant associations testi-

16

Introduction

fying to the ability of various classes to organize around their own perceived interests.42 Finally, only class-based theories take into account the relationship between the class structure, the economy, and the state without which a political analysis is bound to remain incomplete. However, since some class-based theories of Indian democracy also tend to misrepresent Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, in the next chapter, I discuss Gramsci’s own view of it. Such a discussion is also important to showing why his work avoids the determinism of orthodox Marxian views, offers a more holistic approach to politics than Modernization theory and is specially well suited to analyzing South Asia’s political history. Notes 1. By this I mean the system of representative (also political, electoral, or capitalist) democracy. While this is the only form of actually existing democracy and while it taken to be equivalent with true democracy by the adherents of empirical democratic theory, it is nonetheless a disputed term which is why I put it in quotes. For alternative conceptualizations see Zillah Eisenstein, The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994; David Held, Models of Democracy, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1987, and Alan Gilbert, Democratic Individuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 2. See in the text below for a discussion of post-independence politics in the two states. 3. After Zia’s advent (1977-1988), the process of “Islamization” in the country also contributed to the emergence of new ideological trends in the army. See the collection in Asghar Khan (ed.), Islam, Politics and the State: The Pakistan Experience, London: Zed Books, 1985. 4. See Chapters 3 and 5 on this point. 5. In the Indian context, communalism denotes a view of “society as constituted of a number of religious communities. Communalism in the Indian sense therefore is a consciousness which draws on a supposed religious identity and uses this as the basis for an ideology.” Romila Thapar, “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity,” in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1989, pp. 209-231. This is the sense in which I also employ the concept. For differing perspectives on Indian communalism see Nandlal Gupta (ed.), India: Nation-State and Communalism, New Délhi: Patriot Publishers, 1989; R.N. Kumar, Communalism and Separatism in Pre-Independence India, New Delhi: lanaki Prakashan, 1990; Gyan Pandey, “The Colonial Construction of Communalism,” in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vol. VI, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989; Randhir Singh, Of Marxism and Indian Politics, Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1990; Donald Smith, India as a Secular State, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Introduction

17

6. Following Benedict Anderson, I view nationalism in the broadest sense: as an “imagined political community." Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, revised edition, 1983. 7. In later chapters I argue that both Hindu and Muslim politics was characterized by communal and secular tendencies. 8. “Seemingly” because the League collapsed within a decade of Pakistan’s creation. 9. While modernization theorists emphasize the caste affiliations of Indian elites, Marxists focus on class since historically there has been an overlap between them. See Irfan Habib, Interpreting Indian History, Shillong: North-Eastern Hill University Publications, n.d.; D.D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, second edition, 1975, and Niharranjan Ray, Nationalism in India: An Historical Analysis of its Stresses and Strains, Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University, 1973. 10. For a monthly update on the Muslim situation in Kashmir see Aurangzeb Syed and Farook Shah (eds.), Kashmir Solidarity, monthly newsletter, Blacksburg, Virginia. 11. Among others, James Manor credits Indian democracy to this accommodative tradition in “How and Why Liberal and Representative Politics Emerged in India,” in Political Science, No. 38,1990, pp. 20-38. However, his claim that it is “Certain persistent habits of mind and patterns of behaviour [that] have helped to produce this penchant for accommodation,”seems essentialist. It is more reasonable to suggest that this tradition has been shaped by social, political, economic and ideological considerations. 12. By this I mean state-sanctioned politics. It is important to make such a distinction since peasants in some areas have developed their own associations and means of political protest outside of official channels. 13. Rajni Kothari, however, maintains that it is state repression that has fuelled these movements. See State against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance, Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1988. However, it is difficult to see how a sustained movement (as against sporadic unrest) can survive in repressive situations. Social movements seem to thrive where there is some political pluralism on the one hand and a measure of social discontent on the other. 14. Joni Lovenduski and Jean Woodall use this term to describe the former state bureaucracies of Eastern Europe. “State-rooted middle classes [they argue], are not atypical in countries which are late to industrialise and where economic development is state-led and dependent on foreign finance.” From Politics and Society in Eastern Europe, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 3 4 .1use this term in preference to “state bourgeoisie” since not all state classes are bourgeois in their orientation and since, in colonized societies, economic development was dependent on foreign finance and state intervention. 15. Pakistan was created in two “wings:” East and West Pakistan (separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory) because of the geographic concentration of Muslims in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India. For events leading to India’s partition, see Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

18

Introduction

16. Exceptional state forms likè military dictatorships seem strong because of their authoritarianism but such regimes disguise “a brittleness of institutional structure which means that they are unable to respond effectively to changing crises, conflicts and contradictions inherent in these societies,” Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place; Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990, p. 43. 17.1 am grateful to William Richter for drawing my attention to this point. 18. A comment Bhutto recorded in a file I read during my tenure in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1976-1982). 19. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of this concept. 20. Conversely, Ayesha Jalal argues that it was the exigencies of state-building that prompted the coup. The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan's Political Economy of Defense, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 21. For a discussion of why notions of “Oriental despotisms” persist in analyses of Muslim societies, see Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979. To Said’s views may be added the claim that reasons why many societies whose citizens are Muslim are not democracies may have to do with their distinctive political-economies rather than with some intrinsic “Islamic” traits. In fact, to the extent that there are no purely Islamic states (like there are no purely socialist or capitalist ones) it is difficult to make definitive assessments of the relationship between Islam and (Western-style) democracy. Finally, for the record, the most brutal despotisms in recent memory (Nazism, fascism) emerged in Western, Christian, developed, capitalist states. 22. The term generally refers to the extension of practices and institutions geared to facilitate political participation. 23. This is in spite of the fact that the theory assumes that economic modernization (capitalism) will engender political development (Western-style democracy). 24. For why the social sciences broke with political-economy which was concerned with analyzing the role of classes in the production and distribution of wealth and the implications of this break for a political analysis see Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 25. However, some of the recent literature is more well-rounded. See, for instance, Larry Diamond, J. Linz and S. Lipset (eds.), Democracy in Developing Societies, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1989; and, on India, Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, In Pursuit ofLakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. For problems with the Rudolphs’ approach to “political-economy,” see Asma Barlas, “State, Class and Democracy: A Comparative Analysis of Politics in Hindu and Muslim Society in Colonial India (1885-1947)”, Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, 1990. 26. For an overview of how different theories conceptualize the relationship between the economy and politics, see James A. Caporaso and David P. Levine (eds.), Theories of Political Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Introduction

19

27. To make this claim, however, is not assume an a priori relationship between class and politics. On the contrary, all such claims need to be grounded in historical inquiry as I argue in Chapter 2. 28. Gramsci used the term “subaltern” to refer to groups that are subject to the hegemony of another class. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1971. In employing this term for their own work, the subaltern scholars, most of them Indian by birth, seem to mean a double entendre since they are engaged not only in retrieving the role of workers and peasants in colonial politics but also in freeing Indian historiography from the influence of Western hegemony. The work of this group can be found in Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and listed in the bibliography. For a critique see “Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article,” in Social Scientist, Vol. 12, No. 10, Issue no. 137, 1984, pp. 3-41; and “Subaltern Studies III & IV: A Review Article,” in Social Scientist, Vol. 16, No. 3, Issue No. 178, 1988, pp. 3-41. 29. While references to the colonial legacy cannot explain Indian or Pakistani politics fully or in perpetuity, it is impossible to explain the differing class base of the two states (which have remained the same since 1947) without examining how colonial rule facilitated the political control of specific classes within them. 30. See also the discussion on theories of Pakistani politics in the text below. 31. “Passive revolution,” which represents a weak form of hegemony, may acquire the form of a bourgeois democracy or fascism. See Chapter 2 and Gramsci, Prison Notebooks. 32. Making this distinction, however, does not mean denying a relationship between them; it simply allows for a clearer exposition of the connection. 33. Although for reasons given in Chapter 2 it is important to make this distinction, making it is not to prejudge the relationship between religion and politics. 34. For a clarification and justification of this methodology drawn from Gramsci’s work, see Chapter 2. 35. While Alavi does not use this phrase, his work parallels that of the statetheoretic school which perceives the state in these terms. See Alavi, “State and Class under Peripheral Capitalism,” in H. Alavi and T. Shanon (eds.), Introduction to the Sociology of *.Developing' Societies, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982. Among those who share his views of the state are Mohammad Waseem, Politics and the State in Pakistan, Lahore, Progressive Publishers, 1989. 36. The view that the military plays the role of a “middle” class is common not only to the left, but also to modernization theorists who see its intervention in politics as propitious for that reason. See, J.J. Johnson (ed.), The Role of the Military in the Underdeveloped Societies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962 and Jose Nun, “The Middle Class Military Coup,” in C. Veliz (ed.), The Politics of Conformity in Latin America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. 37. As early as 1950, a brochure published by the civilian government was entitled, rather candidly, Pakistan Welcomes Foreign Investment, Pakistan Bureau of Business Facilities and Information, Karachi, 1950.

20

Introduction

38. Of course, while the military may have intervened because of the instability of civilian regimes, this does not mean that what was initially a genuine reason did not eventually degenerate into a handy pretext. 39. In our own times, the East Europeans have embarked on just such an enterprise: to construct some form of the latter without the former. How well they fare may clarify the relationship between class and politics as well. 40. Walter Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, p. 234. While Adamson's critique is directed against “Marxist theory’s investment in the proletariat as the final carrier of history's telos,” its investment in the bourgeoisie as the harbinger of a bourgeois-democratic revolution can also be problematical for reasons given in the text below. 41. While this reprimand is meant for mainstream theorists, some Marxists are equally guilty of elitism. 42. See Chapters 3,4 and 5.

2 Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: A Gramscian Approach As noted in Chapter 1, class-based theories impute the divergence in the forms of the Indian and Pakistani states to their differing social base: specifically, to the Indian bourgeoisie’s having instituted its hegemony in the state (via a “passive revolution”) and the inability of Pakistan’s ruling groups to do likewise because of their own feudal nature or, conversely, because of the overdevelopment of the state and/or the underdevelopment of the economy. Although, for reasons given earlier, a class-based theory is a better candidate for explaining the contrast between India and Pakistan than one that does not recognize the salience of class, these formulations are problematical in that the first conflates bourgeois hegemony and democracy while the second tends to be reductionist; and neither specifies the role of the subaltern classes in engendering different types of politics in the two states. In this chapter I explain why Antonio Gramsci’s theory not only avoids these errors but also offers a better theoretical and methodological approach than orthodox Marxist views or modernization theory for analyzing South Asia’s political history.

Gramsci’s Political Theory Since theories of Indian democracy tend to confuse bourgeois hegemony with democracy, I begin by clarifying Gramsci’s own view of the concept of hegemony, which also affords the best entry point into his work. However, since this concept is itself embedded in a larger theory and since I draw upon the latter to construct a general theoretical approach rather than relying on any single concept, the ensuing exegesis attempts to specify the overall features of Gramsci’s work. 21

22

Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism

Hegemony as Political Principle Gramsci’s (1971:144) argument about hegemony derives from his observation that the first element of politics in bourgeois society is its division into “rulers and ruled, leaders and led.” Given this reality, the question he is interested in resolving is how the former are able to secure the latter’s willing endorsement for their rule. It is in this context that he uses “the concept of hegemony for a differential analysis o f the structures o f bourgeois power in the West"1 (Anderson 1977: 20, his emphasis). The political ascendancy of a class, he argues, manifests itself "in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership.’” It dominates rival groups which it can defeat or destroy and it leads allied and kindred groups (Gramsci, 1971: 57). Hegemony, then, is “the predominance obtained by consent rather than force of one class or group” over others (Femia, 1975: 31) through “the diffusion and popularisation of [its] world view,” (Bates in Arnold, 1984, n. 2). However while hegemony refers to the ability of a class to obtain consent, it is not to be confused with consensus in a liberal sense since for Gramsci the significance of “consensus is not to be found in the apparent willingness of an individual to accept certain views and to engage in certain activities, but rather in the conditions for that willingness to be present” (Morera, 1990:24). Instead, it is a form of strategic class leadership that entails class dominance of a distinctive type where the dominant class fashions “an order based ideologically on a broad measure of consent [but] functioning according to general principles that in fact ensure [its own] continuing supremacy.” However, since this order also confers “some measure or prospect of satisfaction” on the less powerful, the more egregious aspects of class rule may be mitigated (Cox, 1987:7). The process of acquiring hegemony may also foster a “compromise equilibrium” between classes since a hegemony-seeking class will need to accommodate “the interests and the tendencies of the groups” it seeks to lead (Gramsci, 1971:161). A class, says Walter Adamson (1980:177), "becomes more or less politically powerful” historically because it may be the bearer of certain values which though emblematic of its own “experience in the world become detached as images and projections of its political outlook.” Depending on their appeal, it will be “able to attach itself to other political groups as joint power-seekers, potential power-shapers, and the social forces behind new cultural expressions.” In this context, Gramsci (1971:260) argues that the earlier (feudal) ruling classes had limited appeal because of their conservatism and inability to enlarge their class sphere, literally or ideologically, which reduced them to a “closed caste.” This is why the feudal state itself was only a

Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism

23

Figure 2.1

“mechanical” association of different social blocs, rather than a hegemonic “educator." A bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is like “an organism in constant motion, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level” because of the revolution it has introduced into conceptions of the law and thus into the functioning of the State. This “revolution” has not only furthered the will to social conformity, but also allowed the state to substitute “for the mechanical bloc of social groups their subordination to the active hegemony of the directive and dominant group, hence [abolishing] certain autonomies, which nevertheless are reborn in other forms” like parties, etc. (in ShowstackSassoon, 1982a: 104). This does not mean, however, that hegemony itself is static or totalizing as Bob Jessop (1990) argues. Instead, it may extend across a long spectrum with "expansive” hegemony at one end, and a war of maneuver at the other, with passive revolution in between (see Figure 2.1). The first includes the entire nation while the last represents specific interests. Passive revolution, on the other hand, is an “attempt to promote change ... not based on a positive hegemony.” The passive feature involves deterring the growth of a revolutionary rival by destroying its “revolutionary potential,” while the term itself refers both to historical events like the founding of the Italian state, “and a style of politics which preserves control by a relatively small group of leaders while at the same time instituting economic, social, political, and ideological changes”2 (Showstack-Sassoon, 1982a: 131-33; 15). (While Gramsci used the term to indicate a decline in bourgeois hegemony in the West, in India’s case it denotes an increase in the bourgeoisie’s power in colonial conditions. In both cases, however, it is a weak form of hegemony and can assume the form of “democracy” or fascism [Buci-Glucksman, 1979; ShowstackSassoon, 1982.]) The difference, then, is not in the quantity (grades) of hegemony, but in its quality (type). Moreover, what qualifies an intervention as hegemonic is not the site of a struggle or the institution through which it occurs but the nature of the intervention itself (Buci-Glucksman, 1982). According to Jessop (1990: 235), hegemony may also refer to time (length) as well as aspects of policy (content) and, in so far as it involves

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a “strategic codification of power relations,”3 may be viewed as being both intentional and nonsubjective. It is intentional in that it has an objective and is inscribed in local sites of struggle; it is nonsubjective because the outcome of such struggles are not dictated by the choices of individuals or groups. Moreover, hegemony may be exercised not only within a social formation but also at the level of the world system (internationally). Although the bourgeoisie has been successful in acquiring hegemony nationally and globally, this does not mean that it commenced as an “innovatory” force. On the contrary, says Gramsci (1971: 53), hegemonic classes emerge from within subaltern groups which is why it is essential to identify the phases through which they acquired 1. autonomy vis-a-vis the enemies they had to defeat, and 2. support from the groups which actively or passively assisted them; for this entire process was historically necessary before they could unite in the form of a State.

In this context, he claims that the most “purely political phase” of a class—its “decisive passage from the structure to the ... superstructure”—will be its hegemonic phase. This phase is political not because the struggles are focused on the state but because they are “conducted in terms of establishing an alternative hegemony” (Showstack-Sassoon, 1980:118). This phase is also political since it is the elaboration of hegemony that allows the dominant classes to transcend their own “economic-corporative” interests to become agents of more universal activities. Thus, since a hegemony-seeking class will need to accommodate the groups it seeks to lead, it may be required to make “sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind”4 and to pursue, within reasonable bounds,5 some version of the general interest through, as Gramsci puts it, a “national-popular” program. The term national-popular refers both to how well intellectuals are able, “in the wide sense to relate to the needs and aspirations” of the people, as well as to “a view of the revolution as a struggle to unite [them] against a small minority of exploiters and oppressors,6 thereby creating a new national identity” (Showstack-Sassoon, 1980:15). It is, in effect, a cultural term "relating to the position of the masses within the culture of the nation,” (Hoare and Smith, 1971: 421, n. 65). This is why national-popular struggles—women’s, peace, nationalist, civil rights— may not necessarily have a class character (Simon, 1982). However, this does not mean that they cannot serve the interests of a dominant class. Jessop (1990: 209-10), for instance, notes that a successful hegemonic project is able to link the fulfillment of the specific interests of subordi-

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nate groups “to the pursuit of a ‘national-popular’ programme which favours the long-term interests of the hegemonic force.” This requires integrating strategically vital “forces as subjects with specific ‘interests’ [while repudiating] alternative interpellations and attributions;” devising a project that can achieve their “ ‘corporate’” interests; and, finally, specifying “a ‘policy paradigm’ within which conflicts over competing interests and demands can be negotiated without threatening the overall project.” While such views of hegemony imply active class intercession in politics rather than “passive consent to a class policy,” Christine BuciGlucksman (1982:120) differentiates between different types of consent. When the state instrumentalizes it, i.e., it is a top-down process, she argues, consent is likely to be “passive and indirect.” When, on the other hand, it results from an alliance between the rulers and the ruled, it will be active and direct. In both cases, however, it must be acquired “through a politics of alliances which must open up a national perspective to the whole of society” in order to transform it. Transformative politics implies, on the one hand, reusing politics to a higher intellectual or moral plane. On the other, it refers to revolutionary praxis through which a new type of moral reform is achieved.7 Integral to both is ideologically informed participation by the people in politics which is the substance of democracy for Gramsci. Democracy for him is not a “set of rules” or institutions, but a method of “conducting politics based on creating the conditions for active political intervention by the mass of the [people] and aimed at the abolition of the division between rulers and ruled.” If such a likelihood does not exist, then appeals to the people become “pure demagogy” (Gramsci, 1971:230).

Hegemony, Democracy, and the Economy Gramsci’s argument suggests that hegemony is neither stable nor equivalent to bourgeois8 democracy. Thus, he noted that imperialism, monopoly capitalism and the October Revolution had “opened up cracks everywhere in the hegemonic apparatus” of the leading capitalist states making their exercise of hegemony “permanently difficult and aleatory” (in Buci-Glucksman, 1982: 125). In postcolonial societies where the bourgeoisie is itself in the process of formation, its hegemony is also likely to be thin. In fact, Gramsci (1971:263) maintains that the hegemony of any group which has just established a state will be largely of an economic nature during the initial period of social reorganization. In this context he argues that the “superstructural elements will inevitably be few in number and have a character of foresight and of struggle, but as yet few ‘planned’ elements. Cultural policy will above all be negative,

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a critique of the past.” In other words, hegemony will be “differentiated according to classes and historical phases” which is why there can be no abstract or ahistorical approach to it (Buci-Glucksman, 1982:121). The relationship of hegemony to democracy is also conditional since, as Adamson (1980:174) says, the Athenian republics “were participatory without being hegemonic while modern bourgeois states like fascist Italy could stymie participation while still being hegemonic to an increasing degree.” Therefore, the fact that bourgeois rule is hegemonic does not explain why it has assumed a specific form (democracy or fascism). This can only be determined by analyzing each case historically. At best, the relationship of democracy to hegemony lies in the fact that in a hegemonic system there exists democracy between the ‘leading’ group and the groups which are ‘led’ in so far as the development of the economy and thus the legislation which expresses such development favour the (molecular) passage from the ‘led’ groups to the ‘leading’ groups (Gramsci, 1971: 55-56).

In addition to qualifying the relationship between democracy and hegemony, this view affirms that the economy does not determine politics or forms of the state. As Gramsci (1971: 160) noted, not only had the Great Depression resulted in a reorganization of capitalism in a variety of political forms in the West ranging from the New Deal to fascism, but liberalism itself had been established by law: it was a “deliberate policy, conscious of its own ends, not the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic facts.” As such, while material conditions may underpin the "dialectic of economic forces and politics, of social being and consciousness ... innovative political activity has a wide latitude of influence” (Gilbert, 1981: 267). The exact relationship between changes in production and social organization, then, will be shaped by hegemonic conflicts rather than being “predetermined by any simple causal relationship” (Showstack-Sassoon, 1980: 85). (By arguing that it is only through politics that classes "engage in struggles” Gramsci also avoids conflating state and politics. Not only do "the balance or relation of political forces ... have consequences for the state [but they also] allow for the possibility of political strategies that have as their objective” its transformation [Hunt, 1980:15.]) Here it needs to be clarified that while Gramsci did not deny the role of economic factors in shaping long-term development, he did not consider the mode of production to be an adequate theoretical framework for explaining “the critical transformative phases of history characterized by open conflict, upheaval and revolution, when one system was giving way to another.” For him, only a nondeterministic theory could

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explain “the rich interplay of diverse conflicting social forces at these ‘conjunctural’ moments of revolutionary change” (Boggs, 1984:157, his emphasis). (The focus on conjunctural factors also avoids falling into the trap of the “master narrative” of the modes of production [Prakash, 1992:178] and, in fact, opens up the possibility for writing a history that is not universal, continuous, or “unilateral” [Braudel, 1980.]) However, while ruling out the possibility that the economy can induce “fundamental historical events,” Gramsci (1971: 184) admits that economic crises may create a terrain favorable to the “dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions.” How these questions are resolved will depend partly on the nature of the historical bloc, “the particular configuration of social classes and ideology that gives content to a historical state” (Cox, 1987:409, n. 10). (This concept, as Showstack-Sassoon [1980: 121-22] argues, effectively describes class relationships where “one mode of production is dominant but articulated with other modes of production.” Moreover, while different classes can be part of a historic bloc, they may not be part of the political. As a result, changes in the ruling group—a circulation of elites—may not signify changes in the historic bloc.) In sum, the economy may limit political action by influencing the kind? of hegemonies that can exist but it cannot determine their content or the form of the state. These will be defined by the type of relations between the leaders and the led, the intellectuals and the masses and the ongoing political activity of all the contending forces (Showstack-Sassoon, 1982a: 110). This is why a Gramscian class analysis proceeds from an inquiry not into the nature of the economy or the state, but into the “political history, forms of consciousness, and modes of organization of the classes. It is this dynamic which, by defining the forces in the field in concrete terms, allows the particular forms of the state to be determined" (Vacca, 1982: 56-58). That is, the specific features of a state derive from the nature of the relationship between the rulers and the ruled and it is the elaboration of hegemony which, by allowing the former to transcend their “narrow ‘economic -corporative’ interests, connects the concrete forms assumed by the state with the particular kind of compromise established” between them. Although on this reasoning the relationship between class and politics is indefinite, it is not indeterminate as different classes tend to favor different modes of political intervention (Showstack-Sassoon, 1982; Hunt, 1980). For instance, landlords may capitalize on their hold over the peasantry while (liberal) bourgeois classes, without access to a readymade constituency, may favor egalitarian ideologies and the intercession of parties to win support. Both strategies will have a significantly different impact on politics and thereby on the forms of the state.

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Parties, Hegemony, and Democracy Since modes of political intervention in societies have changed, Gramsci accords a central role to parties in his discussion of hegemony. (Although his views were inspired by his attempts to streamline the Italian Communist Party, they provide useful insights into the functioning of parties more generally.) Parties, says Gramsci, not only enable classes to "become agents of more general activities of a national and international character” (in Vacca, 1982: 63), but also help to engender class solidarity. This is because while “classes produce parties,” the latter are not simply a “mechanical and passive expression” of the former but also “react energetically upon them in order to develop, solidify and universalise them” (Gramsci, 1971:227-28). This is why a party’s history “can only be the history of a particular social group” and why its failure may result from the latter’s delinquency.10 However, since groups are never isolated, a party’s history “can only emerge from the complex portrayal of the totality of society and State (often with international ramifications too).”11 Writing its history, therefore, is like writing the “general history of a country;” while comparing national parties “is highly instructive and indeed decisive” for identifying the causes of political change in different societies (1971:151-57). Second, since they provide the “leaders of civil and political society,” parties also function as “schools of state life.” In fact, within their field, they accomplish their “function more completely and organically than the State does within its admittedly far larger field” (Gramsci, 1971:16). Thus, it is a party that welds together various types of intellectuals into organizers of the “activities and functions inherent in the ... development of an integral society.”12 Third, it is in the party that the people themselves “acquire a universal-national consciousness” since it is a party that helps to foster an organic bond between different social strata (Migliaro and Misuraca, 1982:81). This is why parties are agents par excellence of class hegemony. Finally a (revolutionary) party can also help to institute democracy by recasting the relationship between the leaders and the led (civil and political society) through its internal and external activities. Internally, Gramsci emphasizes the importance of the rank and file’s participation in decision-making through a process at once theoretical and practical. (The party cannot respond to challenges if its leaders lack theoretical comprehension of issues; however, such knowledge can only be effective if it is translated into policy by its cadres.) Externally, the party should be able to acquire support by formulating a program that relates to the “real needs of as great a part of the population as is possible, given the concrete historical conditions" (Showstack-Sassoon, 1980: 220). In

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addition to transforming politics, a revolutionary party can also fortify civil society vis-a-vis the state. Thus, the greater the extent of organized politics (i.e., the type of politics conducted through parties, trade unions, etc.) in civil society, the less likely it will be to tolerate an authoritarian state than a passive or disorganized one.13 However, while parties can facilitate democracy, they are not to be confused with it. The degree to which a society is democratic will depend not only on “electoral competition between parties—‘pluralism’ as it is sometimes called—but also the character14 of those parties and the other effective political forces” in society (Hindess, 1980:51), including the state.

Political Versus Civil Society While Gramsci’s view of the state is contradictory, he often works with an “enlarged” concept in which it comprises the “entire complex of practical and theoretical activities” with which rulers seek to rationalize and preserve their dominance with the consent of the ruled (Gramsci in Migliaro and Misuraca, 1982:72). An “integral” state, in particular, which he defines as “hegemony protected by the armour of coercion,”15will include not only the means of coercion but also of “organizing consent through education, opinion shaping, and ideology formation and propagation.” It may therefore encompass “agencies usually thought of as nonstate or private—aspects of civil society such as political parties, the press, religion, and cultural manifestations.” However, it does not “include all such agencies but only such as tend to consolidate and stabilize a certain form of established power” (Cox, 1987:409, n. 10). Although, as Etienne Balibar (1994:113) says, “no state is viable that does not repress contradictions, inherent within every difference, beneath the unity of a dominant discourse,” according to Gramsci, no viable state can be “without hegemony, or without compromises,” either (Vacca, 1982:58). In fact, every hegemonic state is an “educator” and is “ethical” in that one of its activities is to raise the people to a “cultural and moral level” that conforms to the needs of “the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes” (Gramsci in Vacca, 51). This is why it is in the state that the latter attain historical and political unity. This unity, however, is not only juridical but derives from the “organic relations between State or political society and civil society.” Thus, to acquire state power, a class must be able to institute its leadership over civil society, i.e., there must be political hegemony prior to attaining power. That a class "already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power... is one of the principal conditions” for winning such power (Gramsci, 1971:52-57).

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While his argument presupposes a sharp distinction between civil and political society, Gramsci collapses both periodically. For him, says Adamson (1980:220), the distinction is only possible as the contrast between the institutions of a subaltern class and those of the dominant classes. The former are necessarily in civil society; the latter, though parts of an interpenetrating civil and political society in advanced capitalism, are ultimately under the control of political society.

In other words, institutions that support the state’s “claim to monopolize the means of violence and through which it exercise (s) force,” can be viewed as part of political society. Those, on the other hand, that are involved in creating “organized consent over their members or potential members through some combination of cultural, spiritual and intellectual means” for challenging the state or the leading classes, may be located in the civil (Adamson, 219). In this context, the more developed the latter is, the less the state will be able to dominate it through force alone; hence the expansion in its hegemonic functions (Morera, 1990: 28).

Subalterns, Hegemony, and Common-Sense In contrast to the dominant groups, the subaltern are located in civil society because of which their history is intertwined with the latter’s history and only through it “with the history of States” (Gramsci, 1971: 52). (By definition, says Gramsci, these groups are “not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a ‘State.’”) In this context, he locates the reason for their disunity, specially of the peasants, in the relationship between social structures and consciousness itself. Their “social and cultural position,” he says (419) engenders a worldview or common sense that is “fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential.”16 This is why peasants lack collective awareness and why their beliefs are inconsistent. For example, they may be given simultaneously to “passivity and turbulence.” Or, to put it differently, "subaltern society may be engaged in a continuing dialectical tussle within itself, between its active and its passive voice, between acceptance and resistance, between isolation and collectivity, between disunity and cohesion” (Arnold, 1984:159-60). This dialectic, as Paulo Freire (1971:30) has argued, stems from the experience of oppression itself which leads the oppressed at a certain moment of their existential experience, [to] adopt an attitude of ‘adhesion’to the oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot ‘consider’ him sufficiently clearly to objectivize him—to discover him ‘outside’ themselves.

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In fact, says Freire, through a process of inversion, the boss appears “inside” them. This does not mean that the oppressed are unsuspecting of their oppression; it is simply that their “perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression.” While for both Gramsci and Freire knowledge of oppression and a change in oppressive relationships can only come through a process of transformative (consciousness-raising) political action, neither rejects common sense altogether. In fact, in so far as it gave expression to subaltern consciousness Gramsci believed that it also allowed organizers and intellectuals to work it “into a coherent position if they remained flesh to its bones” (Davidson, 1984: 145). On the positive side then, he concluded that the spontaneity and “ ‘elementary passions’ of the people, despite their political immaturity and negative qualities,” provided them with the “commitment and energy [that are] the first raw elements from which a genuine class consciousness could emerge” (Arnold, 161). However, as both David Arnold and Alastair Davidson note, Gramsci’s argument becomes difficult here due to his view that popular beliefs, being derived from the dominant culture, comprise the backbone of hegemony. Hence, says Arnold (161-62), he tried to qualify his views in various ways. For instance, subaltern groups “might receive the substance of their culture from the hegemonic classes but make it their own by impregnating it with non-hegemonic values or by selecting some aspects and rejecting others.” Conversely, even if it is true that “no subaltern culture [can exist] except within the constraints of the dominant hegemonic culture, the second [can] never obliterate the first. It merely [keeps] reproducing it in new forms” (Davidson, 1984: 147). In both cases the implication is that, as Raymond Williams says, “lived hegemony [is not] a ‘totalising abstraction’ to be virtually equated with the absolute ideological and political domination of society” by a dominant class.17 On the contrary, it is open to constant redefinition since there are always non- or counter-hegemonic values at work resisting, restricting and qualifying its operations (in Arnold, 165-66). Similarly, Ranajit Guha (1988b) contends that the domain of subaltern class politics in colonial India was not only distinct from but also independent of elite politics, revealing the partly autonomous nature of the former’s consciousness as well as the finite nature of the latter’s hegemony. The point of these arguments is that “to be subaltern is not to be powerless” (Hobsbawm, 1973:13); that in spite of their political submersion, subaltern groups can play an active role in politics, depending on the nature of their common sense and the efficacy of their associations. Where, for instance, the core of ruling class power lies in their “willing subalternity,” (Hobsbawm, 1982: 30) elites will be under no pressure to make any compromises either. Where, on the other hand, subaltern

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groups are engaged in a process of counter-hegemony creation, a dominant class, specially one interested in acquiring state power legitimately, or in exacting conditions, or on a long-term basis, may be more amenable to political accommodation, particularly if its coercive abilities or options are restricted. Admittedly, the constrained nature of bourgeois democracy does not make it much of a compromise for a class to make since a society that is democratic in “its electoral machinery and constitutional law [may be] extremely undemocratic with regard to control over the practices of the state” (Hindess, 1980: 46). Yet, such democracies are “far more than mere cosmetics on the face of coercion” (Hobsbawm, 1982:32). In spite of their restrictive nature, they have opened up some space for collective political action. Of course, whether or how well citizens use these openings to effect meaningful change will depend on how well “the society, the nation, the people past and present [identify] with the state and civil society of the rulers.” This identification is, in fact “the strongest element in [the latter’s] hegemony” ((Hobsbawm, 1982:31). In addition to identifying with the rulers, other reasons that the ruled may not challenge the legitimacy of an existing order may have to do with their ignorance of or disinterest in different forms of social organization, including their own; or, they may feel powerless to effect change. However, neither “ignorance, disinterest or lack of confidence” are given psychological attributes; instead, they are “generated by definite social processes,” (Therborn, 1980:171) such as the nature of the hegemonic culture itself.

Intellectuals, Ideology, and Hegemonic Culture A hegemonic culture, says Jackson Lears (1990:577), depends ultimately not on “brainwashing ‘the masses’ but on the tendency of public discourse to make some forms of experience readily available to consciousness while ignoring or suppressing others.” (Which experiences or ideas become prominent will be determined by the nature of the existing class structure [Giddens, 1990] as well as by the outcome of hegemonic struggles.) While, for this reason, a hegemonic culture is never plural, this does not mean that it is based on “political fraud and the ideological manipulation of the ruled” (Vacca, 1982: 58). In fact, Gramsci expressly states that ideologies are not “mere illusions for the ruled, a deception they undergo or a willed and conscious deception for the rulers” (in Vacca, 58). (Self-deception, he says [1971: 327], may serve as an “adequate explanation for a few individuals taken separately, or even for groups of a certain size,” but not for explaining the life of “great masses” of people.) Accordingly, while they may have an “arbitrary” dimension to

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them, ideologies are matrices “of thought firmly grounded in the forms of our social life [rather than a corpus of] discreet falsehoods,” as J. Mepham (1990: 196) argues. The dynamic spread of ideas, he says, is only possible “to the extent [that they render] social reality intelligible.” It is this link between ideas and reality that is “the key to [ideology’s] dominance” (182). However, while ideologies are a “response to certain specific problems posed by reality,” (Gramsci, 1971:324), not only is the latter fraught with contradictions but there is no universal conception of the world, no philosophy-in-general that allows people to make sense of it in the same way. On the contrary, there are conflicting conceptions and philosophies (or, in Roland Barthes [1977:210] words, “a division of meanings”) between which one must choose.18 Such a choice is contingent on real life activities implicit in one’s “modes of actions;” and since “all action is political, can one not say that the real philosophy of each [person] is contained ... in political action?” If this is true, then a critical “working out at a higher level of one’s own conception of reality” can only occur through a “struggle of political ‘hegemonies’ and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then in that of politics proper” (Gramsci, 1971:326-33). Since ideologies and philosophies are typically the products of a society rather than a class (Gramsci, 346), some of them may be held independently of class positions, that is, they may be autonomous. (Their autonomy will need to be determined historically according to Giddens [1990: 523] who argues that Marx also realized that ideologies could "have a partially ‘internal’ autonomous development, and the degree to which this is so depends upon factors particular to specific societies” that have to be studied empirically.) The fact that some ideologies are autonomous does not mean that they cannot serve the interests of one class better than that of another. For instance, religions that are able to establish “a dominant and universalist moral code for society,” thereby unifying it, provide the ruling groups with the "necessary ideological justification for existing social divisions, makes those divisions appear non-antagonistic and holds together a potentially divided society into a single whole.” Conversely, for the subaltern groups, “religion enters their common sense as the element which affords them an access to a more powerful cultural order” (Gramsci in Chatterjee, 1989:172). Not only may ideologies serve different functions for different groups but the latter may internalize them differently. Speaking of Catholicism, Gramsci (1971: 420) notes that there is one type for the “peasants, one for the petty-bourgeoisie and town workers, one for women, and one for intellectuals which is itself variegated and disconnected.” This is why

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the Catholic Church, aware of the potential dangers of these divisive constructions, had struggled historically to prevent the “formation of two religions, one for the ‘intellectuals’ and the other for the ‘simple souls.’ ” Since it could not raise the latter to a higher plane it had attempted instead to impose “an iron discipline” on the intellectuals so that they did not "exceed certain limits of differentiation and so render the split catastrophic and irreparable” (338; 331). Reasons why the Church, the state and groups aspiring towards hegemony have tried (or try) to attract or control the intellectuals is because they are “the bearer(s) of new ideas,” specially in peripheral and dependent countries. However, in these countries not only are their ideas likely to be a reflection of “the productive development of the more advanced countries” but also of the latter’s “ideological currents.” Moreover, in the absence of strong economic groups in the periphery intellectuals come to identify with the state instead which is the “concrete form of a productive world” here (Gramsci, 1971:116-17). Since the elaboration of the intellectual strata does not occur “on the terrain of abstract democracy but in accordance with very concrete traditional historical processes,” its relation to the productive process is key in Gramsci’s (1971:11) definition of it. Accordingly, by intellectuals he means those who exercise “organizational functions in the broad sense” in the productive, cultural and political-administrative fields. Every essential class, he says (9-10) in this context, has found intellectuals in "existence who seem to represent an historical continuity uninterrupted even by the most complicated and radical changes in political and social forms.” These “traditional” intellectuals, usually ecclesiastics, perform a crucial role in defining the “fabric of hegemony” (Vacca, 1982: 61) which is why groups evolving towards hegemony try to conquer them. In addition to traditional intellectuals, every social group also produces along with itself “organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields” (Gramsci in Vacca, 76). For instance, organic bourgeois intellectuals can be expected to “elaborate and build consensus around a bourgeois model of society” (Vacca, 63). On this point, W. Wesotowski (1990:175) claims that a class only discovers its practical needs from its experiences, but it is the intellectuals who impart to these “spontaneous discoveries the shape of a political program and the form of ready ideology.” This may be because, as Marx said, “in their minds [the intellectuals] do not go beyond the limits which the [dominant classes] do not go beyond in life” (in Wesotowski, 175).

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While intellectuals act as “permanent persuaders” on behalf of a class, they do not consider themselves its servitors. In fact, since they “experience through an ’esprit de corps’their uninterrupted historical continuity and their special qualification,” they regard themselves as being “independent of the dominant social group” (Vacca, 1982:78). However, given their function in legitimizing class hegemony and given, too, Gramsci’s differentiated analysis of their role, it is possible “to link the analysis of “intellectuals... to the analysis of classes" (Vacca, 62, his emphasis). The importance of intellectuals can be gauged from the fact that "within the same social formation, the forms assumed by the state ... vary according to the different social relations and functions of the intellectual groups” (Vacca, 59). An “unstable equilibrium” between classes often derives from the fact that traditional intellectuals, specially in civil and military service, are "still too closely tied to the old dominant classes” in their thinking (Gramsci, 1971:245). This is why their attitudes interest Gramsci. Do they, he asks, “have a ‘paternalistic’ attitude towards the instrumental classes? Or do they believe that they are their organic expression? Do they have a ‘servile’ attitude towards the ruling classes or do they think that they themselves are rulers?” (Gramsci in Vacca, 1982: 62). Where intellectuals suffer from an “ideological shortness of breath,” as Pier Paolo Pasolini (1982:183) once put it in another context, the content of hegemony may be turbid. This is why Gramsci condemned “ossified” thought as the gravest danger to Soviet culture. What he found striking was how a “critical point of view which requires the utmost intelligence, open-mindedness, mental freshness and scientific inventiveness has become monopolized by narrow-minded wretches.” Hence, “the type of formation of the categories of intellectuals [and] their relationship with national forces” is crucial for hegemony-creation (Gramsci in Vacca, 1982:49). This brings Gramsci’s discussion full circle.

Gramsci: Elements of a Synthesis The preceding (admittedly somewhat simplified) review of Gramsci’s theory was meant to illustrate not its flaws or “antinomies,”19but its distinct conceptualization of the relationship between the economy, class, and politics as a complex synthesis of multiple determinations20 and historically contingent factors. This view, while not free of some of the tensions21 that infuse Marxist theory is, nonetheless, one of its more refined variants. For Gramsci, the relationship between the economy and politics is best visualized not as a base-superstructure model but a historic bloc, a concept that captures the emergent nature of social reality, specially how "classes and fractions of classes are related in society and the com-

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plicated relationship between [its] economic, political and cultural aspects” as well (Showstack-Sassoon, 1982: 14). Similarly, while Gramsci believes that a liberal bourgeoisie is likely to establish a “democratic” state, he also argues that state forms will depend ultimately on the nature of the relationship between the rulers and ruled. In this context, his argument that the elaboration of hegemony serves as the basis for not only class domination but also political compromise is unique since Marxists do not usually accept the idea of class accord in bourgeois democracy. Thus, while Marx was not unaware of the consensual aspect of politics, he did not satisfactorily analyze the sources of interclass cooperation or how it could afford the basis for psychological stability (Birnbaum, 1990). Leninist versions also evade the "problem of bourgeois democracy [since its] precise significance is the inclusion within the democratic framework of the dominated classes” (Hunt, 1980:9, his emphasis). Gramsci, on the other hand, while acknowledging the inequities inhering in bourgeois rule (the struggle for hegemony would be redundant if this class could "naturally” represent the common good or its rule was innately just), is concerned to specify how some element of class harmony has emerged in class-divided societies. In this context, he locates the sources of legitimacy of bourgeois rule not in the bourgeoisie’s ability to defraud the people or in its coercive powers alone, but in its political and intellectual appeal which, he argues, relative to that o f the previous ruling classes, has been enormous. However, the fact that the bourgeoisie has also been able to keep the social tensions occasioned by the workings of a capitalist economy from trickling out beyond the economic realm through a process of political accommodation neither means it has done away with class privileges, nor is it proof of its will to democracy. Instead, it is the outcome of hegemonic struggles which, by tempering class demands, have permitted the formulation of a minimally shared “national-popular” agenda. While such an agenda does not entail restructuring the system of unequal privileges on which capitalist society is ultimately constructed, it is the process of political compromise, though originating in class conflict, that has allowed the rudiments of a common good like “democracy” to emerge in class-divided societies.22 Given this view, Gramsci is also more aware than most Marxists of the “enormous practical as well as theoretical significance of [the] relation between class and society, people or nation, between historic past, present and future” (Hobsbawm, 1982:31). Finally, he lays greater emphasis than orthodox Marxists on the role of parties,23 ideology, and intellectuals in shaping politics and the forms of a state.

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Gramsci’s rendition also differs from mainstream ones not only in its class-based focus but also in its view of conflict. Although, as Benjamin Barber (1984:8) notes, it is not news to liberal democrats that politics arises out of conflict and takes place in a realm defined by, inter alia, power and interest... the paradox of consensus remains. ... Consensual democracy resolves conflict by defining it out of the political picture from the outset.

Thus, while liberal democrats grant the possibility of conflict in the “political game,” they do not concede that it defines the rules o f the game. In fact, by assuming consensus to be innate to the “political system,” they promote the tautology that an end of democracy (social harmony) is also its means. For Gramsci, however, there can be no real consensus without conflict, no effective leadership without elements of both compromise and coercion. Second, while like mainstream theorists Gramsci accords a central role to parties, unlike them, he differentiates between their role in instituting democracy and hegemony. Such a distinction is essential for explaining why, in spite of a plethora of parties, politics in so many countries remains undemocratic, even in the “thin” sense discussed in Chapter 1. Similarly, since his analysis of intellectuals is grounded in his analysis of classes, it offers a more convincing account of why elites may be corrupt, reactionary or conservative in some societies or at certain historical conjunctures and radical, reformative or “democratic” in/at others. (In terms of his argument, reasons for the difference between the Indian and Pakistani elites have to be sought in the type of classes with whom they share ideological affinities rather than their own “nature.”) Third, Gramsci’s view of politics as a dialectic of conflict and compromise between the dominant and subaltern classes, society and state, leaders and led, challenges the mainstream notion that political sagacity and vigor are the prerogatives of only the former. In fact, it is his theory that provides a convincing explanation for why some elites “choose” to embrace liberal and/or “democratic” programs. Finally, and for the same reason, his argument avoids the elitism of both mainstream and orthodox Marxist theories. In sum, Gramsci’s work not only clarifies the relationship between class and politics that orthodox Marxists take for granted and modernization theorists ignore, to their common detriment, but also advances a more holistic argument about politics than both since it integrates a historical analysis of the state, class, and the economy with a discussion of parties, ideology, and intellectuals. While this argument does not amount to a full-fledged synthesis, or even to a theory of democracy, it

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nonetheless provides a deeply interconnected and congruent “network of concepts”24 for undertaking an analysis of South Asian politics.

A Gramscian Methodology I use Gramsci’s theory to develop a theoretical and methodological approach rather than drawing upon any single concept for two reasons. First, as I argued in Chapter 1, the trouble with many class-based theories of Indian and Pakistani politics is not that they posit a relationship between bourgeois hegemony and "democracy” in India and the dominance of a landlord and official class and its breakdown in Pakistan, but that they to rely on reductive and a priori claims to establish the validity of these arguments. Gramsci’s work, on the other hand, avoids these reductive tendencies by focusing on not only structural but also conjunctural factors and by employing the concept of a historic bloc (rather than the base-superstructure or modes of productive models) to analyze the relationship between the economy, state, class, and politics, historically. A second and more compelling reason is that Gramsci’s own theory rests on a set of related methodological assumptions which, even if they are less interconnected than I have presented them as being are, nonetheless, contingent on one another. To abstract from this network, therefore, is to lose the linkages that make it unique in the first place. In this context, an approach based on Gramsci’s work suggests, first, that in order to derive the nature of the Indian and Pakistani states, it is necessary to analyze the “political history, forms of consciousness, and modes of organization” (Vacca, 1982:56) of the dominant and subaltern Hindu and Muslim classes in India on the one hand, and between them and the state on the other, since these were the major contending forces in the colonial era.25 Second, it is necessary to specify the political and historical processes by which different types of social classes became ascendant among Hindus and Muslims (and, in the former case, hegemonic as well) since these processes are likely to have had a direct bearing on their political agendas, ideologies and relationships. Third, such an analysis must focus on the nature and role of the Congress and the League for at least three reasons: first, comparing the experience of national parties can help to identify the processes of transformation in different societies; second, colonial politics and the two national struggles came to be conducted mainly through the Congress and the League; and finally, it is through parties that classes establish (or fail to establish) both democracy and hegemony. Accordingly, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between the differing social base of these parties and their political agendas, in addition to examining the role of party politics itself among

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Hindus and Muslims (i.e., to what extent was politics conducted via parties and with what results for democracy.) This also requires assessing the role of Hindu and Muslim intellectuals in politics, specially in shaping their respective nationalist discourses. Finally, it is necessary to identify the role of the subaltern classes not only in the national struggles, but also in engendering “democracy.” In keeping with this line of inquiry, this book raises three major questions: first, what factors shaped the policies of the colonial state and what impact did these policies have on the dominant and subaltern Hindu and Muslim classes and their politics? Second, what kinds of political agendas and ideologies did different classes come to espouse and why, and with what implications for “democracy” and their own hegemony? Third, what were the implications of subaltern class politics and unrest for “democracy?” Since India and Pakistan acquired their independence through successful national struggles, three auxiliary questions are pertinent: first, how did Hindu and Muslim intellectuals come to theorize “the nation,” and what implications did this have for their politics? Second, how did the emergence of communal identities and ideologies impact on the Congress and the League? Finally, to what extent was Hindu politics secular and the Muslim “communal?” Asking these questions is, of course, not tantamount to advancing a theory of democracy, or dictatorship. At best, it is a way of establishing a relationship between class and politics, historically. Also, in so far as these questions have been addressed before, the importance of revisiting them lies not in the originality of the exercise but in its comparative nature and its use of a theoretical framework which, it has been suggested, is more ecumenical than that of the other leading theories in the field. To be able to address these questions, it is necessary to specify how I “operationalize” concepts like hegemony, civil and political society, and Hindu and Muslim politics. To the extent that hegemony is “a fit between power, ideas, and institutions” (Cox, 1981:140) it is impossible to reduce to a set of empirically measurable “variables.” At the same time, to avoid over-generalizing the concept it is necessary to indicate those situations that can plausibly be regarded as hegemonic. Keeping in view its relational nature, I treat as an indication of hegemony: first, the active participation in and acceptance by (a) the subaltern classes of dominant class politics and ideology and (b) the latter those of the colonial state’s in addition or preference to their own. (That alternative organizations and ideologies did exist indicates that groups engaged in them or advocating them were reasonably aware of not only shared, but also oppositional, interests.) However, even if the subaltern groups supported the dominant classes and the latter, the colonial state, it is only feasible to

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regard this as a sign of hegemony if, second, the political initiatives of the state and the dominant groups (a) emerged during the course of political struggles, and (b) were “articulate” in a Gramscian sense; that is, they (i) related/catered to the needs or demands of the groups over which hegemony was sought to be exercised, (ii) involved elements of coercion and compromise, (iii) became part of the worldview or ideology of the groups over which hegemony was exercised and (iv) transformed politics itself to an appreciable degree. Such a view, though not unproblematical, is based on the assumption, first, that political compromise can be taken as a sign of hegemony because the interests of dominant and subaltern classes, civil and political society, and colonizers and colonized, though not predetermined, are likely to be disjunctive. Second, to the extent that some ideologies come to be associated with a class, when groups embrace each other’s worldviews, it may be taken a sign of hegemony, either of a positive or negative nature. In other words, since ideologies represent different truth and/or use values to different groups, or convey its interests, or its sense of itself better or more characteristically than others, specific classes may favor certain ideologies over others. For example, bourgeois classes have tended to support secular ideologies while peasants have responded more favorably to communal ones. Similarly, colonial powers relied on arguments of differential capacities and racial superiority to legitimate their rule while the colonized turned to notions of self-determination and equality to press their claims to freedom. Even when groups adhere to the same ideology, like nationalism, their constructions of it may differ. As a result, when classes embrace a certain ideology or specific constructions of it, it may be taken as a sign of hegemony of the class with which that ideology is/has been associated politically and historically. An analysis along these lines also needs to distinguish between civil and political society. Since colonial rule was predicated on clearly defined political, economic, racial, administrative and psychological boundaries between the rulers and the ruled, this distinction is not difficult to make in the case of colonized societies. Political society was the realm of the former; civil, of the latter. However, since not all groups and institutions in Indian civil society were involved in challenging the state, only those can be located in it that were.26 While the subaltern classes and their parties would necessarily be part of it, the dominant classes and their parties, the Congress and the League, can be located at different junctures of political and civil society (since at different times they sought either to participate in state power, or to align with the subaltern groups to challenge the Raj).

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Figure 2.2

Since political allegiances were shaped not only by class affiliations and affinities, but also by the emergence of communal identities, specially after the 1920s when politically active Hindus and Muslims began to support the Congress and League respectively, it is essential to note the religious and class polarities (depicted in Figure 2.2) in colonial civil society. Conveying these polarities non-visually, however, raises problems since the use of terms like Hindu and Muslim society or politics (which I use) implies that religious and/or class identities were pregiven or fully developed which was not the case.27 In relying on these lexically convenient terms, then, I am suggesting only that the political goals, agendas and identities of the dominant and subaltern Hindu and Muslim groups tended to diverge rather than that politics itself was intrinsically Hindu or Muslim, or that all groups operated at the same levels of consciousness, or that identities were not historically constructed. There is, finally, the question of what constitutes an adequate historical explanation. In this context, Roy Bhaskar’s (1978) exposition of the historical method suggests, to my mind, the most useful lines along which a Gramscian analysis can be conducted. Most events in open systems (those that are not experimentally produced), says Bhaskar (123), are conjunctures. That is, they are to be explained as the outcome of multiple causes. A historical narrative, therefore, should permit for the emergence through a redescription of the concerned events “of a picture of the conjuncture or balance of forces in which it occurred and in terms of which it is explained.” Complex events in particular require a causal analysis, i.e., the event’s resolution into its components. These will then need to be theoretically redescribed so that “theories of the various kinds of mechanism at work in the generation of the event can be brought to bear on [its] explanation.” The next stage consists in “retrodiction from redescribed component events or states to the antecedent events or states of affairs that could have produced them.” Retrodiction will itself need to be supported by autonomous evidence until all causes have been excluded except those, that along with “the

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other factors at work, actually produced the effect on the occasion in question” (125). In sum, the four stages in historical explanation, according to Bhaskar, are: causal analysis or resolution of the event; theoretical redescription of its causes; retrodiction via normic statements to possible causes of their components, and finally, the elimination of alternative causes.

A Final Caveat To the extent that my analysis mixes theory and history, it is likely in that capacity to be doubly culpable. To me, however, a theory is attractive not so much for its elegance as its capacity to explain the world with some immediacy and rectitude. I cannot, therefore, resist a strong existential urge to “apply” it. This does not mean, of course, that the application is necessarily consummate; I have doubtless done violence both to theory and history, specially the latter, by making some broad generalizations. While these are likely to represent colonial history as having been less differentiated than it was, they are neither meant to be in the nature of “summational statements,”28 nor are they meant to impose a false homogeneity on a fragmented reality. They are simply an unavoidable heuristic device dictated by the necessity of rendering a comparison intelligible. I have used them without a willing suspension of disbelief and with some skepticism; readers should also accept them in this spirit. If my analysis also seems unpardonably eclectic at times, I would like to believe that it is because of definitional slippage rather than lack of theoretical rigor. Definitional exactitude is doubtless useful for clear conceptualization and praxis, but I get around it when necessary by claiming that some imprecision (for instance, defining classes in colonized societies in terms of their relationship to the state rather than the economy, or using the term “elites” to denote political leaders) does not nullify the theoretical soundness of my argument. Second, at a time when the literature on democracy has itself become so elastic,29 some inexactitude may be excusable. Finally, it seems necessary to justify my interest in studying actually existing “democracy.” Quite simply, we no longer view democracy as “a wonderfully pleasant manner of carrying on in the short run" (Plato, 1987: 376). On the contrary, it seems to have become the “world’s new universal religion” (Corcoran, 1983: 15). Yet, we seem to be living not only in the best, but also in the worst of times for the rise and decline of democratic regimes and freedoms, to echo Charles Dickens. It is the best of times because of the collapse of oppressive rulers and the effusion of movements for political rights throughout the world. But it is also the worst of t imes as state terrorism against its own citizens, specially indig-

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enous peoples, is reaching unprecedentedly high levels (McCamant, n.d.) and everything from genocide to mass rape is being sanctified in the name of “nationalism.” This paradox confirms Freire (1971:93) in his view that the axiomatic motif of our time is “domination—which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved.” While this book is not directly about domination or liberation, it is concerned to examine the type of politics (both repressive and liberatory) that was conducted in the framework of colonial rule in India. If its weaknesses can be stomached, I believe it offers some interesting insights into the subject. If my optimism is justified, then the risks that I run as a neophyte comparativist in venturing into a field already so heavily and ably mined by so many eminent scholars, and one in which there seems to be less unanimity than ever before on what constitutes a credible representation,30 will have been well worth hazarding. The rest of this book is divided into three chapters. The next analyzes the nature of colonial rule with the aim of specifying its impact on the Indian class structure as well as its implications for local politics. Chapters 4 and 5 then detail the nature of Hindu and Muslim politics respectively. The final draws out the reasons for the emergence of two divergent political practices in India and their meaning for democracy, nationalism and communalism.

Notes 1. Anne Showstack-Sassoon argues that Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony “with regard to the state in a specific historical period: the state in the period of imperialism and the dominance of monopoly capitalism.” See, “Hegemony, War of Position and Political Intervention,” in Anne Showstack-Sassoon (ed.), Approaches to Gramsci, London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Society Ltd., 1982. David Arnold, however, notes that Gramsci recognized “elements of hegemony ... in earlier times and in rural society even if [it] only reaches its most diverse, developed and effective forms in modern industrial society.” “Gramsci and Peasant Subaltemity in India,” Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, July 1984, pp. 155-177, p. 176, footnote 2. My own discussion of hegemony is meant to show the broader applicability of the concept and its relevance to the politics of developing societies. 2. It is in the latter sense that Gramsci used the term passive revolution to describe Gandhism in India. 3. Bob Jessop notes that both Foucault and Poulantzas “seem to have agreed that the overall unity of a system of domination must be explained in terms of a certain strategic codification of power relations. This process is both intentional and nonsubjective.” Since hegemony also involves a codification of class power, it seems reasonable to regard it in the same vein. From State Theory: Putting the

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Capitalist State in its Place, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press,

1990; p. 235. 4. In “real life,”says Gramsci (1971:89) “one cannot ask for enthusiasm, spirit of sacrifice, etc. without giving anything in return.” At the same time, he notes that the sacrifices of dominant groups “cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic” (161). Selections from Prison Notebooks, translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1971. In any event, since the range of the bourgeoisie’s “universalistic function has objective limits which it cannot surpass,” it can make only limited compromises. Showstack-Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980, p. 119. 5. For Gramsci, the “definition of the highest development of a class consists in its ability to represent universal interests,” Showstack-Sassoon, 1980; p. 119. 6. In terms of this definition, all anticolonial struggles would be “nationalpopular.” 7. The second type refers to proletarian democracy. 8. According to Esteve Morera, however, Gramsci’s argument opens up the possibility for constructing “a theory of socialist democracy.” From “Gramsci and Democracy,” in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 23, No. 1, March, 1990, pp. 23-37. 9. For instance, weak political unity is both a cause and an effect of a weak economic transformation of society according to Gramsci, Selections, 1971; p. 116. 10. This argument also suggests that a party can only be hegemonic to the extent that the class within it is. 11. These views, it should be apparent, are opposed to those of modernization theorists. 12. As Gramsci (1971:16) notes, an “intellectual who joins the political party of a particular social group is merged with the organic intellectuals of this group itself, and is linked tightly with the group. This takes place through participation in the life of the State only to a limited degree and often not at all” See in the text below for a discussion of intellectuals. 13. See the discussion on the state in the text below. 14. In this context, Gramsci (1971: 155) argues that parties also carry out a “policing function” aimed at “safeguarding a certain political and legal order” through methods that can also be repressive. 15. This definition “supposes a much more articulated conception of the class nature of the state; a complex and mediated re-linking of the state to the ruling class,” says Giuseppe Vacca, “Intellectuals and the Marxist Theory of the State,” in Showstack-Sassoon, op. cit., 1982, p. 55. 16. On this point, see Arun K. Patnaik, “Gramsci's Concept of Common Sense: Towards a Theory of Subaltern Consciousness in Hegemony Processes,” in Economic and Political Weekly, January 30,1988, pp. PE 2-PE 10. 17. See James C. Scott for an argument that denies the existence of hegemony in any form, thin or thick. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990 and, for a critique, Greg

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DeLaurier and Mike Yarrow, “What Do the Oppressed Believe? Post-Modernism, Hidden Transcripts, and Hegemony.” Paper presented at “Marxism and the New World Order,” University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1992. 18. Commenting on Bertolt Brecht’s views on the proletariat’s struggle, Barthes argues that these views imply that “class division has its inevitable counterpart in a division of meanings and class struggle its equally inevitable counterpart in a war of meanings.” As he says, some “objects of discourse do not directly concern the proletariat (they find no interpretation within it)” which is why they need representatives to assign meanings to it. Yet, this process can reinforce bourgeois hegemony which has permeated cultural, intellectual and academic discourses. From Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 210-11. 19. On this point see Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” in New Left Review, No. 100, November, 1976-January, 1977, pp. 5-78; and Luciano Pellicani, Gramsci: An Alternative Communism? Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1981. 20. The phrase is Bob Jessop's. From State Theory, op. cit. 21. The archetypal one, of course, is how far one can privilege economic factors without being a determinist and political ones without becoming a voluntarist. 22. In this sense, Gramsci can be situated between Aristotle, who believed that the “middle” class was naturally able to represent the common good, and Marx who argued that it was utterly incapable of doing so. 23. For the argument that neither Marx nor Engels offered a coherent theory of parties see, in addition to Showstack-Sassoon (1980) and Bob lessop (1990): E. Balibar, “Marx, Engels and the Revolutionary Party: Concept of the Party,” in Bob Jessop and Charlie Malcolm-Brown (eds.), Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought: Critical Assessments, London: Routledge, 1990, Vol. II. I. Cunliffe, “Marx, Engels, and the Party,” and M. Johnstone, “Marx and Engels and the Concept of the Party,” in ibid., Vol. III. 24. For an elaboration of this concept, see Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organization and Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 25. As I argued in Chapter 1, this focus on the colonial period is justified since the social base of the two states has not changed notably after independence. 26. In his study of Brazil, for instance, Francisco Weffort places the family, church, bar associations, the press, unions, business groups, cultural associations and parties in civil society since it is through these that various groups are trying to challenge the state and extend democratic freedoms. See “Why Democracy?” in Alfred Stepan (ed.), Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. 27. This is why some scholars have begun to put the words Hindu and Muslim in quotes, to denote that these identities were constructed during colonial rule. However, what seems to be important to the emergence of religious identities is not the purity of religious practice (i.e., lack of “syncretism,”) but consciousness of putative differences from other communities. In this sense, Hindus and Muslims were aware of their religious identities prior to colonial rule, as I argue in

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Chapter 3. Moreover, since one never puts words like Buddhists, Christians, or Jews in quotes, no matter how tenuous their identities, it seems unnecessary to treat other religious groups differently. 28. Edward Said, who employs the term for Orientalist methodology, says he means by it that “in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say, about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood (and would understand himself) as also making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up.” Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979, p. 255.1have no such ambitions and if any part of my argument sounds too sweeping, it is as a result of error, not arrogance. 29. Over the last decade, mainstream theorists have been moving away from their “purely political” approaches towards unashamedly political-economy ones that are sensitive to the role of the economy, classes and the state, once the domain of the left. The latter, conversely, has been focusing more on issues of identity formation and the problems of organization in civil society. These mutual shifts have tended to blur the boundaries between both in terms of terrain and terminology. 30. See, for instance, the exchange between Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 2, April, 1990, pp. 383408 and Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 34, No. 1, January, 1992, pp. 141-167; and Prakash: “Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride? A Reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook,” in ibid.; pp. 168-184.

3 The Colonial State and Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism Imperialist powers tended to view themselves as the embodiments of both agency and civilization while relegating the people whom they had colonized into a “wholly different category” (Balfour in Said, 1979: 31). This bias, as Edward Said (1979:32) has argued, derived from a notion of epistemic privilege: the belief that not only had they acquired a complete and genuine knowledge of the subject races but that the object of their knowledge was “inherently vulnerable to scrutiny [and] was a fundamentally, even ontologically stable ... ‘fact,’” incapable of change or self-reflexivity. To “have such knowledge of such a thing [says Said] is to dominate it, to have authority over it.” So it was with sundry British officials (and the early nationalists) in India who came to view the extension of representative institutions and independence as a gratuity of their rule. The freedom struggle of the 1930s and 1940s, however, brought with it a new brand of intellectuals who perceived in local politics not English magnanimity, but the Indian elite’s vigor. Later yet, some theorists began to re-read India’s history not as a hallowed text of the elite’s activities but as a narrative of subaltern class struggles against colonial rule and the dominant classes. Given the complexity of events and the multiplicity of protagonists involved, the reality may incorporate and transcend all these interpretations. Thus, it could more plausibly be argued, at least from a Gramscian perspective, that colonial politics was shaped by the political and economic circumstances and ideology of not only the British and the colonial state, but the local classes, dominant and subaltern, Hindu and Muslim, and was the outcome of intentional activity as well as historically serendipitous happenstance. A history of each of these contending forces is, however, beyond the scope of this study which aims, instead, to identify the factors that shaped their mutual relationships and the im47

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plications of these for democracy, nationalism and communalism. This requires beginning with an analysis of colonial rule itself.

Colonial Rule and India's Class Structure Two hundred years of colonization engendered a sequence of changes in the subcontinent that were not only fundamentally dissimilar to any it had weathered before, but which permanently altered its politicaleconomy and injected numerous contradictions into it. What was distinctive was not only the colonial state’s monopoly on political power1 but the odd mix occasioned by the intersection of colonial-induced capitalism with aspects of the precapitalist social configuration which the British also helped to preserve. As a result, at the time of their withdrawal, India and Pakistan were politically modern only at the top; their huge agrarian base remained in the grip of a well-entrenched landed class: the erstwhile zamindars, sardars, rajas and maharajahs of “British” and “Princely” India. It is essential, then, to analyze those aspects of the subcontinent’s hybrid political-economy that generated enough tensions to propel it into era of modern politics but with strong residues of the ancien regime in tact. This necessitates specifying the nature of the precolonial social formation and the impact of colonial rule upon it.

The Colonial State and the Landlords The precolonial social formation has been described variously as feudal, semi-feudal, protofeudal, or feudal-type rather than Asiatic2 since there existed at the point of production a "fusion of economic and political power,” a medial principle of European feudalism (Alavi, 1980: 366). Even those reluctant to use the term feudal for Mughal society which "knew little or nothing of fief, commendation, demesne or serfdom,” agree that the nobility “shared with the hereditary aristocracy the political power to extract the surplus from agriculture” (Raychaudhuri and Habib, 1982:299). According to D. D. Kosambi (1975) like European feudalism, the Indian was also characterized by a simple technology, a rudimentary division of labor, production for household use, conditional landholding by lords on some form of service-tenure, political decentralization, and the exercise by the nobility of quasi-judicial functions over the population. The hierarchy of personal loyalties that sustained European feudalism also existed in India where men often burnt themselves on the funeral pyres of their lords. However, Indian feudalism was distinct from the European in that the nobility did not have “proprietary rights over the land” (Desai, 1966:37). Hence, it could not rely on the labor of “unfree peasants,” nor evict

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them, as they were not serfs in the classical sense. (In place of demesne farming by compulsory labor, the Indian nobility relied on slaves. In fact, an increase in slavery was a notable difference between European and Indian feudalism, says Kosambi.) Moreover, there were no organized guilds or churches in India; instead, caste tended to replace both. During the pre-Mughal period, land had been held communally3 and not viewed as the king’s property who had merely received one-sixth of the produce in kind (Wadia and Merchant, 1957:333). The Mughals had continued the existing tenures and tax system, only increasing the state’s share to one-third of the produce. While private property was not unknown under their rule, communal ownership remained the norm in agriculture. In the absence of an “absolute owner of the soil,” the produce continued to be apportioned between the cultivators and the king or his nominees who were assigned the task of gathering tax from specific village communities (Beauchamp, 1934:20). While these "tax farmers” had become quite strong by the middle of the eighteenth century, they did not approximate the lords of the manor in Europe since their position “had never received the sanction of a legal title” (Metcalf, 1964:37). The British, on the other hand, while retaining the land basis of revenue, changed the system of landholding by introducing private property into it. In Bengal, their Permanent Settlement of 1793 transformed the zamindars, or former tax farmers, into landowners making them liable for a revenue fixed in perpetuity (Wadia and Merchant, 1957: 336). (Though Bengal was a Muslim province, the Settlement closed the door to landlordism for them since, under its working, “land passed from impoverished Muslim hands to rich Hindus,” who ended up comprising nine-tenths of the newly created landowners; the tenants, on the other hand, were mainly Muslim [Ahmad, 1992: 8.]) Similarly, in the NorthWestern Provinces, British policies converted an existing class of (largely Muslim) taluqdars, also revenue collecting officials,4 into a landowning gentry. In Madras, however, the state instituted the ryotwari system, based on direct dealings between itself and lone peasant cultivators while in the Punjab it preserved the village “as an economic entity” by allowing land to be held communally but taxing the farmers individually (Ahmed, 1992:9). In spite of these variations, however, as Eric Stokes (1959: 26) notes, these policies involved the introduction of “private property rights in land, secured and maintained by a Western law system [thereby initiating] a fundamental change in the customary modes of land tenure, the heart of Indian society.” By inducing these changes, the Settlement not only altered the existing class structure but, as Thomas Metcalf (1964: 37) notes, also profoundly effected the “distribution of power within Indian society,” since whichever class secured its attendant rights and

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privileges became “in effect master of the land, able to reduce all others to virtual dependence upon its generosity.” As a result, claim scholars, the peasants lost their rights to a customary rent and permanent tenure and were reduced to the landlords’ mercies. While no longer subject to “feudal obligations,” they were now free only in the sense that they had to work for the landlords, their “only means of access to land, or to starve” (Alavi, 1980:372). The latter could eject them or extract as much rent from them as they wished because of which a “new system of subrenting grew up under which each peasant cultivator had to support by his labor a whole hierarchy of parasites” (Beauchamp, 1934: 22). Thus, British efforts to “naturalise the landed institutions of England among the natives of Bengal” (Temple in Wadia and Merchant, 1957: 336) had the effect of “preserving, if not intensifying the precapitalist forms of exploitation and appropriation” (Patnaik, 1975: 227) specially in Bengal where they resulted in feudalism and serfdom becoming the main features of the land system (Wadia and Merchant, 337). Partha Chatterjee (1986b: 173-74), however, argues that such views fail to note intraregional variations as well as changes in British policies over time. While the Settlement did confer “what were presumed to be full rights of private proprietorship” on landlords, as the effects (in the form of peasant revolts) of “ ‘high landlordism’” in eastern Bengal became increasingly obvious to the state in the nineteenth century, it sought to "define more precisely, perhaps redefine, the legal rights of ‘property’ amongst different agrarian classes.” The result, he says, was a “definite restriction on the ‘unfettered’ proprietary rights of landlords.” In fact, each spate of agrarian unrest obliged the state to set narrower limits on these rights so that eventually the structure of land law was no longer even formally contained within the straightforward bourgeois principles of private property and freedom of contract. Property itself was ambiguously located in different persons and in different sorts of rights to the same piece of land, and freedom of contract was [severely] curtailed.

According to Chatterjee, these measures resulted from the state’s desire to “protect the basic structure of small-peasant agriculture [in order to avoid] the massive ‘law and order’ problem of large-scale evictions from the land.” It even turned its coercive powers against British planters “when their activities posed too much of a threat” to the stability of this agriculture, devoted mainly to subsistence production but also responsive, within the constraints of the “existing organization of production,” to market forces and to the state’s need for surplus appropriation through the sale of cash crops on the world market.

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According to David Washbrook (1981: 664), however, tensions in the definition of land rights resulted from a lacuna in the legal system itself which reflected the desire of the state to create, on the one hand, a “society whose prosperity was underpinned by a free market in all commodities, including and specially land,” (a principle that became the basis of public law) and, on the other, an attempt to base the personal law of its subjects on ascriptive criteria like status and religion. From its inception, therefore, the law embodied two opposing precepts with dissimilar social consequences. Thus, whereas the public aspect was meant to enlarge an individual’s freedom in the marketplace, the private sought to limit the arena “of ‘free’ activity by prescribing the moral and community obligations to which the individual was subject, and was to be made by the ‘discovery’ of existing customary and religious norms.” As a result, its effects were not only to favor the elites by obstructing change, but also to revert to “long dead or unfashionable conventions.” Not only that, but in its definition of rights to land and its revenue appropriation policies, the East India Company’s5 rule was merely a continuation of the ancien regime since it did not dismande the latter’s “institutions of economic management. Instead it worked them more intensively than they had ever been worked before” (661-65). To what extent colonial rule represented a break with the past is a matter of some dispute. However, it neither induced a bourgeois revolution in India, nor even a thorough capitalization of agriculture (Chatterjee, 1986b: 178). Instead, by allowing the landlords to continue extracting the agricultural surplus and guaranteeing their power as “an essential local component of the structure” of its own authority (Alavi, n.d.: 8), it strengthened their hold on the peasantry. Accordingly, much like the Great Reform Act in Britain allowed the English aristocracy “to create ‘communities of deference’ within municipal electorates,” British policies also allowed Indian landlords to “reproduce their power and blunt the decision of the revenue courts” even after the implementation of the “radical rent theory allegedly enforced on behalf of a prosperous yeomanry” (Bayly, 1989:236-37). As a result, they were able to “carry on living a parasitic life on the toils of the disintegrating peasantry” (Mukherjee, 1974: 332) in addition to acquiring access to virtual “vote banks” (Bailey, 1963) when electoral politics was extended to the rural areas as peasants had few options but to follow their political lead. Assured a safe passage in turbulent times, the landed class, for the most part, became the surest prop of imperial rule, content to play “second fiddle” to the Raj and provide it a “breakwaters in the storm” (Sarkar, 1989:64). This it did, among other things, by decrying the introduction of representative institutions, demands for which originated from the official class. The British perpetuated these differences by freeing vari-

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ous classes and groups from one another’s support by allocating them fixed seats in and separate representation on various councils.6 There was a method in the seeming madness of a state, itself a symbol of British middle class ascendancy, in underwriting the landlords’ power and thereby what some Marxists term a phase of “secondary feudalism” in India. First, in the Physiocratic tradition, the British continued to view land as the source of wealth and expended their energies while in India extracting the surplus from it. Revenue collection was easier and more efficient if they had to deal with "a few thousand landlords than [a] legion of small peasant proprietors” (Desai, 1966: 39). Second, until the 1920s, India’s prime economic attraction for Britain lay in its being a source of raw materials and a market for its finished goods. To that end, the colonial state adopted policies impeding its industrial development. Local capital, therefore, tended to find an outlet not in industry but in agriculture. (However, as Chatterjee [1986b: 175] argues, this does not mean that there was a thorough “capitalist reorganization of agricultural production.”) India’s vast dimensions and the modest strength by comparison of the “handful of English merchants” also obliged reliance on local allies (Roy, 1971: 153). An advantage of the Settlement, as Governor-General Bentinck noted, was that it created “a vast body of rich landed proprietors who are deeply interested in the continuation of British Dominion” and who, because of their “complete command” over the people, could protect British interests against “popular tumult or revolution”7 (in Alavi, n.d.: 8). (According to Majeed [1992: 5] English fears of revolt were inspired by the French Revolution that seemed “to threaten the European social order as a whole.”) With the advent in the late nineteenth century of an educated strata interested in a share in power, the state’s need for support from a conservative landlord class increased even more. The introduction of private property in agriculture also did not seem nefarious from the British point of view as it was a part of their own social structure by now. In fact, they felt that without “fixed laws or enforceable rights to property, the slightest accumulation of wealth through agricultural improvement would lead to instant spoliation” (Marshall, 1990: 57). The Settlement—their “attempt to apply the English Whig philosophy of government to India”—was meant partly to limit even the state’s power by fixing the land revenue in perpetuity (Stokes, 1959:5). It also coincided with English “agrarian patriotism [that was] based on a faith in agrarian improvement and attempted to integrate great landowners, yeomen farmers, and the professional classes in a moral community” (Majeed, 1992: 30). Finally, the role of the landed class in England’s bourgeois revolution and the British belief that this class was “stronger and wiser than others” (Maine in Callender, 1987:

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282) encouraged them to assume that their policies in India would also stimulate the growth of a similar class with the “aristocratic wisdom, strength and imagination” to regenerate Indian society (Callender, 282). However, while a combination of reasons encouraged the state to support the landlords, ironically the very logic of some of its own policies began to undermine them in some provinces (like the U.P.) after the 1920s. By demolishing forts and assuming responsibility for military and security forces and land revenue assessment, and by establishing courts to adjudicate disputes, the state took away from the landlords some of the "essentially ‘royal’ functions [they had been accustomed to discharge] as ‘little kings.’” It also failed to give them "a new functional position of importance by which their local pre-eminence might be maintained.”8 However, this was not true across the board. In those province that the British considered strategically vital, like the Muslim province of the Punjab, the colonial army’s recruiting ground (and the eventual heartland of Pakistan), they propped up landlordism through “additional economic resources” at a time when this class was "receding in importance in other parts of South Asia” (Ali, 1988:78). (See also Chapter 5 on the Punjab.) While such policies helped to keep the dominant Muslim classes in India "overwhelmingly feudal, landed," (Smith, 1946; Gankovsky and Gordon-Polonskaya, 1964) part of the reason for their social backwardness predated colonial rule. Thus, at the time of their conquest of India, the Muslims had not displaced the “already established, Hindu, classes engaged in trade and in the non-military” careers (Smith, 1946: 164). Nor had the latter converted to Islam. Yet, it was from their ranks that the Hindu bourgeoisie emerged. In part, the Muslims’ "lack of business experience” stemmed from the fact that during Mughal rule the “respectable families generally had government connections while business was in the hands of Hindu castemen.” The aristocracy’s extravagance, the Islamic “emphasis on brotherhood within the fold, and a cavalier attitude towards material wealth” also left little capital for investment (Buchanan, 1934:147-48). As such, while Muslims formed about a third of India’s population, they owned “less than a ninth of the total wealth; this share, moreover, stagnated in semi-feudal landholdings, without turning into modern capital” (Kosambi, 1975: 389). Trade and commerce remained a Hindu (and Parsi) monopoly, a trend that was exacerbated by the uneven development of capitalism in India.

The Colonial State and the “Middle” Classes The British were, of course, not the first foreign conquerors of India. In fact, it had been subjected over millennia to occupation by a string of

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foreign invaders ranging from the Golden Horde of the Mongol, Genghis Khan, to the legions of Alexander of Macedon and including among them Huns, Scythians, Afghans, Persians, Arabs and Turks. However, these incursions had neither destroyed the existing system of tribute extraction nor the 80,000 or so villages, the nucleus of India’s social and economic life. British rule, on the other hand, not only undermined these so-called “village republics”9 and the traditional division of labor on which they were based, but also fostered a new mode of production in India: capitalism. (While there were pockets of manufacturing and mercantile activity, merchant guilds and a money economy at the time of its intrusion, colonial rule foreclosed the prospects of independent development, occasioning instead a retarded and monopolistic10 form of capitalism that evolved under the regulatory eye of the colonial state [Das Gupta, 1970.]) According to B. B. Misra (1961: 69), it was the introduction of private property, a laissez-faire economy after 1833, modem education, and the rule of law under the Company which, by permitting a “free circulation of capital, productive enterprise, and a system of large-scale production on a joint-stock principle and method,” laid the groundwork for the introduction of capitalism in India. Bengal,11where the British were first to ingress, became the initial hub of Indian capitalism with local merchants serving as junior partners in British firms. It also became the home of the “bourgeois intelligentsia,”12 and the first locale of the “national” movement. In analyzing the political role of these classes, it is important to distinguish between the former who entered politics only after the 1920s and the latter who became the standard bearers of “bourgeois” values from the nineteenth century on. The Capitalists. Claude Markovits (1985) has traced the “rise and growth of an Indian business class” to the period between 1850 and 1930. It was Britain's outlay on infrastructure in the last decade of the Company’s rule (1850s) that provided the spark for local industrial development, he says. In fact, it was the colonial state’s investment in railways that laid the “foundation of capitalist enterprise” in India (Rungta, 1970:17). (This investment was fuelled by growing capital accumulation and a rise in wages in Britain and the unstable supply of American cotton in the 1840s that encouraged the English to try and develop Indian resources as an alternative.)13 However, it was only under the Raj (18581947) that a “steep and steady rise” in the country’s internal and external trade allowed its commercial classes to accumulate enough capital to venture into industrialization on their own (Markovits). Yet, British dominance in “most of the ‘modern’sector and a predominantly pre-capitalist agrarian structure,” (Markovits, 2) technological backwardness, racial prejudice (Bagchi, 1972) and restrictive fiscal and

The Colonial State TABLE 3.1

1750 1800 1830 1860 1880 1900 1913 1928 1938

55

Distribution of World Manufacturing Output 1750-1938 (% shares of o f total) India

China

Third World

24.5 19.7 17.6

32.8 33.3 29.8 19.7 12.5 6.2 3.6 3.4 3.1

73.0 67.7 60.5 36.6 20.9

8.6

2.8 1.7 1.4 1.9 2.4

11.0 7.5 7.2 7.2

Developed Countries 27.0 32.3 39.5 63.4 79.1 89.0 92.5 92.8 92.8

s o u r c e : Colin Simmons, “ ‘De-industrialization/ Industrialization and the Indian Economy, c. 1850-1947,” M odem Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985):600. Reprinted by permission of the author.

TABLE 3.2 1750 1800 1830 1860 1880 1900 1913 1928 1938

Comparative*1Per-capita Levels of Industrialization (index numbers) India

Japan

Developed Countries

7 6 6 3 2 1 2 3 4

7 7 7 7 9 12 20 30 51

8 8 11 16 24 35 55 71 81

aU.K. in 1900 = 100. s o u r c e : Colin Simmons, “ ‘De-industrialization/ Industrialization and the Indian Economy, c. 1850-1947,” M odem Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985):602. Reprinted by permission of the author.

monetary policies impeded the growth of Indian capital until the First World War (Antsey, 1931). In fact, such policies not only retarded India's industrial potential but actually resulted in a process of de-industrialization. Thus, Colin Simmons (1985: 599) notes that India’s share in the world’s total output declined from about a quarter in 1750 to under 10 per cent a century later, and less than three per cent by 1880 (see Table 3.1.). Comparing its experience to that of other countries (see Table 3.2) he argues that, unpalatable though the fact may be to many scholars, this decline cannot be accounted for without noting "the nature and effects of the imperial impact” (601). Equally importantly, this decline resulted not from the free play of market forces but the “relationship between town and country ... the agency of social classes, [the] political

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presence of the colonial state [as well as] the larger context of the world economy” (Chandavarkar, 1985: 637). However, by the end of World War I, a combination of “political, strategic and fiscal factors” obliged Britain to review its policies and permit light industrial development (Markovits, 1985:11). Following the Industrial Commission’s advice, the Raj introduced protective tariffs and, in 1924, subsidies for the Indian iron and steel industries. This relief, however, was short-lived. The measures were soon reversed partly because of the onset of the Depression and partly because of British unease at the rapid growth of Indian industry following the drop in foreign competition and the war boom. Hence, it clapped preferential tariffs on British goods and revalued the Indian rupee, measures that militated against the interests of local industrialists. In spite of these constraints, however, Indian capital was to grow briskly, specially during the inter-war years, and by 1947 India had a powerful bourgeois class, mainly Hindu in composition. This is because capitalism in India developed not only as an enclave economy, but also unevenly. Thus, in the three presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras, "the pattern, timing, and sources of capital and entrepreneurship varied considerably” (Kochanek, 1974:12). In the east, (Bengal) development was financed by European capital, while in the west (Bombay) it was financed mostly by the local (Hindu and Parsi). In the northwest, presently Pakistan,14 where the British were last to obtrude and where they supported landlordism, there was “little industry and hardly any bourgeoisie to speak of” (Alavi n.d.: 9). As a result, the Punjab and Sind remained "agrarian appendixes” of India while the Frontier and Baluchistan did not have even a literati at the time of Pakistan’s creation in 1947 (Gankovsky, 1971). As late as the 1940s, the top three business communities in India were non-Muslim, while of the top 57 companies, only one was owned by a Muslim.15 Due to calculated policies and unintended consequences, then, there was not much of a Muslim bourgeoisie in India. The Hindu bourgeoisie itself was neither a monolithic nor a homogenous class and its conflicting interests often dictated political agendas at odds with one another and the state. Politically, the most active were the industrialists whose relationship with the state was ambivalent. On the one hand, they had to compete with the British for “raw materials, labor and technicians, and to market [their] products” (Markovits, 1985: 9). On the other, they also profited from some of the state’s infrastructural policies. They tended, therefore, to remain “overwhelmingly loyalist till the 1920s—often for sound economic reasons” (Sarkar, 1989: 64) only being drawn into a rapprochement with the Congress under Gandhi’s ascendancy (Markovits, 1985).

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Bourgeois support for the party does not mean, however, that they were nationalists, or democrats.16 The call for “democracy” (and for freedom) came instead from the official class, the “irritating and troublesome baboos,”17 as the more supercilious Englishmen were prone to call them. The Official Class. A paradox of colonialism was the induction of “middle class ideas and institutions” into India without a “comparable development in its economy and social institutions” (Misra, 1961: 11). This created an oddity: the growth of a class “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and intellect,” as Thomas Macaulay had hoped, in a country that was still pre-capitalist and illiterate (in Misra, 11). It was, says Misra wryly, like putting the cart before the horse. Thus, even before Indian capitalism had matured, intellectuals of this group became its staunchest advocates as well as the first to “imagine” an Indian nation and to use party politics initially to make inroads into the colonial state, and in the 1940s, to challenge it. The rise of the official class as a distinct social group was tied not to “any major breakthrough in the production system,” but to the state’s policies and involved the “adjustment of precolonial literati and service groups with partial changes in the economy” (Ray, 1977:510). In particular, it was linked to the rapid dissemination of English education after the mid-nineteenth century. The decision to educate the Indians was taken only after a protracted debate between the Orientalists and the Anglicists. According to theorists, the early Orientalists in India were both racially and culturally tolerant. Thus, Ann Callender (1987:19-20) argues that the three sources of their ethos were "humility in response to an ancient and still largely uncomprehended civilization,” moderate aims for British rule and “experience of a permissive Georgian society where calls for political reform, religious revival and moral probity were as yet barely audible and rarely heeded.” Similarly, David Kopf (1969: 5) claims that these Orientalists were not nationalists “in the nineteenth-century Victorian sense.” Instead, they “were products of the 18th-century world of rationalism, classicism, and cosmopolitanism.” The source of their “historical and cultural relativism” was tolerance, and their credo was that “to rule effectively, one must love India”18 (21-22). They were, therefore, opposed to all ethnocentric impulses to “Westernize” it. The Anglicists’ ambitions for India, on the other hand, maintains Francis Hutchins (1967: viii), knew “literally no limit.” They hoped that in a generation or so, its “ ‘respectable classes’ would be Christian, English-speaking, free of idolatry, and actively engaged in the government of their country.” By the 1830s, the Anglicists’ had triumphed and the British were free to create, in

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Macaulay’s memorably execrable phrase, a class that would be Indian only “in blood and colour.” While many Englishmen believed that “education in a native inevitably destroyed his better qualities, fostering cunning and cowardice” (Cronin, 1989: 10), others viewed it as the “best means of overcoming class and political conflict, by diffusing a cohesive ideology throughout the polity” (Majeed, 1992:70). Some assumed that it would transform its “recipients into loyal subjects” (Pandey, 1969: 14) by depositing “Western values into the souls of the educated” (Guha, 1988a: 25). The Evangelicals, on the other hand, hoped it would induce them to become good Christians, “thereby strengthen [ing] the foundation of the empire” (Pandey, 1969). Meanwhile, the foundation of the Company, threatened by its “parlous financial position,” also obliged reliance on educated but poorly paid Indians to staff lower-rung administrative posts (Bayly, 1989:245). Not everyone was pleased at the nominal “encouragement” this gave to the locals and, as Viceroy Lytton scathingly put it, did not mean that Britain was ready to sanction “the supremacy of Baboodom” (in Pandey, 1969: 20). Similarly, Viceroy Curzon, palpably unnerved by the inroads being made by the educated strata into the colonial order, warned that the “superior wits of the native pose an extreme danger to the 900 and odd higher posts that were meant, and ought to have been exclusively... reserved, for Europeans.” In fact, he viewed this issue as “the greatest peril with which our administration is confronted” (in Pandey, 1969:10). While he desisted from stipulating a racial criterion for service because of the outrage such a measure was expected to elicit, the "whole aim of the education commission (he) appointed was to make education more expensive and less attainable” by Indians (O’Donnell, 1979:47). The emergence of an educated class inclined to take seriously Western theories about liberty, democracy and nationalism also created problems of a different sort for the British in time. English language facilities, some of them realized to their dismay, were being used to propagate “hostility to the established order [leading to a] diminution of respect for authority,” a trend that could not “be viewed with toleration, much less with favour” (in Philips et al., 1962:129-30). Hence, they tried belatedly to restrict English education by withholding grants from local institutions and securing from those receiving state funds, a pledge to forswear politics (Pandey, 1969). In spite of their exertions, however, by the late nineteenth century a politically aware educated strata had emerged, notably in Bengal. This group, however, tended to be Hindu. The Muslims, as Sufia Ahmed (1974) and Rafiuddin Ahmed (1981) have pointed out, remained outside the ambit of the cultural and political “modernization” associated with the “Bengal Renaissance.”19As a result,

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"nationalist” discourse was dominated from the outset by Bengali Hindu intellectuals; the Muslims only appeared on the all-India scene as a viable political group half a century later.

The Colonial State and the Subaltern Classes In addition to facilitating the emergence of a property-owning landlord and a middle class, colonial rule also induced the growth of a working class that remained quite small because of the constricted nature of capitalist development in India, as well as engendering greater differentiation amongst the peasantry. The state’s relationship with the subaltern classes was characterized on the one hand by its attempts to provide them periodic relief, specially in the wake of social unrest. For the workers, this entailed regulating the length of the working day as well as establishing procedures for conflict resolution, etc. For the peasants, it involved a redefinition of occupancy rights so as to protect the small peasants from the effects of land alienation and high indebtedness.20 The British district officer (that indispensable cog in the colonial leviathan) charged with the duty of dispensing punitive justice over the heads of the remote sarkar or government, and the proximate zamindars, also tried to assume the role of a rural Solomon, or mother-and-father, as the peasants picturesquely referred to him, specially before the 1850s. (After that period, says Callender [1987: 211], aloofness from Indian life became normal. The “philosophical” district officers were replaced by “public school men, uncurious about India, their knowledge solely derived from Mill, many heavily influenced by Arnold towards ‘muscular Christianity,’ [and] imbued—with few exceptions” with disdain for the Indians.) At the same time, the state also sought to control subaltern class unrest through draconian laws, arrests and even torture. British officials who had poetically claimed that their eye had always rested upon “the real people of India, [the] Indian poor, the Indian peasant, the patient, humble, silent millions [whom] even the eyes of their countrymen, too often forget” (Curzon in Choudhary, 1971: 6) seem to have felt no qualms when crushing their rebellions. In fact, whereas during the earlier years of their rule, they showed some “paternalism” by holding inquiries into the causes of agrarian unrest and adopting “legislation in the interests of the peasantry,” as the latter’s interests began to coalesce with those of the nationalists in the Congress in the 1920s, “ideological domination was increasingly replaced by physical domination; landlord associations were organised to counter the now well-knit Kisan Sabha and other peasant bodies” (Singh, 1984:10). Yet, in the end, neither reform nor repression could avert the outbreak of systematic turmoil, spe-

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dally after the 1930s, because of the ravages of excessive tribute extraction by Britain and the effects of the Depression. (It was the ability of the Hindu elite in the Congress to harness this discontent in the service of “Indian” nationalism that allowed it to struggle for Britain’s ouster from India.) To the extent that colonial rule was marked by periodic subaltern class unrest, specially peasant insurgency, it is tempting to accept Guha’s (1989) depiction of it as having been non-hegemonic. Clearly, in so far as the ability of a colonial state to exercise the sort of ethical leadership envisaged by Gramsci over a people it had colonized was restricted, its hegemony was likely to be thin. Also, by leaving intact a large peasantry, colonial rule limited the scope of bourgeois hegemony not only of the English but also of the Indian variety since, according to Chatterjee (1988a: 388), the latter requires the peasantry’s dissolution as a form of productive labor and thereby the “extinction of [the] communal mode of power” on which peasant societies are based. However, in so far as the majority of subaltern class movements (and even the national struggle until its Gandhian phase), sought only to reform certain aspects of the existing order rather than to replace it (Arnold, 1980), and in so far as these attempts remained largely confined within the ideological perimeters established by colonial rule,21 they may be taken as an indication of the hegemony not only of the colonial state but also of the dominant classes whose power the state undertook to protect in its own interests. In effect, the subaltern classes may have been subjected to a double hegemony. (The fact that this hegemony was partial or precarious, or that its effects were negative, or that the peasants bought into it because of the contradictions in their own common sense rather than its intrinsic moral worth does not mean it was non-existent.) Second, to depict colonial rule as non-hegemonic (or hegemonic, for that matter) would be to reduce both the concept of hegemony and British rule to static phenomena. However, if hegemony is perceived along the lines suggested in Chapter 2, and if one bears in mind that neither British attitudes nor their rule were “a monolithic orthodoxy,” as Hutchins (1967: xii) says, then it becomes possible to distinguish between its hegemonic and non-hegemonic aspects during the course of its two hundred year history. The Raj, as I argue below, was based not only on force but also on collaboration. This is why the British were able not only to remain in India, more or less physically unscathed, for a longue duree, but to depart its shores with some goodwill to boot. Part of the reason for the latter lies in the nature of their relationship with India’s elites. Below I discuss the implications of this relationship for nationalism and communalism on the one hand and the question of Indian representation, or “democracy,” on the other.

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Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communalism Depending on their interpretation of the concept, theorists trace the genesis of Indian nationalism to various periods in history. Some, including the postcolonial Indian state, claim that there was an existing national unity in precolonial times created by the fourth-century Hindu Gupta dynasty. However, as Kosambi (1975: 313) so inimitably puts it, “far from the Guptas reviving nationalism, it was nationalism that revived the Guptas.” Niharranjan Ray (1973:11-12) also disputes the claim that there was a national consciousness in precolonial India. The political and economic conditions that encouraged the rise of secular nationalism in Europe, he says, were missing in precolonial times. While there was a “general consciousness of a sort of geographical and cultural unity” during this period, it was only after the British advent that nationalism began to connote “more than mere indigenous empire-building of a sort.” In other words, it was a "direct outcome” of the changes induced by colonial rule. To speak of “nation, nationhood and nationalism in a predominantly rural-agricultural, precapitalist economy [he argues], is to deny the entire process of history as known to us today.” Adherence to this viewpoint has not, however, produced agreement on when nationalist consciousness emerged in the colonial period. (On this point, see also Chapter 4.) Thus nationalist historians trace it to the 1857 Revolt22 which they depict as a national war of independence. However, Jim Masselos (1985) claims that while it was characterized by antagonism to foreign rule typical of any national movement, not only was it a somewhat haphazard affair, but it did not reflect any signs of real political unity. To the British and their chroniclers, of course, the Revolt was only a “Sepoy Mutiny” since it was instigated by some army units angered by specific British policies and was only later joined by a crosssection of society hostile to their rule. Orthodox Marxists, on the other hand, view it merely as a last-ditch attempt on the “feudal” elite’s part to halt the regenerative processes unleashed by colonization. Another commonly held view of Indian nationalism traces its genesis to the Orientalists’ attempts to educate the British. The former, it may be recalled, were enthused by the prospect of exploring "the sciences and the arts of Asia, with the hope of facilitating ameliorations there and advancing knowledge and improving the arts at home” (Pargiter in Said, 1979:79). Hence, the purpose of the College of Fort William23 that they founded in Calcutta was to teach Englishmen how “to learn to think and act like an Asian” (Kopf, 1969:18). To this end, the college undertook to teach Indian history and civilization in Bengali (with help from Hindu literati) in addition to publishing textbooks and newspapers in that vernacular as well. In the process, says P.J. Marshall (1990: 47), “India was

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mapped and described. Indians were provided with their ‘history,’... that is they were given their place both in the past and in the present.”24 Ironically, it was the Hindu elite that came to embrace the tenets of Orientalism “whereas the British civil servants for whom it was originally designed, did not” (Kopf, 224). Initially, says Marshall (50), the British were more interested in the “history of Islam in India” because of their knowledge of Arabic and Persian, languages patronized by the Muslims. However, by the late eighteenth century, an “eager public was given what appeared to be the first authoritative work on Hindu India to emerge from Britain’s involvement in Bengal.” At the heart of this “authoritative work,” as well as of Orientalist historiography in general, were three motifs: first, that medieval Indian history was a golden age of Hindu civilization, second, that Muslim rule had oppressed the Hindus, and, finally that Hinduism itself was a monolithic religion, themes which, in concert, helped to sharpen “nationalist” sentiments among the Hindus. To the Orientalists, India’s history was a history of “the Hindu nation,” and in its medieval period they found a golden age of Hindu civilization. The works of H.H. Wilson, in particular, not only linked existing Hindu traditions with their “historically authenticated pristine form” but uncovered in the “content of ‘Hindu’ civilization ... a series of golden epochs that infused the newly born cultural consciousness with a regional pride.” Knowledge of this golden age was important, says Kopf (1969: 177; 284), since it would provide the impetus for a new sense of community. It is unlikely that nationalism would have emerged "without a sense of community, the sense of community without a collective feeling of self-respect, and self-respect without the stimulus of a rediscovered golden age.” In addition to imbuing them with a new sense of community, Orientalism also shaped the Hindu intellectuals’ response to their own “absolute past of the Purana” whose demolition they eventually undertook to accomplish through history as well. Thus, it was historiography that was “assimilated to nationalism” since the first three local works to appear in Bengali were all histories, preceding the novel by six decades, exalting the idea of a Hindu community and Bengali itself (Guha, 1988a: 31-34). As Guha (58) says, the use of the language as an official medium of instruction along with the “multiplier effects of a liberal education in increasing the appetite for historical literature and of Orientalism in enhancing the value of the indigenous past” generated a new faith in its creativity so that by the 1840s, feelings about the “mother-language [had] gelled into an ideology” (36:41). However, not only did "languageconsciousness” become a substitute for “self-consciousness,” but since it was from the British that Bengali intellectuals had learnt to rethink

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their past, nationalist historiography was silent on the “fundamental question of power—the question of Britain’s right to rule India” (51). This is why, says Guha (46-48), “the autonomy of historiography was not only a question of language. It was also a question of power.” If the nationalists were quiet on Britain's right to rule India, they were less reticent on the effects of Muslim rule in India, which, following the Orientalists, they depicted as tyrannical and unprogressive. Thus, in their renditions of India’s history, the Orientalists had ascribed its backwardness to Muslim rule from which, by implication, their own had3 been a deliverance. Despotism had been “the consequence of Islamic conquest. Hindus had met oppression by a passive resistance of immobility [thereby becoming] a living museum of the early civilisations of the world” (Marshall, 1990: 59). The tendency to “identify India with Hinduism” and to portray the Muslims as intruders was also widespread among “most of the young men under Colebrooke and Carey,” two noted Orientalists in India, says Kopf (1969: 103). In fact, according to him (162), the latter’s struggle on behalf of Bengali and Sanskrit against the Persian and Hindustani groups at Ft. William College marked "the beginnings of Hindu-Muslim rivalry in microcosm but without Hindu and Muslim participants.” (This rivalry would also be nurtured at the Muslim University of Aligarh where one of the principals, Thomas W. Arnold, and other men on the teaching staff were also Orientalists.)25 Finally, the Orientalists contributed to a growing sense of Hindu identity by trying to reconstruct Hinduism itself. One of the first tasks they undertook was to consolidate a vast anthology “of myths, beliefs, rituals and laws into a coherent religion and of shaping an amorphous heritage into a rational faith known now as ‘Hinduism’” (Kopf in Tharpar, 1989: 229). In this context, Romila Thapar (1989:210-15) argues that in precolonial times there was no “well-defined and historically evolved religion [called Hinduism nor] an equally clearly defined Hindu community.” Instead, Hinduism had been “projected largely in terms of its philosophical ideas, iconology and rituals.” It comprised multiple sects reflecting a "multiplicity of beliefs.” Nor are ideas of a Hindu community of as long a lineage as is often thought, she argues. This does not mean that notions of community were absent; however, there were “multiple communities identified by locality, language, caste, occupation and sect.” As such, identities also tended to be segmented (222). For instance, even the Muslim invasion of India was not perceived by its people as a “Muslim” invasion; instead, they tended to refer to the “new arrivals” in ethnic (Ttirks), cultural (mleccha) (unclean), or geographic (Yavana) terms. Similarly, Muslims regarded the inhabitants of India as “Hindu.” It was not, therefore, a case of two monolithic religions confronting one another, as the Orientalists held.

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It was not only the Orientalists’ labors on behalf of Hinduism and their antipathy towards Islam that contributed to a specific awareness of being Hindu or Muslim, but also the Evangelicals’ attacks on both. While the early British officials had followed a policy of non-interference in local customs and religions, the growth of Evangelism in Britain persuaded many to take up as their mission aggressive proselytizing in India. In this crusade they were able to enlist the Company’s help by having a “pious clause” included in its charter obliging it to fund their activities in India. The ensuing Christian-Hindu-Muslim encounter presently motivated a defense on behalf of Hinduism and Islam that helped to promote feelings of religious unity on the one hand, and defensiveness on the other as both Hindu and Muslim “reformers” struggled to bring the two religions into conformity with Western notions of rationality and in some cases, even the West’s ideas of sexual propriety! Thus, Ashis Nandy (1983:52) argues that the colonial culture’s emphasis on hypermasculinity and devaluation of femininity and androgyny resulting from the British “denial of psychological bisexuality in men” led Hindu intellectuals like Chatterjee to recast the god Krishna himself in more masculine terms. His Krishna, says Nandy (23-24), “was not the soft, childlike, self-contradictory, sometimes immoral” god he was usually portrayed as being, but a “respectable, righteous, didactic, ‘hard’ god, [who would not] humiliate his devotees in front of the progressive Westerners.” If the colonial culture’s reordering of sexual categories magnified fears about their own latent androgyny among Hindus and Sikhs—finding cathartic release in their taunting one another “with being effeminate” (Metcalf, 1992: 239)—its view of Islam, at once irrational and militant, bred among some Muslims an “apologetic psychology” (Nadvi, 1987) reflected in their attempts to expurgate the religion of its supposedly irrational aspects through modernist exegesis. Amongst others, however, the encounter with Christianity motivated a more orthodox and militant reaction manifested in the outbreak of various anti-British movements during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Hardy, 1972; Haq, 1970; Nadvi, 1987; Nizami, 1969). The turn to orthodoxy also manifested itself in the exertions of Muslims and Hindus to cleanse their religions of the mutual syncretism resulting from their centuries-long association in India. Alongside “modernizing” reformers, therefore, there also cropped up orthodox Hindu and Muslim groups dedicated to reconverting former adherents and expurgating their religion of the other’s “creeping” influences. In both cases the ambitions that permeated these attempts to interpret or reinterpret, as the case may have been, Hinduism and Islam, only served to intensify feelings of religious particularism.

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Finally, it was the Anglicists’ “emphasis on the need to assimilate completely to an alien culture” and their resolve to reconstruct Indian society along Western lines which provoked Westernized Hindu intellectuals like Rammohun Roy, Chatterjee, Vidyasagar, the Tagores and Saraswati, to repudiate rationalism in favor of a return to religious values (Kopf, 1969:262). (As Mookerjee [1976] notes, all of them were overtly Hindu in their orientation.) The symbiosis between national and communal identities resulted, then, partly from the consciousness of belonging to a “nation” on the one hand, and to reformed and united Hindu and Muslim communities on the other, as Irfan Habib (n.d.: 30) argues. Awareness of being “Indian,” he says, was attended by a new appreciation of what it meant to be Hindu or Muslim, an appreciation that would eventually fuel antipodal constructions of “the nation” by the intellectuals of the two communities. Partly, however, the tendency of Hindu and Muslim intellectuals to view nationalism “not as an alternative principle of social cohesion but as one that co-existed with and depended upon traditional social cohesive units,” like religious communities can be ascribed to the fact that colonialism not only failed to effect a “modernizing” economic transformation of India but in many cases helped to energize its “traditional social units.” The inability of Indian intellectuals to “see communal consciousness and nationalism as binary categories,” (Chandra, 1981:179180) then, also had to do with the premodern nature of the Indian social formation since “traditional” ideologies are the typical accompaniments of premodern social structures. This is why religiosity and sectarian strife were also common in feudal Europe and other precapitalist societies. The difference, however, is that as Gyan Pandey (1983:63) points out, theorists do not refer to this fact as “communalism.” Instead, they reserve the term "for the analysis of Indian society in the colonial period and then [read it back] as a quality that must have existed in the subcontinent long before this.” How far Hindus and Muslims were aware of their religious identities and to what extent communalism existed in precolonial India has been widely debated. Peter Hardy (1982: 8), for instance, claims that “British Indian” Muslims tended to be “census Muslims,” that is Muslims by profession only, implicitly denying them such an awareness. Similarly, Bayly (1985) argues that it was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (during colonial rule) that a growing realization of being Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh began to emerge. Nevertheless, at the popular level the practice of Hinduism and Islam continued to be “syncretic,” he says. However, while the latter fact may be true, to regard it as evidence of the lack of religious awareness in precolonial India may be misleading.

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First, what seems to have been significant in the definition of Muslim and Hindu identities was not the purity of their practice, but an awareness of difference. In this context N. Ahmad (1992: 49) argues that even though at an interactional level Islam and Hinduism were marked by intercommunal practices, at the ideological they remained antithetical to one another because of which “no movement for a synthesis was ever successful.” The Muslims never abandoned their religious observances, while the Hindus, despite having adopted Muslim dress, mannerisms and language did not repudiate their Hinduism (Robinson in Ahmad, 1992: 50). Second, while it acquired a specific form only under British rule, religious strife antedated it, with hostility sometimes emanating from the Hindus (as Wolf [1982] notes, the Marhatta challenge to the Mughals was not only a political but also a religious one) and sometimes from the Muslim monarchs themselves. Finally, as S.H. Nadvi (1987) points out, various ulema (plural of alim or knowledgeable) had challenged heretical movements during Mughal rule including the Emperor Akbar’s endeavors to try and synthesize Islam and Hinduism through his Din-e-Ilahi, attesting to significant religious awareness. (Incidentally, Akbar’s exploits also led to the desecration of his tomb by militant Hindus outraged by his matrimonial alliances with Hindu Rajput women.) None of this is to suggest, of course, that there were also not significant secular tendencies at work during the precolonial period (see Hasan, 1986) or that communalism did not acquire an institutionalized form during colonial rule. On the contrary, as Sandria Freitag (1989:61) says, the British, by using the “labels ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ in their institutional structures in ways that belied the Indian reality behind the terminology,” and by creating “through administrative fiat a set of circumstances that encouraged for state purposes the establishment of identity by religion” institutionalized religious divisions. With the passage of time as “groups received rewards or penalties by virtue of their supposed identities the labels came to possess a persistent institutional reality they had lacked earlier.” (It was also new "conceptions of statecommunity relations, and alternative symbolic expressions of restructured urban relations” she says [85] that provided the context for the rise of communalism in some areas.) In this context, Farzana Shaikh (1989: 74) has traced the institutionalization of religious identities (specially of the Muslims’) to the British view of representation. While they were interested in securing “a ‘representative’ assembly that could accurately reflect the society of which it was a part,” she says, being an Indian was not adequate since the very idea “was subject to question in so diverse a society. What was essential was to demonstrate a given connection between representative and represented that rested upon a set of shared social, cultural, religious or ra-

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cial affinities.” It was the attempt to establish this “given connection” that led at least the Muslims to define themselves as a discrete community. (See also Chapter 5.) A less sophisticated variant on these themes is the theory that blames communalism on the British policies of divide and rule which it says set off a struggle for office between the Hindu and Muslim elites. This view, however, ignores the fact that such a struggle commenced only in the late nineteenth century when Indians first began to be nominated to the councils (see below) whereas communal tensions preceded this rivalry. It also fails to explain why divide and rule proved so easy. For, if it is true as Freire (1971:138) says, it is only when people are alienated that it is easy to “divide them and keep them divided,” then the historical roots of alienation seem to have predated colonial rule and may have been located in the Mughal period itself. Mughal rule, argue scholars, not only displaced Hindus from power, but also reduced them to vassals, “owing a material and moral allegiance to the paramount power.”26 Moreover, while the Mughals were able to centralize Indian territory, they were unable to construct a nation because, as Roy (1971: 174) argues, their “feudal imperialism” was based not on the backing of a “loyal native nobility [or] native feudal chiefs grown out of the people, but by nobles sent from the courts of the foreign emperors.” Power, too, was maintained not by indigenous groups but by a mercenary army. If for the Hindus a sense of alienation may have derived from the nature of Mughal rule, there are few indications that Muslims felt completely at ease during it, in spite of their privileges as India’s rulers. As Ali Imam’s (in Al-Mujahid, 1990: 327) speech in 1908 indicates, their estrangement seems to have resulted from the fact that on Indian soil, Islam met in its “world-wide career of conquest and conversion” with a resistance which had little of the admirable military prowess of the Hindus. What Hindu chivalry was powerless to protect, Hindu ethics, Hindu philosophy and [the] Hindu social system had made impregnable. Centuries rolled by but the conqueror and the conquered in point of nationality, character and creed suffered not from their political association.

This restricted association appears to have resulted, on the one hand, from the Hindus’ ability to ensure their survival by refusing to be “psychologically swamped, co-opted or penetrated” (Nandy, 1983: 110-11) and, on the other, from the Mughal elite’s failure to enlarge their class sphere, as well as their having left intact institutions in civil society that, by providing alternative sources of political loyalty, prevented allegiance

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to the Mughal state27 thus reducing it to a mechanical bloc of social groups with limited appeal and legitimacy. However, in this context, it should be noted that in spite of their insularity, the Hindus did succumb to many aspects of British rule which was also not grown out of the people, and that the British middle class (no less a closed caste than the Mughal elite had been, at least as far as the Indians were concerned) was nonetheless able to assimilate local intellectuals—if not all of society—to its own ideology. This difference can be ascribed to the partly hegemonic nature of the colonial state with whom local groups came to identify (as I argue in Chapters 4 and 5) as well as to the ability of the colonial culture to engender the displacements by virtue of which the British came to be viewed as “India’s” benefactors, and the Muslims as its enemies as Nandy (1983) maintains. However, while it was the colonial culture that enabled these displacements to take place, the relative ease with which they occurred points to deeper roots of alienation between Hindus and Muslims, as noted above. Second, Nandy’s claim only makes sense to the extent that one is willing to acknowledge the (partly) hegemonic nature of the colonial culture. A feature of such a culture as noted in Chapter 2 is the “tendency of public discourse to make some forms of experience readily available to consciousness while ignoring or suppressing others” (Lears, 1990: 577). Colonial rule, as argued above, not only appropriated depictions of India’s past, but also brought into consciousness only some of its features (like the negative nature of Muslim rule) thereby leading the Hindus to regard the Muslims as their enemies. Finally, while colonial rule allowed the Hindus to displace their hostilities against the British by assuming, unselfconsciously for the most part, the role of sub-oppressors towards the Muslims—a role they played not only through their “national” discourses, but also through their access to political and economic power which, relative to that of the Muslims, was greater—for the latter it allowed few avenues for similar displacement. In fact, the object of their anger became the British who, by ousting them from rulership not only severed the connection between their exercise of power and their notions of religious solidarity contingent upon its exercise, but also opened up the issue of their status in India to dispute (Shaikh, 1989). It was not only among Hindu and Muslim intellectuals that colonial rule helped to foster religious solidarity on the one hand and separatism on the other, but also among the subaltern classes and in the rural areas (Pandey, 1983). Thus by preserving peasant communities, colonial rule also helped to perpetuate the hold of religious ideologies since peasant consciousness tends to be religious and communal. Finally, not only did the state allow Christian missionary activities but it also enforced Hindu

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law in “large areas of society which had not known it before or which, for a very long period, had possessed their own more localized and nonscriptural customs” (Washbrook, 1981: 653). Similarly, it bolstered the Muslim clergy in the Punjab in an effort to underwrite its own legitimacy, as noted in Chapter 5. In addition to engendering communal tensions, British policies—specially the conflict between the Orientalists’desire to “educate Europeans in the languages and cultures of the East" and the Anglicists’ to educate “Asiatics in the sciences of the West”—also induced a crisis of identity among the intelligentsia. “In existential terms [it shifted] its commitment from the Indian heritage to British culture, without a physical shift from India to England,” something that “could only have disastrous psychological repercussions” (Kopf, 1969: 263; 241). According to Nandy (1983: xi) this shift signified the generalization of the West from a “geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category.” As a result, the West was “now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds.” It was nothing less than colonizing the mind, Nandy says, and to the extent that the Indians’ minds were colonized, it resulted in the loss of their very selfhood. The British, too, did not escape unharmed since adherence to notions of hypermasculinity brought into focus by colonialism helped to make prominent the “least tender and humane” aspects of their own culture. By opening up “alternative channels of social mobility in the colonies and underwriting nationalist sentiments through colonial wars of expansion,” colonialism also generated a “false sense of cultural homogeneity” that paralyzed social consciousness and hampered a critique of British society. Finally, by encouraging the British “to impute to themselves magical feelings of omnipotence and permanence,” colonialism induced a damaging array of pathologies (Nandy, 33-35). Far from being “conspiratorial dedicated” oppressors, then, Nandy (xv) views the British as self-destructive co-victims “with a reified life style and a parochial culture, caught in the hinges of history” that they were disposed to swear by. Politically, too, colonialism affected British society in detrimental ways. As Tom Nairn (1977:21-22) notes, a regime so deeply preoccupied with overseas exploitation needed "conservative stability at home. It demanded a reliable, respectful hierarchy of social estates, a societal pyramid to act as the basis for the operation of the patrician elite.” Consequently, the modern liberal-constitutional state never itself became modern: it retained the archaic stamp of its priority. Later the industrialization which it pro-

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duced, equally pioneering and world-wide in impact, never made England into a genuinely industrialized society.

As a result, Britain did not outgrow its conservatism nor did British nationalism learn “the key, populist notion informing most real nationalisms: the idea of the virtuous power of popular protest and action.” While British nationalism was effectively “mobilized for external war” every incident only intensified its conservatism (42). At no point was British nationalism and conservatism so successfully mobilized as for India’s colonization. In spite of a “superficial appearance of indifference to the Empire,” (Dutt, 1953:19) by the "turn of the twentieth century, it meant for an average (and a not-so-average)28 Englishman, with moderate income and modest intelligence,” nothing less than “a fundamental faith,” claims Suhash Chakravarty (1989: 2). The Raj, he says, was celebrated in the biscuit tins, chronicled in the cigarette cards, reflected in the music halls, ‘that very stuff of social history;’ advertised in cinema, radio and the press; researched in the imperial institutes; popularized by imperial societies (1989:230).

In India, its celebration acquired somewhat less innocent forms as the British embarked, after 1857, on an ambitious scheme of social engineering: defining what it meant to be Indian. Thus, Bernard Cohn (1983: 183) notes that after the Revolt, the British began increasingly to specify what was Indian in an official and ‘objective’sense. Indians had to look like Indians: before 1860 Indian soldiers as well as their European officers wore western-style uniforms; now the dress uniforms of Indians and English included turbans, sashes and tunics thought to be Mughal or Indian.

This emphasis on creating a new “British Indian” identity and tradition resulted not only from their desire to gain legitimacy as the natural heirs of the Mughals (Cohn, 195), but also from changes in the “public image of the British monarchy,” between the late nineteenth century and World War I, as “its ritual, hitherto inept, private and of limited appeal, became splendid, public and popular.” From 1877, when Disraeli made Victoria empress of India, and 1897, when loseph Chamberlain brought the colonial premiers and troops to parade in the Diamond lubilee procession, every great royal occasion was also an imperial occasion (Cannadine, 1983:120-25; his emphasis).

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However, whether these royal events reflecting in part “a novel consciousness of formal imperial possession, were an expression of national self-confidence or of doubt is n o t... clear,” says Cannadine. What is clear, however, is that India’s colonization underwrote not only Indian nationalism, but the British as well, something that in characteristic colonial fashion, the English were never to admit. Not only that, but India would become too mixed up with “England’s national pride and prosperity for English writers to be able to give a full, judicious, and unbiased account” of its history henceforth (Moon, 1984:10).

The Colonial State and Democracy English rule in India should be judged, says Philip Woodruff (1953:16), "not by the nasty little atavistic impulses that came wriggling up from the subconscious” of solitary Englishmen but “by the conscious will of England expressed in Parliament.” Following his counsel, I focus on the actual nature and outcome of constitutional reform legislated by Parliament. This reform is important not only because it provided the framework for "democracy,” but also because, “from first to last, the activities of the all-India political associations were closely connected with the constitutional arrangements of the Raj” (Tomlinson, 1979: 2). Accordingly, I review its history below, noting how changes in Britain’s politicaleconomy over the course of two hundred years impacted on it. The English entered India as powerless merchants of the East India Company in 1600; they departed its shores in 1947, an enervated imperial power. During this period, they ruled it for only two centuries. Their authority was divided equally between the tenure of the Company and the Crown, each enjoying almost a hundred years of rule—the first from the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the Revolt of 1857; the latter from 1857 to India’s division in 1947. However, whereas the Company’s illusions of grandeur were restricted to claiming the title Bahadur, or valiant, Victoria became not only the Queen of England “by the Grace of God” but Kaiser-i-Hind by that of her loyal minions in India. These self-awarded appellations are more than empty accolades; as the following analysis shows, they succinctly epitomize the differing visions of the Company and the Crown in India. In so far as the former’s rule tallied with the mercantilist period and the latter’s with the ascent and decay of the pax Britannica, the passage of control from the Company to the Crown was also an important watershed in British policies in India. An analysis of political reform, then, must distinguish between both. However, prior to doing that, it is necessary to specify the differences between “British India,” annexed by the Crown in 1858, and “Princely” India, under the rule of sovereign princes since the breakdown of Mughal power, which en-

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tered into a special relationship with the latter since the “basis and form of government [in the two] were quite different” (Coupland, 1944: 7).

Indian (“Princely”) India Indian India, consisting of about 565 princely states dispersed randomly through the subcontinent, covering between two-fifths to half of its total area and with around a fourth of its population, became the bastion of feudal and despotic rule as the British Crown undertook to vouchsafe its chiefs continuing control and freedom from interference in exchange for their acceptance of its own “paramountcy.” The ensuing relationship between Britain and the states, so unique as to be without a “parallel within the British Empire or elsewhere” was formalized in a series of sanads between them29 (Coupland, 1944: 13). These agreements differed from state to state, depending on its value to Britain. For the smaller ones, they only recognized landlords’ rights; in the larger, they were of a more “bilateral character.” In exchange for Britain’s promises to reduce his enemies to subjection (at his own expense, naturally), a prince accepted its “suzerainty,” yielded control of his relations with other princes to the “Paramount Power,” agreed to defend India military and to collaborate with Britain on other matters (Coupland, 14). In so far as the government of the states was autocratic, it did not “differ in principle from the government of British India before 1919” says Coupland (15). (It was not until that year he alleges that the idea of governing India “other than in two watertight compartments was tentatively broached and not till 1930-35 that a real attempt was made to establish” India’s political unity. This claim, however, is not accurate as pointed out below.) Neither the British parliament nor a “British Indian” legislature had any writ in the states which carried on their own existence largely unaffected by changes in the rest of India. Rule through fiat, forced labor, slavery, the absence of civil rights and the imposition of huge taxes at will were some of the features of “Princely” India. The states were important to the British for various reasons. First, they knew that as long as they kept them up as “royal instruments but without political power” they could continue in India as long as their naval supremacy allowed (Canning in Dutt, 1949:409). “Checker-boarding all India” as they did, the states provided a “vast network of friendly fortresses in debatable territory.” As such, it “would be difficult for a general rebellion against the British to sweep India because of this network” (Rushbrook-Williams in Dutt, 1949:410). In addition to being bulwarks against threats from below, the princes were also ready to act as a counterpoise to threats from above, from “British India’s” official class, by advising against representative government and, when the demand

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for power-sharing could no longer be resisted by the Raj, by their willingness to oppose the former. This is why the 1935 Act gave them twofifths representation in the Upper House and one-third in the Lower allowing them both weightage (representation in excess of numbers) and a “veto over the emergence of a responsible central government.”30 Finally, the states were expected to afford “restless and ambitious Indians a useful field for the exercise of their talents which was denied to them in British India” (Moon, 1984:72). This snug pact between the princes and the Crown ended precipitously in 1947 when, realizing they had outlived their utility, Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy to India, repudiated the sanads. Under pressure from Jawaharlal Nehru—who feared “these Princely Ulsters”— he bulldozed the princes into joining India or Pakistan, violating Britain's guarantee of sovereignty to them.31

“British India” By the time the British were through with it, “British India”—comprising the rest of the country and around 300 million people—resembled a political-administrative pyramid atop which sat the British monarch aided by the British Parliament. However, it was the British secretary of state for India in London, assisted by a council, who was the real comptroller of Indian affairs. The Crown's envoy in India was a British governor-general (later viceroy) also aided by a council, British in composition until 1861. Beneath him were British governors (for smaller provinces, lieutenant governors or chief commissioners) who headed the 11 provinces. Next came the divisional commissioners and their deputies. The Raj came to rest with the 250 British district officers of “British India.”32 This division of authority between British officials in London and in India was jealously guarded by various secretaries of state who often warned the latter that the “risk of serious embarrassment would become much greater” if they failed to understand “the one great principle which from the beginning has underlaid the whole system." Namely, that the “final control and direction of the affairs of India rest with the Home Government, and not with the authorities ... in India itself” (in Philips et al., 1962:13). Friction between Whitehall and Delhi was to become a source of voluminous and caustic diatribes, specially on the issue of political reform which was dictated by conflicts between not only the colonial state and local classes but also the “mother” state and its “British Indian” progeny.

The Company and Constitutional Reform At the time of the Company’s advent into India, Britain’s interest in colonies was dictated primarily by its mercantilist interests. The mercantilist

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period, as Robert Gilpin (1977: 28-29) has noted, entailed conflict and establishing control on the “sources of treasures, markets, and raw materials” upon which economic and national security was seen to hinge. Interested in colonies for their commercial utility, the English merchants were content to trade with India under the protection of its Mughal emperors for over a century. It was only when Britain’s growing industrial needs in the eighteenth century required colonies to “specialise in the manufacture of raw materials and other goods that would not compete with the mother country” that an ideology justifying political control on the sources of raw materials began to emerge in Britain (Ambirajan, 1978:28). This ideology was propagated among others by political economists like Adam Smith who underscored the necessity for English merchants abroad to fortify their storages against "barbarous natives” (in Ambirajan, 28). By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain had begun to extend its territorial sovereignty in India by combining “trade with warfare, fortification, military prudence and political government.” Its quest for power received a stimulus from the decline in Mughal authority that encouraged the Company to venture out beyond “the sphere of Mughal protection” to stake out its own claims (Ambirajan, 29). In 1757, it wrested India’s richest province, Bengal, from the French and by 1857 had disposed of its Dutch, Portuguese, and local rivals “at the cost of sundry massacres” (Beauchamp, 1934: 18). The Mughals, who on their sufferance and to their eternal damnation had admitted them as petty traders into India, were defenseless before the British advance. In the aftermath of the Revolt, the dynasty was consigned to oblivion, its last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, bundled off by the Raj to die in Rangoon, denied even the right of burial in his country. Despite their fortune in acquiring an empire, however, the Companywallahs lacked the political erudition necessary for consolidating it along hegemonic lines. While officials in Whitehall periodically bemoaned their transgressions, the “merchant adventurers and gentlemen warriors” (Hutchins, 1967: 3) remained engrossed in looting India directly and under the guise of trading with it. Thus, the Nawab of Bengal protested its forcible expropriation of the products of peasants and merchants for a fourth of their value and its extraction through "violence and oppression [of] five rupees for goods which are worth but one” (in Dutt, 1949:98). In addition, because of the havoc wreaked by their taxes, a severe famine gripped Bengal in 1769-70 in which a third of its people died. Yet, revenue for that year exceeded that for 1768 due to the brutality attending its collection (Hastings in Dutt, 1949:104). (It jumped from 818,000 pounds in 1764-65 under Mughal rule to 1,470,000 pounds in 1765-66 and to 2,680,000 pounds in 1790-91 under the Company. By the

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time of the Revolt in 1857, the destitute Indian peasants were paying a staggering 15.7 million pounds towards British industriell development.) The overall economic pattern during this period, then, was one of a “drain” from India into Britain that, according to its own officials, amounted to “two to three and sometimes four million pounds sterling a year [continuously for] half a century or more” (in Mukherjee, 1974: 380). The toll this extracted from the hapless peasantry led GovernorGeneral Cornwallis in 1789 to “safely assert that one-third of the Company’s territory in Hindustan is now a jungle inhabited only by wild beasts” (inDutt, 1949:104). The Company’s rape of Bengal did not go unnoticed in England where Horace Walpole condemned it for having “outdone the Spaniards in Peru.” At least they, he said, were “butchers on a religious principle” (in Kopf, 1969:13). By 1784, Parliament itself denounced the Company’s political and commercial institutions as “totally corrupted and totally perverted.” The Company, it said, had kindled “hostilities in every quarter for the purpose of rapine,” reducing in its thirst for riches the most flourishing areas to “a state of impotence, decay and depopulation.” By 1858, the Parliament went so far as to brand the Company the “more corrupt, more perfidious and more rapacious [than any] civilized Government [that] ever existed on the face of this earth” (Lewis in Dutt, 1949: 99). (According to Mukherjee [1974], this running battle between the Parliament and the Company was fuelled by the competition between English industrial and mercantile interests.) It was, however, rather ingenuous of the Parliament to blame only the Company’s cupidity rather than the economic interests of a rapidly industrializing Britain for reducing Indian cities to “dumps and jungles.” Thus, it was Britain’s imposition of heavy protective tariffs against Indian cotton, its appropriation of land revenue and the closure of the European markets due to the Napoleonic Wars, that destroyed India’s internal market as well as its textiles industry (Alavi, 1980). Parliament’s reprimand was also odd given that, in Coupland’s (1944: 7) delectably euphemistic phrase, “government was virtually dictated by [its] acceptance of responsibility for [India’s] welfare.” Acceptance of responsibility by Parliament basically boiled down to extending its own fiat over India, a process it initiated by centralizing the Company’s presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay under one Governor-General in 1773. It also established control over Indian finance, foreign affairs and legislation, triggering interminable conflicts between the British government in England and the British Government of India. Moreover, it was Parliament that imposed constitutional reform on India specially during the last 25 years of Company rule when the latter

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"served not as a body of merchants but as an instrument of the British government” (Kochanek, 1974:12). The thrust of this reform was to exclude Indians from governance, a strategy which, says Bayly (1989:6-7), was emblematic of Britain’s imperial policies between 1780 and 1820. The spirit that had “animated British relations with subject races,” he says, changed sharply in this period and where the “political hierarchies of colonial territories” had once included local elites, Britain now sought to exclude them from vital posts so as to “decontaminate the springs of British executive power from the influence of ‘native corruption.’” Hutchins (1967: 15), on the other hand, contends that the "Europeanization of the services” resulted from moral considerations, specially “the view that uprightness and honesty were more important to the success of British Indian government than the association with that government of Indians.” These differing interpretations stem, in part, from disagreements between British political theorists and administrators themselves on how best to govern India. The Orientalists, for instance, believed that the more important priority was “to adapt our Regulations to the Manner and Understanding of the People, and Exigencies of the Country, adhering as closely as we are able, to their Ancient Usages and Institutions” (Hastings in Callender, 1987: 19). They were, consequently, averse to new-fangled schemes like representation. To the Utilitarians, on the other hand, the Indians were merely a benighted race incapable of the “honesty, industry and intellectual vigour necessary for democracy,”33 and it was they, specially James Mill and his son, who succeeded in establishing the terms of discourse on the issue by arguing that “good government was more important than self-government” (Callender, 43). Thus the ubiquitous Macaulay, drawing on J.S. Mill’s authority, claimed that not one “speculator of Indian politics, no matter how democratical his opinion, has ever maintained the possibility of giving at the present time such institutions to India” (in Dutt, 1949: 448-49). (As late as the twentieth century, the British continued to view “a quasi-autocratic form of administration” as the most “practicable” one for India [O’Donnell [1979:19.]) India, Mill had announced, was not a dependency whose “population is in a sufficiently advanced state to be fitted for representative government” (in Coupland, 1944: 22). His argument, accompanied by an “assault on Indian culture and society merely underlined,” according to Bayly (1989:237) “an already racist and interventionary strand in imperial policy.” Hutchins (1967:11), however, claims that Mill was motivated by the belief that “India was in the mainstream of human development [and] presented no obstacles to social advance which had not been met and overcome elsewhere.” Moreover, by “our race” he meant not the En-

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glish but the human race. Similarly, Stokes (1959: 66) maintains that Mill’s views on India derived from his belief that “the source of its ills was no different from that of the rest of mankind’s: quite simply it was bad government.” He wished therefore, “to dispel what he considered the silly, sentimental admiration of oriental despotism” (53). In this context, Majeed (1992:126-28) argues that Mill did not view the colony as a different country and in using India as a “testing ground for utilitarianism [he] was fashioning a critique of British society itself.” This is why he condemned the use of colonies “ ‘to produce or prolong bad government,’ and perpetuate the power of the ruling few” (158). According to him, Mill was also not a racist since he did not hold racial factors accountable for differences in social forms. However, even Majeed admits that on imperialism, Mill was “ambivalent.” Partly because of these conflicting views, the ground rules that Parliament had established in 1784 for ruling India without Indian participation remained in force until the nineteenth century. Whatever its real wellsprings, this policy gave the colonial state a tenuous social base reflected in its dependence on force and/or treachery to subdue or outwit its enemies of which it had not a few. Ranging from the revolts of individual princes to the uprisings of peasants and religious groups, it was besieged by sporadic rebellion long before the 1857 Revolt finally sealed the Company’s kismet in India.

The Crown and Constitutional Reform The Crown entered India in 1857 with the Company’s debacle fresh in its memory and with new plans in hand. This phase of imperial rule coincided with the period of free-trade liberalism, British hegemony, and a "new era of international politics and economics” epitomized by the pax Britannica which was to provide “the general structure of international relations” until its collapse after World War I (Gilpin, 1977:31). It also coincided with changed British attitudes towards India, a shift that had occurred even before the Revolt. The Company’s abolition had “sounded the death knell of liberal hopes for India’s rapid transformation and liberation from British control.” The inauguration of the Raj, on the other hand, was the “assurance the nation required that India did indeed now ‘belong’to the nation, and not just a handful of Englishmen” (Hutchins, 1967:86). Having ended the Company’s monopoly34 on Indian trade under pressure from the Lancashire lobby, free-traders and industrialists at home, the Crown had, however, to justify its foray into India anew. For, if “untrammelled economic relations” between Britain and her colonies were to the best advantage of both, as the free traders were claiming,

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"what was the sense in holding on to the colonies?” (Ambirajan, 1978: 48). Vindication for colonialism came once more from political economists, this time Mill, who cautioned that once free, colonies would erect tariff barriers. Hence “in the present state of the world [colonization] is the best affair of business in which the capital of an old and wealthy country can engage” (in Ambirajan, 49). By now an industrialized Britain was seeking investment opportunities and markets, and India was not only a stable and lucrative outlet for investment, but also a valuable captive market. Also, the British and Indian economies had become interdependent while the Indian bureaucracy continued to offer the best employment opportunities for the British middle-class. India had also acquired greater political weight in Britain where the secretary of state could use it as “a political weapon in the armoury of his party” (Ambirajan, 7). Accordingly, while the British ultimately envisioned a "free imperial economic association of British trading nations ushering to the threshold of civilization a number of dependent races,” there was no prospect of their yielding India forthwith (Bayly, 1989:236). On the contrary, Britain’s “new frame of mind ... had as its governing idea the justness of the permanent subjection of India to British rule” (Hutchins, 1967: xi). This vision, in the making since the Second British Empire in 1783, signalled, says Bayly (252), a “new imperialism” as well as a “new nationalist energy which largely identified law, religion and commerce as the highest national goods” and viewed them as being “universally threatened.” The Crown’s agenda, then, was more ecumenical than the Company’s: the permanent incorporation of India into its Empire. However, such a plan was difficult to realize in the aftermath of the Revolt without social endorsement. It was now that the “high politics of empire [became concerned] primarily with underpinning imperial governance with Indian collaborative structures” (Moore, 1974: 1). Thus, Victoria hastened to proclaim her social and religious neutrality in an attempt to mollify the princes and her “British Indian” subjects, abjured the desire to extend Britain’s dominion in India any further (a pledge soon violated with the annexation of Burma and Berar) and clarified that the English Crown desired henceforth to be “identified with the hopes, the aspirations, the sympathies and interests of a powerful native aristocracy” (Lytton in Dutt, 1949:658). (As a result, social status continued to be based on land until the 1930s while the "middle class remained a lowly breed” [Bayly, 1989: 236.]) This shift in British policy can be ascribed not only to changed British attitudes towards India, but changes in India itself, most notably the emergence of social unrest in the form of the Revolt. As the Company’s rueful experience had shown, the British could no longer continue rely-

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ing on exclusion or violence to do the trick. Instead, an assimilationist approach seemed more serviceable. Though racism remained as pervasive among “the just and powerful as among the ill-bred and poorly educated” (Callender, 1987:118) the British also sought to include segments of the elite in their “imperial system of control” (Page, 1982) specially after the 1880s when the Congress began asking for “representation” through well-argued intellectual appeals. It was difficult for the Raj to shoot down this type of activity with a “whiff of grapeshot” says Anil Seal (1968:15). Moreover, a system based on the “consent of the some and passivity of the majority [was bound to be] cheaper and less embarrassing.” Whatever the Raj’s motives, to the extent that the local elites not only acquiesced to this inclusion, but came to champion its designs for India,35 colonial rule can be said to have acquired some hegemonic features in this phase. Not only did the official class not wish to challenge it until the 1930s, but no other group confronted it either for half a century after the Revolt. Reliance on collaboration does not mean, however, that the Raj sanctioned an unconstrained expansion of political freedoms. In fact, constitutional reform sought both to expand and limit the arena of powersharing. Moreover, patterns of collaboration tended to vary. The “sheer size of the country and the intricacy of its government” meant that British policies did not affect different “regions and the many local social, economic, and political structures [in] the same way or at the same time” (Johnson, 1973: 1). Second, uneven development obliged the Raj to employ “different techniques in different regions.” For instance, where there were few large landlords, it tried to win over the “powerful castes or educated men” instead (Seal, 1968: 9). Similarly, where it encountered resistance from the Hindus, it turned to the Muslims for support. These policies are often imputed by nationalist Indian and Pakistani scholars to Britain’s subliminal Machiavellian urges to divide the Indians. However, although many Raj officials were animated by such an ideal, the reality as Callender (1987), Hutchins (1967) and Stokes (1959) have shown, was much more complex. British policies were hostage not only to English theoretical paradigms, but also to the historical context in which the British were obliged to operate both in India and internationally. Thus, when the Crown took over, the ominous rumblings of the Revolt were looming over India, as were the dire admonitions of local elites who were somewhat exaggeratedly blaming “all causes of rebellion [to the] non-admission of natives into the Legislative Council” (Syed Ahmed in Philips et al., 1962: 30). Accordingly, in 1861 the Viceroy’s Council was opened to some nominated, non-official Europeans and

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“Natives.” This move, however, was disassociated from the idea of popular representation being likened instead to the “durbars [courts] of the native princes: ‘the channel from which the ruler learns how his measures are likely to affect his subjects, and may hear of discontent before it becomes disaffection’” (Coupland, 1944: 21). As a result, the councilors, though drawn from eminent landed36 families, were reduced to the status of timorous courtiers by neither being allowed to ask questions, nor to discuss executive measures, but to speak only when spoken to, and often not even then! The droll nature of “Native representation” was exposed by a British MP who told of a maharajah in the Supreme Council who “could not speak a word of English” and was not allowed to have an interpreter. He was, therefore, reduced to aping the Governor-General who had appointed him, and when that worthy “raised his hand I raised mine, and when he put his hand down I put down mine” (in Majumdar, 1969:761). Even such inoffensive activity was balanced by retaining official majorities and by augmenting the Viceroy’s special powers. While an elective principle was introduced into municipal government in 1884, it involved persons being recommended for appointment by cities, district boards, municipalities, large landlords, universities, and chambers of commerce (for separate seats). Similarly, when in 1892 the central and provincial37 councils were expanded, the viceroy was quick to clarify that his mandate was that "the ultimate selection of all Additional Members rests with the Government, and not with the electors” (in Philips et al., 1962: 68). The central issue, moreover, was what proportion of the councils “were to be elected rather than nominated. The size of the electorate was of secondary importance” (Weiner, 1987b: 39). As the viceroy, Lansdowne, candidly admitted, the Raj was not ready to “create in India a complete or symmetrical system of representation” (in Philips et al., 68). In fact, as a colonizing power many Englishmen felt it was incumbent upon them not to democratize India. As the government in India was founded on conquest, not consent it was, they said, an “absolute Government [that] represents a belligerent civilization.” Hence, it must “proceed upon principles different from and in some respects opposed to those which prevail in England” (Stephens in Philips et al., 57-59). There seems to have been some approbation for such blue-blooded sentiments amongst the British middle class which, says Hutchins (1967: 127), lost its ardor for democracy after having acquired the franchise itself. By “1867 the same classes that had rallied to the standard of democracy when it had seemed equivalent with their own interests rejected it vociferously” when the specter of universal suffrage loomed on the horizon. The "cry went up that anarchy was imminent and individual liberty in danger.” It is then perhaps understandable that India should have en-

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ticed the men who were perturbed by the increasing “democratization of English life—not the man who hoped to make India more democratic than England was herself willing to become. Once the target of reformers, India had now become the hope of reactionaries” (xi). Accordingly, while the English middle classes continued to see India as the “place where [they] could go to redeem themselves,” (Tidrick, 1992: 268) the Englishmen who went to India did so “not to exemplify the supposed middle-class virtues, but to acquire the supposed aristocratic vices” (Hutchins, 1967: xi). Many, moreover, were convinced that “men, not institutions, were the true glory of the empire,” and that their duty was not so much to set an example as to control, a conception of governance that was “essentially pre-modern” (Tidrick, 1992: 33; 4). To the British “race patriots,” on the other hand, the task of empire was simply to preserve the “world-wide ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxons.” To them, says Kathryn Tidrick (231), “history was an inspiration, not a lesson.” The Raj, then, had more than its fair share of men who had been equipped by the British public school system with, as E.M. Foster once put it, “well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts” (in Cronin, 1989:164). Meanwhile, educated Indians, unsuspecting of these diminished British hearts, were nonplussed and enraged with their niggardliness and attempts to foist antediluvian institutioiis onto India. In the wake of the partition of Bengal in 1905, segments of the hitherto moderate Congress turned “Extremist,” demanding not only self-rule as their “birthright,” but also mounting a terrorist offensive against the Raj in addition to boycotting and burning British goods. Some Muslim landlords also chipped in, demanding separate and weighted representation.38 By now the British had realized the nuisance of making their “measures and motives generally understood, and in correcting erroneous and often mischievous statements of fact or purpose” being attributed to them (in Weiner, 1987b: 81). To redress this situation and redeem the Congress moderates whose reliance on constitutional methods had yielded slim pickings, they enlarged the councils once again in 1909, giving the Hindus and Muslims separate electorates. They justified the expansion on the grounds that the landholding and commercial classes who represented39 the “most powerful and stable elements of India’s society [had] now become qualified to take a more prominent part in public life [but had found] little scope for the exercise of their legitimate influence” (in Philips et al., 1962:81). That the Raj expected this influence to be exercised in its own behalf was manifest from the fact that the Councils were supposed to serve as “an agency for the diffusion of correct information upon the acts, intentions, and objects of government.” Their constituencies were still com-

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munities and they could neither control administration nor finance. As before, they continued to be regarded as durbars and as the architect of the reforms, Morley, hastened to clarify, if he thought that this “chapter of reforms led directly or necessarily up to the establishment of a Parliamentary system in India, I, for one, would have nothing at all to do with it” (in Philips et id., 85). In the event, the Minto-Morley Reforms became infamous not so much for their outmoded view of Indian politics as for introducing separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims. This policy, viewed as a consummation of Britain’s divide and rule strategy, illustrated the resolve of many Englishmen to use the “existence side by side of these hostile creeds [as] one of the strong points in our political position in India” (Strachey in Dutt, 1949:423). The Raj, some of its officials bluntly counselled, should “uphold in full force the (for us fortunate) separation which exists between the different religions and races, not to endeavour to amalgamate them. Divide et impera should be the principle of Indian government” (Coke in Dutt, 424). However, to others, the measure was not particularly aberrant for, as secretary of state Morley noted, in Bohemia the Germans had a separate register while in Cyprus, the Muslims voted “by themselves” (in Philips et al., 87). Yet, by setting up the “electoral framework for two party-systems—not for a two-party system”40 (Weiner, 1987b: 41) based on religious divisions, this statute turned the Hindus and Muslims into permanent political adversaries. Debates on Indian government remained muted until the First World War which obliged Britain’s reliance on not only Indian goodwill but its million-strong army and its economic support. It was now that some English statesmen were persuaded to reexamine the issue of Indian constitutional advance from a “new angle of vision” (Asquith in Coupland, 1944: 51). By now, events in neighboring Russia were also weighing on the minds of British and Indian officials some of whom feared a “violent Bolshevik revolution” in India stemming from poverty and lack of democracy. To forestall this possibility they urged the Raj to undertake “vigorous and timely measures [to] increase the political liberties and improve the economic condition of the Indian masses” (Ghose, 1975: 107). Consequently, in 1917 Britain announced that it favored “the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire” (Montagu in Sarkar, 1989: 165). In other words, self-government was not the “inevitable prelude to letting India go, as it appeared at the time and has appeared since to eyes less clouded than Montagu’s by belief in the possibility of voluntary servitude, but as the natural means of keeping it” (Tidrick, 1992: 226). Nor

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was it the same as democratic government, since the states were selfgoverning without being democratic (Moon, 1989). This declaration was given shape in the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms41 whose central feature was “dyarchy,” an intricate system of power-sharing between the British and the local classes. It divided control between the center and provinces on the one hand and between British and local officials on the other by “transferring” some subjects to the latter in the provinces while “reserving” others for central and British control. (The powers given to “British India” were offset by dividing it along communal lines and by creating a Chamber of Princes.) Although the electorate was increased to about 7 million (1 per cent), the suffrage included “more property-tax payers, persons with educational qualifications, and landholders. The landless and urban workers were still not included” (Weiner, 1987b: 41). Devolution of power to the provinces allowed the state to get two birds with one stone. On the one hand, the “magnetic attraction of provincial office [temporarily distracted] political energies away from the all-India level” because of which the “all-India confrontation with government lived uneasily under the axe of constitutional collaboration in the provinces” (Page, 1982:36). On the other, it allowed the state to consolidate a network of alliances with the provincial “rural elites—the landed families whose offspring filled the ranks of deputy-collectors, tehsildars and naib-tehsildars.” The British cemented this alliance by limiting the number of urban seats and extending the franchise to the countryside, far beyond the canvassing power of urban politicians (Page, 30). The Congress elites received the reforms coldly. In fact, perceiving chinks in the state’s armor opened by the war,42 Gandhi instigated the first disobedience movement. To curb dissent from spreading, specially in the Punjab where a 20,000 strong crowd had gathered to protest their policies at Jallianwalla Bagh, British officials massacred around 500 unarmed women, men and children and inflicted injuries on thousands. Fearing a backlash, they followed this up with a declaration of martial law, setting a splendid precedent for the custom of rule by the Punjabidominated military later in Pakistan. They also imposed censorship and ordered whipping as a penalty for protestors who were made to “crawl lying flat on their bellies, and marched miles under the scorching heat of the sun to salute the Union Jack” (Pandey, 1969:107-08). However, in spite of this repression and a growth in the Congress’stature after the 1920s, the Raj was able to acquire enough backing “in the provinces and center to keep the new constitution working because of its ability to hold the moral ascendancy” over the party. The “Liberals in Bengal, the Justice Party in Madras, landlords in the U.P., and Muslims in the Punjab,” argues R.J. Moore (1974:15), were all convinced of the ad-

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vantage to themselves of working the Constitution and of the state’s “reasonable strategy.” Yet, by the time of the decennial review of the Reforms in 1929, it was obvious even to the more sanguine officials that dyarchy had failed. The complex and overlapping division of authority, the impotence of local ministers who found themselves hamstrung by British bureaucrats, and continuing British control on central finance, foreign affairs and defense paralyzed effective government and local responsibility. As an alternative, the Congress adopted the Nehru Report in 1928 demanding greater local control and universal adult franchise. But Britain chose instead to convene three Round Table Conferences in London (1930-32) to work out a formula for power-sharing between the English, the Hindus and the Muslims, the main contending political forces in India by now. Predictably, the conferences ended in a deadlock allowing the British Prime Minister, McDonald, to announce a “Communal Award” of his own which became the basis of the Government of India Act, 1935. By now, Britain was in the throes of an economic crisis brought on by the Depression and India’s attraction as an empire seemed to be dwindling as it accumulated a favorable balance of trade and its civil service became increasingly Indianized. The colonial army, expanded to protect imperial interests, was also becoming a drain on the exchequer. To top it off, the political mood in India had begun to change perceptibly. Labor strikes and peasant unrest were on the rise as were militant trade unions and kisan sabhas. The disenchantment of revolutionary youth with Gandhian restraints had also incited terrorism in the Punjab and Bengal and was aiding in the Left’s growth (Sarkar, 1989). Even the Congress had graduated from its “politics of mendicancy” to mass civil disobedience, having launched another movement in 1931, for which Gandhi was gaoled. (His arrest, says Moore [1974:252] marked a “turning point in relations between the Raj and Indian nationalism.” The repression was meant to prove that the British could govern India without “yielding to Congress;” on the other hand, the “early introduction of a constitution that would attract sufficient Indian support,” was the olive branch held out to local elites to induce cooperation.) It was against this backdrop that Britain enlarged the arena of powersharing by abolishing dyarchy at the provincial level and introducing it at the center instead. The franchise was extended to about 30 million persons and while women got the vote, the working class did not, even though the British working class had been enfranchised by now. The Act also proposed a federation of “British” and Princely India, under British control, that would come into effect if all parties consented to it; the princes refusing to consent, that part of the Act was never implemented.

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While the 1935 Act broadened local responsibility, it also undercut it by institutionalizing the administrative division of India rather than ending it as Coupland claims. In fact, by bringing the states into the central government, it increased the “power of these reactionary anachronisms” (Dutt, 1949: 465). Moreover, it “wove together the strands of communalism and separatism by giving to the Muslims virtually perpetual majorities” in the Muslim provinces. Due to the weighted representation given to them as well as to the princes, the Congress could expect to get only a third of the seats. Hence, while seeming to take India "closer to responsible self-government [the reforms] really contributed to disunity” by deepening the split between the Hindus and Muslims, the center and the provinces and Indian and “British India” (Moore, 1988: 1516). However, as Moore (1974: 316) says, the “devolution of power by stages was [also] bound to involve the attachment to the Raj of individuals and communities” who felt their interests could best be furthered by collaboration. (As he puts it, “attaching in order to devolve is not necessarily the same thing as dividing in order to rule.”) Even the Congress, in spite of its initial hesitation, opted to work the constitution, ostensibly with the aim of wrecking it from the “inside.” In fact, it was the widening of power-sharing after 1935 that allowed the party’s elites to entrench themselves in office until 1939 when a combination of events opened up the possibility for further concessions. The most immediate was Britain’s involvement in the Second World War which not only obliged it to rely on Indian resources once again but which imposed more economic hardship in India resulting in a record number of labor disputes, strikes, and peasant no-tax movements. In 1940, Muslim discontent manifested itself in the demand for autonomy for Muslim majority provinces, while in 1942, the Congress felt confident enough to launch its “Quit India” movement calling for Britain’s ouster from India. The British, however, found it hard to oblige. It was not only that India had provided a financial brace for their Empire, or that their rule had acquired an “illusion of permanence” as Hutchins says. It was also that “India” had become an ineluctable part of the psyche of many Englishmen. Among the tell-tale signs were the change in its name from Hindustan to “British India,” to the reams of sentimental literature written on the Raj (Misra, 1987) and, most revealingly, to the inscriptions on the tombstones of the Englishmen who, having perished in India specially in the Revolt, were acknowledged primarily, if incongruously, in terms of their relationship with it, as its “defenders.” Hence, the British continued to find rationalizations for their rule. In the early days the more impervious had justified it by the artifice of de-

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nying that there even “was an India, or even any country of India, possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious: no Indian nation, no ‘people of India,’ of which we hear so much” (Strachey in Dutt 1970: 284). In their twilight, they tried to exculpate themselves on the grounds that the British government in India was the best that it had “ever seen or ever will see [and that Indians] would rather have their affairs dealt with in many cases by British courts and British officers than by their own people” (Churchill in Philips et al., 1962:315). The Raj, however, violated this benign (if patently Orientalist) view by responding to the Congress’ demand by incarcerating over 60,000 of its members, detaining 14,000 without trial, and killing around a thousand (Stavrianos, 1981). However, neither repression nor reform, nor the Raj’s attempt to groom the Muslims as a counterweight to the Hindus, nor its pandering to the princes seemed to be paying off. The usual debates in England about good government versus self-government that had been resolved in favor of the former were now having to confront the possibility of the latter. Yet, British solutions still continued to fall short of independence. In 1946, the Cabinet Mission brought with it a proposal for a three-tier federation (the Hindu and Muslim provinces and the princes) with the choice to each to opt out. A new round of elections was held with an extended franchise of 40 million allowing a coalition HinduMuslim government to assume power. The government, however, was paralyzed from the start by mutual rancor and Britain’s attempts to retain the role of umpire for itself. However, by now the foundation of the Empire had been eroded by the World Wars, the Depression, the fall in Indian trade, the loss of Lancashire cotton interests, the ascendancy of British Labor, the rise of the United States as the new hegemon and the growing nationalist sentiment in India. Consequently, on the midnight of 14 August 1947, the British divided Hindu from Muslim India, unified “Princely” with “British” India, and dismantled the Raj with as good a grace as possible under the circumstances, relinquishing the “jewel in the crown” of their Empire to its own people.

The Colonial Legacy: An Overview The “customary idealizations of the British Raj,” says Moon (1989:5) are “annoying to Indians, harmful to British interests, and quite unnecessary.” They are superfluous, he contends, because the British achievement can stand on its own, without “euphemism or exaggeration.” It was [he says] no small thing for a tiny handful of Englishmen to conquer a distant and populous country, to administer it peacefully for over a century

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with tolerance and humanity, and to plant in its somewhat uncongenial soil the great liberal ideals and institutions of England.

This eulogy, unfortunately but predictably, fails to note the other, less exemplary face of the colonial Janus. Thus, while it is true that the British established greater territorial and political unity than had existed under the later Mughals, a modern industry, educational system, army, and press, it is equally true that after two hundred years of their rule, the subcontinent remains an area of “long survivals [where] people of the atomic age rub elbows with those of the chalcolithic” (Kosambi, 1975:8). Not only that, but colonial rule distorted India’s past, nurtured pathological self-doubts, inflamed communal hatreds, impeded industrial development, created a landed class whose control of the peasantry made a farce of electoral politics, institutionalized class divisions, gagged the press with the strictest censorship laws in the empire, deployed the army to quell its own people, or fight wars of no relevance to India, and subjected its people to forms of repression that, given the day and age in which they occurred, were unbelievably anachronistic. To the extent that the interests of the colonizers and the colonized could not have been identical, British efforts to establish their own hegemony were at cross purposes with the introduction of healthy politics, let alone democracy, in India. Thus, the conflicting goals of the colonial state induced a disjuncture not only between political and civil society but also between economic and political growth in which “institutional modernization” outstripped economic advance. Accordingly, while the needs of British capital encouraged the state to impede Indian economic development, ease of governance also obliged it to impose “a modernized system of government [on] Indian society from above” (Ray, 1977: 507). Responsible government, however, was meant more to “shore up imperial defence” than to democratize India (Bayly, 1989: 237). As such, it merely resulted in a politics of "limited inclusion,”43 or a form of “liberalized authoritarianism” that opened up some “spaces for individual and group action [but] without altering the structure of authority, that is, without becoming accountable to the citizenry” (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986:9, their emphasis). Hence, while constitutional reform allowed some power-sharing, it steered clear of that integral prop of political “democracy:” universal adult franchise. As a result, the most important accouterment of representative democracy was missing: its very representativeness! If there were to be no elections, or if the electorate was to be restricted to a tiny minority, there was no possibility for the mass of the people to participate in politics which became the preserve of the dominant classes. However, while the colonial state helped to unify these classes and to fa-

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cilitate their political and ideological domination (Jessop, 1990: 42), it also curtailed their power by taking away with one hand in the form of constraints what it had given with the other as concessions. This carrotand-stick policy helped to keep the Hindu elites in line. In spite of Gandhi’s famed satyagrahas, the state-dominant class conflict remained within constitutional confines. After its band of willing satyagrahis had somewhat unwillingly disbanded under Gandhi’s stern edict, the Congress leaders proceeded to the conference table to discuss, quite civilly, India’s future with its alien rulers. Unlike the Western model, then, the features of Indian “democracy’’ were an alien state’s control on politics, a political structure dominated by bureaucrats, and an absence of answerability on the part of the rulers to the ruled. This fostered a genre of politics not even theoretically beholden to the idea of popular sovereignty; the Company’s “enlightened despotism” merely gave way to the “paternalism” of the Raj and later, to the authoritarianism of the local elites for, as R.E Dutt (1953:195) notes, in 1947, the entire administrative machinery of imperialism was taken over and carried forward: the same bureaucracy, judiciary and police ... the same methods of repression, police firing on unarmed crowds, lathi charges, prohibition of meetings, suppression of newspapers, detentions without charge, persecution of trade unions, etc.44

Most damagingly, by dividing and subdividing India along social, ethnic, racial, communal and geographic lines, the British institutionalized the rifts in Indian society. The propertied came to occupy a different place in the imperial edifice from the propertyless, landlords from capitalists, agricultural from non-agricultural “tribes,” princes from commoners and even from one another, the educated from the uneducated, English sahibs from Indian babus, Anglo-Indians from Natives, the Hindus from the Muslims, “Indian India” from “British India,” ad infinitum. This labyrinthine, caste-like apartheid, it is said, was the outgrowth of the British obsession with regularity (Coupland, 1944); the unavoidable product of their orderly minds that helped them deal even-handedly with a country of India’s size and complexity. Perhaps this was the only way the “English mentality... with its curious inability to assimilate anything outside its fixed circle of experience,” (Stokes, 1959: xi) could make sense of India’s diversity. Or, perhaps the “proclivity to divide, subdivide, and redivide its subject matter without every changing its mind about the Orient as being always the same, unchanging, uniform, and radically peculiar” (Said, 1979: 98) was an intrinsic trait of colonialism itself. In the event, this “imperial system of control” allowed a state controlled by

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a few thousand outlanders to erect social, political and psychological barricades between itself and four hundred million people so that no single group could become powerful enough to challenge it until a combination of events eroded England’s status as an international hegemon as well as its “paramountcy” in the subcontinent.

Conclusion This chapter has traced the colonial state’s policies not only to its own political priorities and relationships with local groups (and the British state), but also to changes in Britain’s political-economy and international standing. The analysis has also distinguished between modernization and democratization as well as between the liberal and antidemocratic aspects of colonial rule. In this context, it has argued that while colonial rule modernized politics, it was not unambiguously liberal, democratic or secular in nature. At best, it only left behind a “tutelary democracy” in India (Weiner, 1987). However, not all the credit for even this fact can be ascribed to British policies alone since these policies could not always dictate the nature of relationships or the outcome of conflicts in civil society, factors that were also crucial in shaping Hindu and Muslim politics as the next two chapters show. Also, while the state could demarcate the arena within which politics could take place officially, it could not always determine its content specially as its own hegemony attenuated. Thus, in spite of its efforts, dissident intellectuals and parties did emerge. (Even the Congress and the League which began their careers as handmaidens to the Raj broke away to stake out their own claims.) Finally, to understand why this system managed to survive in India but not in Pakistan, it is necessary to examine those factors, which in addition to “political institutionalization,” shaped Hindu and Muslim politics. In the next chapter, I focus on the former. Notes 1. The pre-British Mughal Empire, says Rajat Ray, had itself been grounded in political asymmetries. However, Ray does not differentiate between the nature of Mughal power and that of the colonial state which was of a qualitatively different order. See “Political Change in British India,” in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 14, No. 4,1977, pp. 489-517. 2. Some of the controversy on feudalism can be avoided by viewing both European feudalism and the "Asiatic Mode of Production” as variants of a tributary mode. See Samir Amin, Neo-Colonialism in West Africa, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973; and for a historical application of this model to India see Eric

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Wolf, Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 3. Communal in this context means commonly held. 4. With the popularization of Ricardo’s rent theory, the British came to view them as “useless drones on the soil” and sought to undercut their power. Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt, India, 1857-1870, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. 5. The British East India Company, formed by a group of London merchants, received a royal charter from Elizabeth I in 1600 for a monopoly in British trade with India. Below, I compare the Company’s rule to that of the Crown’s. 6 .1 discuss constitutional reform in the text below. 7. David Washbrook, on the other hand, notes that struggles over land “produced many casualties among the ‘traditional’ elites,” a risk the Company seems to have been willing to take. Its ability to “reconstruct society and manipulate the various types of collaborators available to it,” was, moreover, restricted he says. See “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” in Modern Asian Studies, 15, No. 3, pp. 649-721, p. 666. 8. The advent of the Congress also eroded the landlords’ standing. See PD. Reeves, “Landlords and Party Politics in the U.P, 1934-47,” in D.A. Low (ed.), Soundings in Modern South Asian History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, p. 280. 9. For debates between Britishers about the nature and political value of these “village republics” see Ann Callender, How Shall We Govern India?, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987; and Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. 10. This concentration resulted from the managing agency system which was notorious for concentrating “power in the hands of a very small number of firms.” In 1911, 15 foreign owned and run agents managed 189 industrial units while prior to the second World War, 61 foreign managing agency houses were overseeing more than 600 companies. Stanley Kochanek, Business and Politics in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, p. 15. 11. Although Muslims were in a majority in Bengal, there was no Muslim bourgeoisie to speak of. See Chapter 5. 12. They can be styled bourgeois, says Irfan Habib, “not because they wished to set themselves up as factory owners, b u t... because they desired the development of India on lines like those of England.” Interpreting Indian History, Shillong, India: North-Eastern Hill University Publications, n.d., p. 55. 13. These strategies were meant to facilitate India’s role of cotton supplier to British industry. See Hamza Alavi, “Formation of the Social Structure of South Asia under the Impact of Colonialism,” mimeo; and S. Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. 14. Because of the route of the Muslim conquest and pattern of religious conversion, Muslims were concentrated in the north west (Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan and the Frontier, later West Pakistan) and in East Bengal (later E. Pakistan).

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15. From Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, 19311939: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Appendix 1. 16. In Chapter 4 1discuss the role of this class in “national” politics and in the Congress. 17. A pejorative British term for the English-educated Bengali Hindu bhadralok, literally, the respectable people. As Richard Cronin says, the “literate, educated Bengali was the chief hate object of British India. He was a figure of fun—his pompous error-ridden English was endlessly imitated—but the mockery was a disguise for hatred and fear.” Imagining India, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, p. 10. 18. Their defense of India was “actually a defense of Hinduism” against assaults from the Evangelicals. David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969, p. 141. 19. See Kopf (ibid.) for an analysis of the Bengal Renaissance and its “modernizing” impact on politics and Chapter 5 for an analysis of Muslim politics in Bengal. 20. See Chapter 5 for the measures that were adopted in the interest of the Punjab peasantry. 21. On both these points, see Chapter 4. 22. This lack of consensus is reflected in scholarship on the Revolt as well. See Salahuddin Malik, “Nineteenth Century Approaches to the Indian ‘Mutiny/ ” in The Journal of Asian History, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1973, pp. 95-117, and Michael Adas, “Twentieth Century Approaches to the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58,” in The Journal of Asian History, Vol. 5, No. 1,1971, pp. 1-19. 23. As a counter to the college, which the Company’s directors saw as “a ‘possible breeding ground for Jacobins’ ” Haileybury college was set up in England in the hope that officials would go there instead. Kopf, op. cit.; p. 126. 24. The English were, of course, neither India's first historians nor the first to try and “reform” some of its social practices; it was the Muslims. Yet, as Syed Habibul Haq Nadvi says, “it appears that enlightenment was brought to the country only by the Greeks and not by the Muslims and the three years of Alexander the Great were more rewarding for India than a thousand years of contributions made by the Muslims.” From Islamic Resurgent Movements in the IndoPak Subcontinent: A Critical Analysis of the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Centuries, South Africa: University of Durban-Westville, 1987; p. 21. 25. See Chapter 5 for the impact of Orientalism on the Muslims more generally. 26. Sangeeta Singh. “Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article,” op. cit.; p. 17. 27. The Hindus' lack of identity with the Mughal feudal state continues to be manifested in the fact that when they look to precolonial history to validate their claims about “national” unity, they look not to Mughal rule, but to the fourthcentury Guptas for having fostered it. 28. Penderal Moon recounts how a “cheerful bootblack” inquired of an Indian whose shoes he was shining in London, “ ‘How do you like our rule in India?’ ”

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Reflections on British India (After the Great War of 1914-1918), Delhi: Durga Publications, 1984, p. 11. 29. Only 40 princes had treaties with the Crown; some 327 states had no representation in the Chamber of Princes set up in 1921, while 127 states had 12 representatives among them; only 108 princes were given individual seats. 30. The British-proposed federation of 1942 also visualized “Princely” India as a separate unit. Moon (1989: 74) admits that the princes were only invited “to share in the political development of India [because of the start] of large-scale political agitation in British India.” 31. Mountbatten not only forced the states to join India or Pakistan, but also prevented three Muslim states (Hyderabad, Junadagh and Kashmir) from joining the latter. 32. All the 900 administrative posts were reserved for the British Civil Service until the mid-nineteenth century. Until 1853, the Company nominated the civil servants. Since local responsibility emerged long after the British bureaucrats had consolidated their hold over the country and remained limited, they became the real rulers of India, and the so-called “steel frame of Empire.” Even the district officers, as Philip Woodruff notes, had enormous power from the day they arrived in India. “A member of the Guardian caste [he says], was given authority which anywhere else he could hardly have attained with less than twenty years experience.” The Men Who Ruled India: The Guardians, London: Jonathan Cape, 1954, p. 15. 33. Although these were Charles Grant’s views, they were endorsed by James Mill. Mill disagreed with Grant only on whether Christianity was the solution to redeeming the Indians. See Callender, op. cit.; pp. 32-42. 34. In spite of the termination of the Company’s monopoly “the government of India still had a mercantilist heart.” It continued its monopoly of the salt and opium trade and its land tax was “distributed according to customary principles of status rather than the imperatives of a free market in land.” C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830, New York: Longman, 1989, p. 237. 35. See Chapter 4 for a discussion of Hindu politics. 36. Between 1862-1888, of the 36 Indians who served on the Council, 6 were ruling princes and 23 landlords. 37. Punjab was not allowed to have a legislative council until 1897, nor were the councilors given the right of interpellation; they were also nominated, not elected. 38. See Chapters 4 and 5 for these developments in Hindu and Muslim politics respectively. 39. The two men Morley appointed to his Council were in fact, “the least representative men he could find.” The Hindu member favored the partition of Bengal, which the rest of his fellow co-religionists condemned, while the Muslim was a prince. CJ. O’Donnell, India's Freedom Movement: The Causes of Discontent, New Delhi: Tulsi Publishing House, 1979, p. 35. 40. In Chapter 5 ,1examine the implications of separate electorates for Muslim politics.

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41. According to RJ. Moore, the Reforms implemented in substance the agreement reached between the Congress and League in 1916 (the Lucknow Pact) but without allowing a communal veto on legislation. See The Crisis of Indian Unity, 1917-1940, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. 42. Rabindranath Tagore noted a loss in Britain's prestige by recalling the time “when our people had great faith in the justice and truthfulness of the British Government” but were now refusing to believe even their war reports! Quoted in Rajat K. Ray, op. cit.; p. 505. 43. This is G. Luciani's characterization of Middle Eastern politics but it also seems to apply to India. The Arab State, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 44. While Dutt’s comment refers to India, it is truer of Pakistani regimes for reasons noted in Chapter 1.

4 Colonial Hindu Politics: Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism As noted in Chapter 2, Gramscians view Indian democracy as the outcome of a “passive revolution” carried out by the bourgeoisie through the Indian National Congress during the colonial period. However, since this claim does not specify why the passive revolution acquired a “democratic” form, or what role subaltern class politics or unrest played in the process, this chapter clarifies both by examining the relationship between party, class and politics historically. In this context, its focus is on the Congress itself. While politics among Hindus was not confined to the party alone, such a focus can be justified on various grounds. First, a party’s history is almost always the history of a class since it is in a party that classes acquire unity and the ability to become agents of more “universal” activities (Gramsci in Vacca, 1982: 63). Moreover, writing a party’s history entails portraying the complex totality of the relationship between state and society as well as national and international factors. Third, parties can be agents not only of class hegemony, but also democracy. Fourth, it is in a party that intellectuals as well as the people acquire a national consciousness. Finally, parties can serve as “schools of state life” by providing political leaders. All these criteria apply to the Congress which has played a decisive role in instituting not only bourgeois hegemony, but also “democracy” in the postcolonial state in addition to having functioned as a nationalist movement in the colonial period. It has also provided most of the country’s leadership and has been able to secure enough subaltern class support to justify treating it as the leading “national” party in India. Lastly, its history accurately mirrors different stages in the evolution of state and class relationships in colonial times. 95

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The Congress and Colonial Politics Theorists divide the history of the pre-independence Congress into three phases: the “liberal" from 1885 to 1905, the “extremist,” lasting a few years, and the Gandhian from 1919 to 1947. Adherence to this periodization also permits an analysis of the impact of subaltern class unrest on the party since the liberal phase coincides with the pre-class struggle1era, the “extremist” with a transitory period, and the Gandhian with the outbreak of significant social strife.

The Politics of “Liberalism”: 1885-1905 The Indian National Congress, the oldest party in Asia and one of the oldest in the world, was the first national political association of the nascent Hindu “middle class.” An assembly of privileged men rather than a party in the strict sense of the term, it originated from a meeting of 72 Hindu merchants, intellectuals and landlords, in addition to a smattering of English liberals who had responded to Britisher Allan Octavian Hume’s invitation to the “salt of the land" to get together to resolve Indian problems at an intellectual level. (The Congress Hume felt would provide a “safety valve” for growing middle class "ferment” which was likely to get out of hand if not directed in a timely manner into constitutional channels.) (Gautam, 1985; Masselos, 1985; Sitaramayya, 1969). Among the reasons for the discontent that troubled Hume and encouraged the Raj to sanction a toothless “opposition” at that historical conjuncture were, first, that by the 1870s, the supply of educated Indians exceeded the state’s demand for them (McGuire, 1988:55). Thus, English education, which had expanded initially in concert with the state’s need for men with “administrative, clerical and professional skills” (Ray, 1977: 507) had outstripped it, as schools and colleges had begun to proliferate under the impetus of local initiatives. Those in service, on the other hand, were finding their progress and promotion blocked by British racism, manifested in their belief that they were all “English gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race” (Mayo in Pandey, 1969: 21). This view had also induced many of them to oppose holding the civil service exam in India “if only because Bengalis, ‘quite unfit to rule,’ would benefit the most” from such a measure (in Pandey, 9). As a result in 1864, there was only one Indian in the civil service, while two decades later, there were just 12 (Ahmed, 1981:53, n. 5). Nor was the educated strata alone in the winter of its discontent. Beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, “large-scale restructuring” in the world economy had resulted in an “influx of foreign capital” into India thereby threatening the fledgling Indian capitalists, a situation worsened by the colonial state’s intervention on the former’s behalf (McGuire, 1988: 43).

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Local capitalists, therefore, also had reasons to be disgruntled. Finally, growing "national” sentiment in the preceding decades had politicized segments of the educated strata. Thus began the political odyssey and partnership of India’s “middle” classes through the aegis of the Congress. However, sharing as yet Britain’s political designs for India, the party adopted an agenda that was the soul of discretion. Thus, the cream of the educated strata that good-naturedly baptized it at the altar of British liberalism consecrated it to agitating (constitutionally, of course) for modest political rights for Her Majesty’s educated subjects; succinctly, for “representative” institutions so that the “educated natives” could learn the art of self-governance through an opportunity for self-government. To this end, the liberals, as they are known, demanded Indianization of the services, appointments to public bodies through exams and elections rather than nominations, and representation on and enlargement of various councils, measures which, if they had been conceded, would have boosted their own share in power. The liberals’ call for representation, however, was less a clarion call for “democracy” than a strategy to enlarge their own sphere of influence by dislodging the landlords from their seats in the councils, a position they had occupied since the 1860s when the British had begun nominating Indians to them. Since then, the Raj had shown a stubborn proclivity to appoint “wealthy and influential native gentlemen who are attached to our rule and have a large stake in it” to the councils in preference to the "middle” classes (Secretary of State in Philips et al., 1962:34). Even at the height of “extremist” turmoil in 1907, they continued to rank the “ruling chiefs and the landholding and commercial classes” in that order of priority (in Philips et al., 82). It was this English policy towards the landed classes that the liberals sought to revoke by demanding representation that would allow them an entry into “the highest echelons of the policy making institutions of the Raj” (Gautam, 1985:74). However, it was not only the “nabobs” they wanted to cut out of political life, but also the underclass. If there was any doubt on this score, the liberals removed it by clarifying that the uneducated or propertyless could not be expected to participate “either in a system of representative government” or in the party itself (McLane, 1977: 98). It was only they who could discharge this duty since only they could appreciate good government. Moreover, they were convinced that in their party no one “could wish to see a better representation of the aristocracy, not only of birth and of wealth, but of intellect, education, and position” (Tyabji in Congress Presidential Addresses 1935: 24). (In this hubris, the liberals were no different from their landowning peers in the British Indian Association who had acidly warned Britain years earlier that “any scheme

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of representation that fails to recognise the claims of wealth, property and social position is radically defective” [in Philips et al., 131], a belief inspired partly it seems by the latter’s tendency to mete out privileges on the basis of all three.) Consequently, if in the course of their deliberations the liberals commiserated with the peasantry, it was not because they wished to associate the “ignorant peasants” with themselves or to mobilize them, but partly out of their reformist impulses, and partly to legitimize their claim to be better suited to represent the peasants than the parasitic landlords or the alien British officials. In addition to showing scant regard for what one would today regard as democratic precepts, the liberals also failed to ensure democracy in their own ranks. The party remained firmly under Hume’s authoritarian thumb as efforts to draft a constitution dragged on for years. (At this stage the Congress was an association of provincial parties, with no independent membership. For instance, the Indian Association joined it in 1888 with 124 branches. The Congress later attempted to establish its leadership over the provinces by convening conferences there. However, it could neither secure the same standing in all provinces nor were all provinces equally active in national politics.)2 Since it was only at the state’s sufferance that they could acquire a toehold within it, the liberals expended their energies soliciting it for reforms. (Their somewhat fatuous belief that salvation hinged entirely upon the justice and benevolence of the English people also persuaded them to go West in search of little political concessions from Britain, where they established a branch of the party.) Nor did they find it discomfiting to solicit such reforms in the name of an identity of political interests between Britain and her colony or their own qualifications to uphold these. As one of the party’s presidents explained in 1887: to be a true and sincere friend of the British Government, it is necessary that one should be in a position to appreciate the great blessings which the Government has conferred upon us, and I should like to know who is in a better position to appreciate these blessings—the ignorant peasants or the educated natives. ...it is the educated natives that are best qualified (iyabji in Congress Presidential Addresses, 1935:25).

Although later presidents would designate the Congress as an “opposition movement,” they would also agree that it was the “duty of those subjects who have received a liberal education with the aid of Government, to repay the kindness of Government by assisting Government in the proper discharge of its high functions.” This they could do by warning it of “the shoals and rocks lying ahead in its path ... thus enabling

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Government to steer clear of [them] (Sayani in Congress Presidential Addresses, 1935:285). Their sense of identity with the colonial state (a good indicator of the hegemonic aspects of British rule), as well as their internalization of Western values also encouraged the liberals to show a closer ideological affinity with British political precepts and institutions than with the Indian, something the English seem to have found baffling. Thus, Coupland (1944:23) notes with some bewilderment that instead of sharing Viceroy Dufferin’s view of the Congress as a “new sort of durbar, [these] first Congressmen were interested in British rather than Indian forms of government.” (Dufferin had greeted the party as a source of potential reinforcement for the Raj; since India lacked the equivalent of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, he felt the Congress could rectify the situation by acting as a “sort of critique toleree" [Singh, 1988.]) It was, of course, hardly peculiar that a class which had been educated in English institutions and was engaged in upturning the landlords’ privileges should have been attracted to modern institutions rather than to the decrepit durbars. Yet, having tutored them in progressive ideals, the British were loathe to allow Indian ambitions free reign. Hence, even though their demands were moderate and posed no serious threat to the Raj, as late as World War I, it refused to yield much ground. Given British insouciance and their own vulnerability'to the state, the liberals’ critique of the ruinous impact of colonialism and their advocacy of the interests of Indian capital fared no better. However, if they had solicited political rights in the name of a congruity of interests between Britain and India, the liberals rejected the idea of economic harmony between them, exhibiting instead, a strong sense of economic nationalism. Thus, they remonstrated that the demands of Lancashire and Manchester for Indian cotton and markets had reduced India pratically to a plantation of England growing raw products to be shipped by British agents in British ships, to be worked into fabrics by British skill and capital, and to be re-exported to India by British merchants in India through their British agents (in Sitaramayya, 1969, v.l: 41).

Not only did the liberals inveigh against the subordination of India’s economic needs to Britain’s, but they also disputed the claim of English political-economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith that free trade was beneficial for it. On the contrary, retaliated the "drain-theorists,” free trade had led to a commercial “drain” from the country augmenting its poverty and ruralization. What was needed was state protection for local capital and a policy of self-reliant development. As they pointedly ob-

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served, even Britain had not flourished under a laissez faire system when passing through similar conditions as India. Whatever its theoretical merits, the “drain theory” expressed the needs of Indian capitalists who “required raw materials, technical skill, capital, and above all, a market [but had no] Government to protect them, to set them on their feet in their early and difficult days” (Buch, 1938: 229). Instead, they had to contend with competition from British capital, tariffs on Indian manufactures, and even a state-imposed income tax since 1860. It was not until World War I that Britain, preoccupied with the manufacture of war matériels and concerned about its future defense, decided to reappraise its policies on industrialization. Until the 1920s, however, the colonial state turned a deaf ear to the liberals’ appeals for protection to capital as well as its calls for a permanent land settlement to relieve the burdens of increasing assessments on the peasantry. The circumscribed and pro-British nature of "national” discourse at this stage, reflected in the party’s agenda,3 has been attributed to the effects of “colonialist-style education” by Guha (1988a: 18). As a result of this type of education, he says, not only did "the words and ideas that had served for political dynamite in Europe [have] their critical charge doused and defused” in India, but English became “constitutive of thought itself for the educated,” a fact that early “nationalists” like Bankimchandra Chatterjee also noted. “The western mode of thinking,” he wrote, was so different from “the traditional Indian mode of thinking that the translation of ideas cannot be achieved simply by the translation of one language into another” (in Guha, 25). That English-educated Indians raised on a staple of the works of Western intellectuals, Orientalists in the main, would sooner or later fall prey to the “silent operation of English ideas,” (Moon, 1989:34) thereby learning to think like their colonial rulers was, of course, hardly unnatural. As Freire (1971:65) says, education as “the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.” To the extent that English education induced Indians to adapt to colonial oppression, their own discourse was likely to be contradictory. Thus, Chatterjee (1993a: 10) argues that while Indian nationalist thought set out “to assert its freedom from European domination [in] the very conception of its project, it remain[ed] a prisoner of the prevalent European intellectual fashion.” Both sides in the debate continued to share the “Enlightenment view of rationality and progress and the historical values enshrined in that view.” For instance, at the level of the problematic the “ ‘object’ in nationalist thought was still the Oriental, who retainfed] the essentialist character depicted in Orientalist discourse,”

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while at the level of the thematic, “nationalist thought adopt [ed] the same essentialist... distinction between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’” (38). As a result, the nationalists’ critique of British rule remained circumscribed within a “Hindu-elitist, colonial, almost comprador framework” since they did not question its legitimacy. On the contrary, they showed “an abiding faith in the rationality and impartiality of English law and in the good intentions of the colonial administration taken as a whole.” In fact, it was the “very existence of British power in India” that they came to view as the “final and most secure guarantee against lawlessness, superstition and despotism.” This was, says Chatterjee (26), far removed "from any truly revolutionary appreciation by a progressive intelligentsia of the strength of peasant resistance to colonialism and of its potentials for the construction of a new ‘national-popular’ consciousness.” According to him, the ideological ambivalence of the intellectuals reflected the process of class formation in India. Thus, whereas in the West, the growth of nationalism was linked to a “fundamental class striving for hegemony and [the] advance of social production,” in India, the inability of the bourgeoisie to play a similar role in economic development also kept its intellectuals from formulating a “consistently rational set of beliefs or practices”4 (25). As a result, not only was their cultural influence confined to small groups with “no creative bonds with a broader social consensus,” but it was reduced to an essentially “abstract phenomenon giving no consistent direction of significant social renewal” (Sen in Chatterjee, 1993a: 75). Finally, since it was from the English that the nationalists "learnt to rethink [their] own past according to a post-Enlightenment, rationalist view of history,” they were silent on the “fundamental question of power—the question of Britain's right to rule India” (Guha, 1988a: 51). In spite of the loyalist nature of national discourse, the Congress’ “buoyant sycophancy,” (Lieten, 1988: 60), and its failure to wrest much of substance from the Raj, its advent was portentous for at least two reasons. First, it demonstrated the ability of the official class to unite politically. Unlike the landlords whose unity was prone to rapid dissipation,5 the official class, unencumbered by feudal estates, animated by modern ideals and education and with an overarching ambition to extend its own authority was "precisely the sections of the population whose interests could be most plausibly united” at an all-India level (Seal, 1968:345) and that, eventually, was most likely to confront the state. Second, unlike the landlords who tended to rely on informal networking to secure themselves in the colonial order, the official class turned to organized politics to pursue its interests. This permitted it to expand its own control over not only political, but also civil society during the Gandhian

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phase. However, until this class had consolidated itself and until tensions between it and the state on the one hand and the subaltern groups on the other matured, it kept a low political profile. Starting in the 1900s, however, the state’s autonomy from the official class and the latter’s from the subaltern groups began to decrease in the wake of an incipient “national” struggle in which four waves are discernible: 1905-1910, 1919-1922, 1930-1934 and 1942-1945.6 These coincide with Japan’s defeat of Russia, the two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the world economic crises, the decline of the pax Britannica, and the rise of subaltern class unrest, and Muslim nationalism in India.

The Politics of “Extremism”: 1905-19077 The immediate catalyst for the first “nationalist” wave was Viceroy Curzon’s partition of Bengal in 1905 into Hindu and Muslim provinces. Justified by him as an administrative convenience, it was seen by the Hindu bhadralok as an attempt on his part to undermine them and to curb the emerging “nationalist” sentiment in Bengal, a not altogether paranoid fear since it was meant to divide a politically troublesome elite (Cronin, 1977). Of that breed of Orientalists who believed that “if we lose India the sun of our Empire will have set” (in Dutt, 1949:10), Curzon was notorious for boasting that the Congress was “tottering to its fall, and one of my greatest ambitions while in India is to assist it to a peaceful demise” (in McLane, 1977: 92). In addition to wanting to perform this commendable liturgy, the viceroy was also soon at war with the educated strata because of his efforts to curtail the power of the local bodies and to make English education costly to the natives so as to stem their influx into service (O’Donnell, 1979). The partition, however, had repercussions no one seems to have anticipated since it occurred at a time of growing social unrest. The peasantry, mired in rising indebtedness had been ravaged by a famine and a plague that had left 13 million people dead; unemployment was rife, while the petit bourgeoisie in the textile industry was faced with extinction because of the state’s refusal to extend it protection. Growing Bengali Hindu “nationalist” sentiment had also inspired many intellectuals to question the legitimacy of British rule and its advantage, to India. Within the Congress, this line of thought was advocated by the “orthodox nationalists” or “extremists,”8 who not only rejected the liberals’ mendicant methods but also injected two new concepts into politics: swadeshi and swaraj. Swaraj was a Hindu term implying “freedom from all externalism, whether in religion ... or society, or politics or economics” (Kumar, 1979: 83). Swadeshi, on the other hand, was an attempt to encourage voluntary protectionism by entreating the people to buy only

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Indian goods, specially cloth (Dutt, 1949). The message, says Kumar (35) was rendered doubly effective by being framed as a “national call appealing to the patriotic feelings of the people” and by being couched in a political idiom drawn from Hindu religious discourse. The growth of Hindu nationalism has been ascribed to the effects of English education, Orientalist history and the Evangelical onslaught which induced the Bengali Hindu intelligentsia not only to repudiate rationalism in favor of a return to religious values (Kopf, 1969) but also to view the Muslims as their enemies. Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s works in particular reveal a “barely concealed hostility towards Islam” (Chatterjee, 1993a: 77). To him, it was the Muslims, not the British, who had distorted the Indian past which he saw as a Hindu past. This view led him not only to counterpose the “Bengali people” (in Guha, 1988a: 59) to the Muslims, even though Bengal was a Muslim majority province, but to characterize them as subhumans fit only for slaughter in his novels (Ahmed, 1974). The thrust of his works was to prove the superiority of Hindu military prowess against the Muslims, and to the extent that his verdict favoring the Hindus "was his answer to defamation of the Indian national character, there could be no doubt about the purely Hindu identity of that nationhood” (Guha, 1988a: 62). Nor was Chatterjee alone in his prejudices. Even a secular liberal like Gopal Krishna Gokhale was given to distinguishing between the Muslims and the Bengalis. “It was this ease with which he could so unselfconsciously talk of the [Muslims] and the people—not the Hindus—as distinct categories,” says Sudhir Chandra (1981: 176) “that marked the ultimate success of communal consciousness.” Similarly, other Bengali Hindus, finding little in the Vedic period to which they could relate, also looked for their protagonists in the history of the Rajputs and Maratthas (Hindus with a tradition of opposition to Muslim rule) and to north Indian Hindu kingdoms (Debroy, 1991). It was not unusual for them to eulogize, for instance, the “valor of Rajput women who [had] burned themselves willingly rather than submit to the Muslim invaders” (Kopf, 1969:267). Even Rammohun Roy, one of the most moderate social reformers of his times, showed distinct traces of that concept of Muslim tyranny—and of British rule as a deliverance from it and hence fundamentally acceptable—which soon became a central assumption of virtually every section of our intelligentsia, conservative, reformist, and radical alike (Sarkar, 1985:9).

It is, then, hardly surprisingly that "extremists” like Tilak, Pal and Ghose also relied on Hindu symbolism to espouse their brand of “nationalism.” Tilak, in particular, not only inaugurated the observance of mili-

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tant Hindu festivals, but also used various events to disparage and undercut the Muslims (Masselos, 1985: 99-100). (However, according to Masselos [113], it was Surendranath Banerjea, a “secular constitutional politician, later to be classed as a Moderate, who first popularised this resort to religious symbols ... to attain a political objective.”) As a result of these trends, not only was the Bengal Renaissance “alienated from the Islamic heritage” (Sarkar, 1985: 9), but “Swadeshi Bengal” came to identify with a Hindu mother cult exemplified by the “extremists’ ” adoption of Chatterjee’s anti-Muslim poem, Bande Matram, as their “national” anthem (Chakravarty, 1981). Thus, the earliest articulation of “Indian” nationalism by Hindu intellectuals was predicated on a fundamental religious distinction between the Self and the other. Decades later, when the Muslims would claim a state on the basis of the same distinction, their demand would be condemned as “communal” by all the leading Hindu intellectuals. According to Ray (1973:70), the association of the nation with Hinduism at this stage was inevitable when there was no middle class and the “Muslim aristocracy had been practically eliminated, when the Muslim conscience was still soaked in feudal nostalgia and when the common people, Hindu and Muslim alike, were quite inarticulate.” Certainly, in Bengal, the absence of a Muslim middle class as well as their social and political backwardness had so far kept the Muslims from participating in “national” politics or in the Congress itself. However, in other parts of India (like the U.R) their abstention from both was motivated by the emerging belief, advocated by Syed Ahmed Khan, that as they were a distinct “nation” with their own interests, their participation in Hindudominated national politics or in the Congress would not be to their benefit.9 Their abstention from the party, then, had little to do with the British. In fact, Dufferin felt they could make no “greater mistake than to endeavour to sow the seeds of dissension, suspicion, or jealousy between any classes of Her Majesty’s subjects.” Yet, he said, “many of the higher Hindu classes have resorted to the absurd device of attributing the split to my Machiavelian (sic) cunning” (in Ahmed, 1974:189). However, while considerations largely intrinsic to the Muslim community had so far prevented it from joining the Congress, “extremist” politics helped to estrange it because of its overt appeal to Hindu communal sentiment. The state, meanwhile, taking advantage of HinduMuslim tensions institutionalized them in 1909 by giving the two groups separate electorates. As a result, appeals to religious identities became a common stratagem for political “mobilization” after this phase. However, the “extremist” legacy was not all harmful. On the constructive side, they demanded swaraj not on the grounds, like the moderates, that they were fit for representative institutions but because it was their

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“birthright” to rule their country (Tilak in Kumar, 1979: 35). In fact, they chastised the moderates for trying to “purchase for India on cheap and easy terms what all nations who are worthy of it bought with agony and blood and tears” (Bevan, 1914:104). Swaraj, they argued impassionedly, was to be attained through the struggles and sacrifices of the Indian people, not British dispensation. As a result of their efforts, politics in some areas of Bengal began “to extend from the classes to the masses” as some scholars are so fond of saying (Buch, 1938: 227). The reliance on a populist strategy was not misplaced. The much reviled “masses” began to boycott British goods, often setting fire to stores selling them. (Mass participation left its own distinctive mark on politics, such as the first-ever strike by labor in 1907 to protest Tilak’s arrest and exile by the colonial state.) Not everyone in the Congress was gratified by this turn in events. So far party-members had been unified behind a broadly shared ideology, but “extremism” forced a rupture between the moderates and “extremists” because of the differences in their goals and methods. Thus, while both wanted swaraj, their understanding of it differed. To the “extremists,” self-rule meant freedom from British control; to the moderates, and later to the Gandhians, at least until the 1930s, it came to mean selfgovernance within the Empire.10Differing aims inspired different strategies: the “extremists/” interested in dislodging the British, turned to non-violent agitation; the moderates, on the other hand, interested in power-sharing with the Raj were chary of a conflict with it and sought to ward it off. This divergence between the two groups is attributed to the fact that “extremist” politics reflected the interests of the petit bourgeoisie, rich peasants and labor, all of whom had little stake in colonial rule. The moderates, on the other hand, were sympathetic to the interests of big business which was in no hurry to sever its imperial link (Beauchamp, 1934: Dutt, 1949). Hence, the adoption of a resolution for independence under “extremist” influence at the party’s 1906 session split it down the middle. Tellingly, it was the “extremists” who were expelled at the infamous Surat session the following year when party dignitaries hurled not only invectives but also their shoes at one another. (After their expulsion, the “extremists” joined the Home Rule Leagues11 that served as a focal point of politics until the 1920s. Although the two groups were reconciled in 1915, two years later, the moderates split away to form the Liberal Federation. The two events after unification were the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the League whereby the former agreed to separate representation for the Muslims, and Gandhi’s satyagraha on behalf of the Champaran peasants that was to bring him and the Congress national renown.)

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The denouement at Surat spurred the moderates, now in full control of the Congress, to make some important changes in it, a process that reached its consummation under Gandhi. They began by opening up its membership to all 21-year old men ready to sign its new creed and founding committees at the district and sub-divisional levels. They also attempted to woo the subaltern classes outside its pale by setting up the Servants of India Society (with help from some Calcutta capitalists) to cater to labor’s needs (Lieten, 1988). In the party itself, they initiated a process of centralizing power in their own hands. They also rescinded the resolution for independence adopting in its stead the goal of selfgovernance within the Empire to be realized through constitutional means by reforming the existing system. Finally while they retained the slogans of swadeshi and swaraj, they redefined them, in the process depriving them of their radical connotations. Thus, Gandhi delinked swadeshi from the idea of a boycott and defined swaraj so broadly (in his desire to keep his options vis-a-vis the British open [Kidwai, 1981]) that it came to mean all things to all people. That the moderates felt obliged to undertake these changes is a good indicator of the “extremists’” impact on politics. Not only had they helped to enlarge the arena within which politics normally took place, but they had also transformed its content with their strategy of passive resistance and their rhetoric of dissidence. This lexicon spurned the conventional liberal paeans to British justice and for the politics of supplication substituted a politics of self-affirmation; for the idea that Indians should follow British dictates, the idea that they should determine their own destiny. Yet “extremism” could neither sustain itself nor subvert British hegemony and, in the end, it petered out as suddenly as it had emerged. It failed, says Sarkar (1989: 115) because it was “an intelligentsia movement with bourgeois aspirations, but without as yet real bourgeois support.” Seal (1968: 347), on the other hand, claims that it dissipated because of its narrow base, its divisive tendencies and its “skin-deep” organization. The extremist front, he says, disintegrated after Tilak’s exile. In fact, according to him, “extremist” politicians were merely a “coalition of dissidents, who having been out-manoeuvred in their own provinces, tried to reverse at the top the defeats they had suffered in the localities.” Conversely, it may be argued that the movement failed due to lack of subaltern class support and its failure to bridge the gap between the leaders and the led as Viceroy Minto shrewdly noted in 1906. What was happening in India, he said, was “altogether peculiar in comparison with other revolutions.” While leaders like Garibaldi and Mazzini had fought for “what they believed to be the liberties of the people and had the support of a great majority,” in India, there was no “movement from

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below. The movement, such as it is, is impelled by the leaders of a class very small indeed” (in Philips et al., 1962: 78). (In spite of his perceptive reading of the situation, Minto thought it fit to support the moderates in the Congress to prevent “extremists,” with whom it would be “impossible to deal,” from gaining control. It was partly to vindicate the former that the Minto-Morley Reforms were introduced in 1909. At the same time, by cracking down on “extremism,” the state was able to drive the terrorists underground.) Minto’s evaluation is confirmed by Coupland (1944: 24) who notes that while Indian nationalism in 1909 was very different from 1885 and 1892 in that many of its advocates “were now ‘extremists,’ denouncing the British Raj [and] organising what was known as ‘Indian Unrest,’” politics continued to be “the monopoly of the small educated class, and the great mass of ignorant villagers ... knew and cared nothing about representative government or Indian nationhood.” In spite of its pejorative tone, this view captures the tenor of “extremist” politics. It was not until the subaltern groups began to organize themselves that politics also began to shed some of its elitist hue. This, however, was not to happen for another two decades. Meanwhile, as a result of the “extremists’ ” expulsion, the Congress became lackluster, even dormant. Its historian could only lament that power “had gone out of the Moderates (and) the Nationalists had not as yet come into their own;” that there was “no Field-Marshal, no Generalissimo to lead the army” (Sitaramayya, 1969, v. 1: 120). India and the Congress, he said, were still waiting for a leader. The yearned for mentor was presently discovered in the person of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Mahatma or Great Soul, who appeared on India’s political horizon in 1915 after his celebrated sojourn in South Africa.

The Politics of “Nationalism”: 1919-1947 Although Gandhi not only transformed the Congress but left an unrivalled mark on “Indian” national discourse, to credit him with all the changes that occurred during this phase would be to indulge in what Said (1979:202) calls “the mythology of creation.” By this he means believing that “an original talent, or a powerful intellect can leap beyond the confines of its own time and place in order to put before the world a new work.” In reality, says Said, a person’s contribution is informed by “the work of predecessors ... the collective nature of any learned enterprise ... to say nothing of economic and social circumstances.” Accordingly, if one examines the social and economic conditions in Gandhi’s times, it is clear that the India of his era was, quite simply, not that of his predecessors.’ After the 1920s, the Indian political-economy

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was in a state of almost continual flux because of the two World Wars, the chronic crises in the world economy, Britain’s collapse as an international hegemon, the growth of Indian capital, the ideological impact of Bolshevism, the state’s attempts both to curb and to sanction constitutional advance, the outbreak of organized subaltern class unrest, and the rise of Muslim nationalism. In conjunction, these events induced shifts in state and class relationships which also impacted upon Gandhi’s own strategy. Prior to considering his role in politics, therefore, it is necessary to identify the nature of these social and political reconfigurations.

State-Class Relationships The Depression of the 1930s not only resulted in a reorganization of capitalism in a variety of political forms in the West, as Gramsci (1971) had noted, but also accelerated the process of British decline in India, a process which began with the unravelling of the pax Britannica after the First World War. The resulting erosion in British hegemony had significant repercussions on the colonial state in India as well.

The State and the Dominant Classes After the 1920s, Britain’s economic and defense interests obliged the colonial state to permit and even aid India’s industrial development. At the same time it found itself in a financial crisis brought on by decreases in its internal revenue because of the boycott and the Depression and the divestment of short-term capital from India. While it was able to surmount the problem of meeting its external obligations temporarily, Britain was compelled to abandon the gold standard shortly later, weakening its own economy and its hold over India’s. Britain’s decreasing control on the economy expedited the growth of Indian capital which also got a boost when the Depression hit British capital in India harder than it did local. As a result, the Hindu big bourgeoisie was able not only to consolidate itself, but to expand and diversify after the 1930s (Markovits, 1985). The growth of local capital set the stage for rising tensions between the capitalists and the state on the one hand and between them and labor on the other, both of which impacted on Congress politics, as described below. Politically, the colonial state was obliged to widen the arena of powersharing, specially after the 1930s, in the wake of increasing pressures from the dominant classes, and in an attempt to offset erosions in its own legitimacy. (In other words, while the state had initially turned to collaboration in an attempt to secure support, after the 1930s, it was the

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decline in its legitimacy that expedited the devolution of power to local elites.) As a result, the Hindu official class was able to strengthen its position in political society as well as to use its control of state power to transform the Congress into a powerful political machine with its own network of patronage in civil society. However increases in the party’s stature and membership were tied not only to the favors it could now dispense, but also to the fact that the people were “psychologically inspired [by] the presence of khaddi12 clad jailbirds in the secretariat and assembly chambers” and the fact that the Congress anthem, Bande Matram, was sung in schools and its “flag flew over school buildings” (Gautam, 1985:102). The resulting improvement in the standing of the official class in civil society and its own growing maturity are reflected in the fact that whereas in its liberal phase, it had waited stoically for token hand-medown reforms from the Raj, in the Gandhian, it launched three disobedience movements, boycotted two out of three sessions of the Round Table Conference (1930-32) as well as the Simon Commission (1942) and resisted Britain’s attempts to impose political reform on India. Instead, it adopted the Nehru Report,13and the Fundamental Rights Resolution, in addition to other measures, as alternative political initiatives. As a result by 1942, it was able to draw enough support to itself to launch its antiBritish “Quit India” movement.14

The State and the Subaltern Classes If India’s dominant groups benefitted from Britain’s gradual decline as an international hegemon, the condition of its subaltern classes simultaneously deteriorated. The very wars that brought spiralling profits to the capitalists impoverished the working class even further. Confined to an urban ghetto in cramped and unsanitary quarters, with depreciating real wages, laborers were consuming less than the inmates of local prisons at the time of the First World War (Sen, 1977: 206). These conditions worsened as local capitalists rushed to replace the slack in British exports caused by the War. In their desire to earn a brisk rupee, they introduced wage controls, double and triple shifts, cut back leave and increased the hours of work from 56 to 72, abuses the state condoned by not imposing the provisions of the 1911 Factory Act that limited the working day to 12 hours. (The working day was reduced to 9 hours only after independence.) The peasantry, on the other hand, had to bear the burden of the colonial state’s mammoth military expenditure and “voluntary gift” of 145 million pounds to Britain’s war effort (Balabushevich and Dyakov, 1964). This squeeze came on top of the prodigal tribute that the Company and

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TABLE 4.1

Industrial Disputes in India (1921-1946)

Year

Stoppages

Workers Involved (000s)

Days Lost (lakhs)

1921 1922 1923 1928 1937 1938 1939 1940 1943 1944 1945 1946

396 278 213 203 379 399 406 322 716 658 820 1,629

600.3 435.4 301.0 506.8 647.8 401.0 409.2 452.5 525.1 550.0 747.5 1,961.9

69.84 39.23 50.52 316.47 89.92 91.99 49.93 75.77 23.42 34.47 40.54 127.18

s o u r c e : S. N. Mehrotra, Labour Problems in India (Delhi, India: S. Chand and Co., n.d.),

p. 402.

the Crown had extracted over the period of two centuries. As a result, by the time of World War I, the extreme backwardness of Indian agriculture had begun to manifest itself in acute shortages of food that between 1911 and 1921 averaged ten million tons a year. In fact, from an exporter of grain, India became a net importer. Rural indebtedness, land alienation, famines, massive exports of Indian gold, the world recessions, and a sharp rise in food prices ravaged the peasants even further. Not unnaturally, the subaltern classes were driven to systematic rebellion after the 1920s. Widespread and militant peasant no-tax movements in the U.R in 1921, along with a record number of industrial disputes the same year and subsequently (see Table 4.1) became a source of rising friction not only between the subaltern groups and the state, but also between the former and the dominant classes, culminating in political realignments between both as well.

Dominant-Subaltern Class Relationships. Shifts in dominant-subaltern class relationships are reflected in the changes that occurred in the Congress itself in this phase. So far the party had acted as a pressure group mostly for the official class. In the Gandhian era, however, not only the capitalists, but also the subaltern groups were drawn to it. It is necessary, therefore, to review the relationship of these classes to one another and to the party.

Congress and the Capitalists It was not until the 1920s, when tensions between the capitalists and the state began to intensify that the latter were attracted to the Congress

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(Chandra, 1975: Markovits, 1985). Through their influence on the party they were able to regulate, if not the course of the national struggle, at least some of its modalities. Fearing that it was becoming an “umbrella organization” for all sorts of interests, they found it expedient to back Gandhi who they believed was the only person capable of restraining it “from adopting a rabid anti-capitalist position,” as the leading industrial baron G.D. Birla, frankly put it (in Bahl, 1988:1). Collaboration between capitalists of Birla’s standing and party leaders grew rapidly so that whereas in the 1920s, Gandhi had been “practically the only intermediary in the deals between capitalists and Congressmen,” by the end of the 1930s, a “host of Congress leaders were competing for the role of privileged brokers to big business.” As a result, the latter supported the party’s bid for power after 1944 in spite of opportunities for development opened up under the Raj by World War II (Markovits, 1985: 180-81). This does not mean, however, that the capitalists cut their links with the British. In fact, they continued to keep their lines of communication with them open, often acting as intercessors between them and the Congress. Nor did the haute bourgeoisie show much ardor for democracy. Instead, it savored “strong bureaucratic rule and primarily wished to see a set of British bureaucrats replaced by a set of indigenous ones” responsive to its influence. In fact, as long as the Raj remained the "main guarantor of the ... social order, while the Congress struggle harboured some revolutionary potentialities, even in a limited sense” they supported the party only conditionally (Markovits, 187). Yet, the rapport between India’s dominant groups became a crucial determinant of the Congress’ line. According to Chandra (1975: 318) it was the “two-fold relationship of the capitalist class to imperialism, i.e., long-term antagonism and short-term accommodation and dependence,” that impelled the party to pursue a “non-revolutionary” path in its conflict with the state. Lieten, (1984: 193-94), on the other hand, claims that their relationship with the state was marked by a “strategy of short term pressure and long term compromise.” In either case, it may be argued that the “passive” form of the struggle also resulted from the fact that a relatively “weak, but restive minority had to confront a wellorganized colonial power” (Gramsci, 1971: 231). At the same time, the capitalists’ connection with “Indian princes, landlords and moneylenders” (Balabushevich and Dyakov, 1964:285) also dictated a policy of containment towards the subaltern classes which is why the Congress also steered clear of a program of radical change in spite of the “socialist” rhetoric of some of its leadership. This mutual back-scratching between big business and the Congress also carried over to state legislatures where in 1923, for instance, Con-

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gress swarajists voted for the Steel Protection Bill favoring the industrial house of the Tatas. The party’s Fundamental Rights Resolution of 1931 also promised capitalists state protection for various industries, as well as control over currency and exchange. Since the Resolution also proposed state ownership of some industries, it is necessary to stress that the idea of public ownership or state intervention in the economy was neither tantamount to socialism, as often alleged (e.g., A.M. Zaidi, 1987), nor was it even new. Not only had the colonial state intervened regularly in the economy, (in fact, according to Wadia and Merchant [1957] it had stepped up its regulatory activities after the First World War and in the Depression and post-Depression eras), but the Congress itself had been demanding such intervention, albeit on behalf of Indian capitalists, from its liberal days. Nor were the latter averse to public ownership or a role for the state in the economy, as the Bombay Plan (the Tata-Birla Plan), their rejoinder to the 1928 Nehru Report, shows. The fate of the Nehru Report is, in fact, illustrative of the influence of the capitalists on the Congress. The Report had proposed public ownership and development through five-year plans. The industrialists, while accepting the principle of state intervention in the economy, assigned a dominant role to private capital in their Bombay Plan. The state was expected only to draw the plan’s framework and to provide funds through its fiscal policies. Not only did these features come to be reflected in the Congress’ agenda, but the party did not publish the Nehru Report until ten years later and never officially endorsed it. (When Nehru, as prime minister of independent India tried to implement his plan, he encountered a crisis of business confidence. As a result, the state was forced to limit exclusive ownership to only three industries of which it already owned one: railways. Moreover, in spite of its declared right to begin new ventures in six industries, it was forced to leave the remaining enterprises in these industries untouched and to postpone nationalization by a decade [Gautam, 1985.]) It was because the Congress was able not only to protect the interests of the dominant classes, but also to allow them to extend their own control over the Indian political-economy without a frontal confrontation with the state or the subaltern classes that Gramsci (1971) credited it with having carried out a “passive revolution” on their behalf. This interpretation has been sustained in recent scholarship as well. Chatterjee (1993a: 30), for instance, argues that instead of acquiring hegemony on the basis of a national-popular program, the bourgeoisie merely coopted the old dominant (landed) classes into a new historic bloc with only a “partial appropriation of the popular masses [so as to] create a state as the necessary precondition for the establishment of capitalism as the dominant mode of production.” Similarly, Lieten (1988:85) main-

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tains that while not the first leader to champion the interests of the capitalists, Gandhi was unique since, unlike others, he seems to have realized that a passive revolution, i.e., a revolution which gradually increases the share of economic and political power of the ... bourgeoisie within the otherwise unchanging system, necessarily excluded the active involvement of the working class.

While it is unlikely that Gandhi aspired to be a passive revolutionary for the capitalists, as the following review shows his policies, as well as those of Jawaharlal Nehru, often had the effect of protecting their interests.

Congress and Labor To Gandhi, unless labor was able to “understand the political conditions of the country and prepared to work for the common good,” its involvement in politics was a “most dangerous thing.” If his resolution of strikes and disputes in favor of the capitalists and his counsel to labor to accept the former’s authority are an indicator of his idea of the common good, then clearly his view of it was seriously circumscribed. Thus, not only did he warn labor that any "unreasonableness” on its part would lead him to help the capitalists (Bahl, 1988: 6) but the man “who electrified vast masses of the rural population ... was totally opposed to the infusion of the same nationalist politics” into trade unions (Lieten, 1988:65). Similarly, the younger Nehru, an avowed socialist with wide appeal among the working class, admonished it not to forget that it was paid from the profits of factories and “not to do anything which might interfere with the smooth working of the mill or cause any obstruction,” since what was harmful for capital was also harmful for it (in Bahl, 9). Even the British realized that there was not “a clear bond of interest or sympathy between the Congress members as a class and the workers and more active labour leaders.” As the 1936 elections drew close, they waited to see how party leaders would “reconcile their capitalist interests” with their 1929 proposals that labor "should be organised and directed against Zamindars and landlords.” The prediction of the Home Secretary that whatever “the results of this turn in the wheel of politics, the cause of labour will be secondary to personal interests” (in Bahl, 1988:13-14) was borne out when Congress ministries assumed office in 1937. Its commitment to capital, more oblique during its exclusion from power, surfaced when the party was confronted during its tenure in office with the choice of backing capital or labor. In spite of Gandhi’s arguments about nonviolence, the Congress in office found it difficult to rec-

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oncile the interests of both nonviolently. It not only sanctioned police firing on striking workers in the U.P., but also adopted legislation, such as the Bombay Industrial Disputes Act (1939), aimed at curtailing independent working class action (Bahl, 1988). Also, when worker discontent manifested itself in strikes, the Congress suppressed the strikers with a force that “far surpassed the record set in Bengal” (Sen, 1977: 361). (As there was a Muslim ministry in Bengal, the Congress supported the strikers there, says Sen.) Yet, despite their self-serving attitude towards labor, the dominant classes, engaged in a power-struggle with the state, could not afford to alienate it altogether for at least two reasons. First, capital could not make headway without a willing labor force. Labor, however, was becoming increasingly restive as evidenced by the rising number of strikes after the 1920s (see Table 4.1). Not only was worker unrest on the rise, but they were also becoming more class conscious. Thus, where they had once rallied to the side of the dominant classes during the swadeshi days, they were now making up limericks about the “fat bourgeoisie sucking their blood,” and calling for the abolition of feudalism and capitalism. The sight of their red flag fluttering alongside the national tricolor during the mass movements could also not have been very reassuring to the advocates of big business and landlords in the party, as Sukhbir Choudhary (1971) says. (In fact, in 1928 a 25,000-strong workers procession demanding immediate independence occupied the Congress platform and could only be dispersed after Nehru’s intercession.) Another reason for the Congress’s interest in labor was that militant trade unions, often under communist influence, began adopting programs demanding universal adult suffrage, equal status for women, freedom of speech, free education, minimum wage, profit sharing and unemployment benefits, as well as socialization of the means of production and even a “Socialist Republic Government of the Working Class” (Lieten, 1988:71-72). The moderate unions, on the other hand, pledged themselves to such arcane aims as developing the human personality “always by peaceful means consistent with [the] truth” (in Malhotra, 1963: 69). It was this gap between the unions that the Congress moderates sought to narrow by trying to absorb the leaders, or the programs of the radical unions, and failing that, to assume leadership themselves, a goal in which they were often successful but at the cost of engendering numerous splits in the trade union movement itself. Thus, the All-India Trade Union Congress founded in 1920 split thrice in 27 years as both the moderates and the communists struggled to control it. The splits resulted in the emergence of “three parallel national centres” which undermined labor’s solidarity and precipitated a decline in trade union membership (Sen, 1977:341). The rivalry also reflected itself in an explo-

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sion of parties including the Indian Socialist Labour Party (1922), the Labour Swaraj Party (1923), the Labour Swaraj Party (Manilal group, 1923), Workers and Peasants Party Congress (1923) and Labour and Kisan Party of Hindustan (1923). Working class unity was also undermined by “the ‘law and order’ priorities of the colonial state [which] gave little room for the development of effective trade unionism.” Finally, conflicts between various groups, “exacerbated by racial, linguistic and social differences,” specially between European and nonEuropean workers, also impeded the unity of the working class (Arnold, 1980:235). Notwithstanding these negative tendencies and even though labor was not fully enfranchised, the Congress sought to enlist its support by promising it a living wage, limited working hours, healthy working conditions, “protection against the economic consequences of old age, sickness, and unemployment,” as well as freedom from “conditions bordering on serfdom,” (in A.M. Zaidi, 1987: 186). As a result of these assurances, its leadership of the disobedience movements, and the role played by both communists15 and capitalists16 in organizing labor, the party was able to draw to itself reasonable working class support by 1947.

Congress and the Peasants In spite of the quickening pace of capitalist development, India was, and remains, an agrarian country. Therefore, it was the peasants who came to play a more crucial role in politics partly because of their enfranchisement by the state (in an attempt to shore up the landlords) and partly because growing peasant unrest convinced Gandhi that swaraj depended on them. In 1920 he warned Calcutta capitalists that if the peasants supported the state rather than the party all “your virtues will not help in winning swaraj.”Labor, he said, was not as important because it was only 20 lakhs; the real threat lay in the "villages and not the towns” (in Kumar, 1988a: 218-224). Accordingly, the Congress began to court the peasantry after Gandhi’s 1917 satyagraha on behalf of the Champaran peasants which he undertook at the latter’s behest.17 (Incidentally, much like his advice to labor, Gandhi warned the peasants not to stop their services to the landlords, nor resist their violence, nor stop paying rent, no matter how excessive [Kumar, 1988a: 225.]) In 1920, when the party adopted the Nagpur Program aimed at enlisting peasant support, its leaders recognized that if they did not take remedial measures promptly they could expect to find labor and peasant parties detached from the Congress, “dissociated from the cause of Swaraj [and likely] to bring within the arena of peaceful revolution class

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struggle.” To prevent this, some of them proposed organizing the peasants “from the point of view of their own special interests and also from the point of view o f ... Swaraj” (Das in Bahl, 1988: 3). In the end, however, the Congress simply decided to set up a Worker-Peasant Independence Wing committed to achieving swaraj through the “force of unarmed mass movement” (in Choudhary, 1971: 235). Party-backed kisan sabhas also pledged themselves to furthering “mutual trust and cordiality between the rulers and ruled” (in Balabushevich and Dyakov, 1964: 56), as well as “amity” between the peasants and the landlords (in Kumar, 1979: 75). However, as long as it did not “sponsor a radical programme of agrarian reform,” (Kumar, 53), the Congress had little success in rallying the peasants, testifying to an appreciable degree of class awareness among them. For instance, the U.P. Kisan Sabha, one of the most radical and powerful peasant associations in India that had demonstrated the “great political potential of agrarian revolt” in 1921 by resorting to extensive no-tax movements, remained beyond its ken. It was to be another decade before the Congress could use “that potential... in the service of the national movement as a whole” (Crawley, 1971:96). By the end of the decade, however, it had set up a network of branches in the villages that enjoyed “great prestige and popularity among the peasants” (Balabushevich and Dyakov, 1964: 229), while by 1942, at the time of its Quit India movement, it had enlisted five million members. Yet, the Congress was not a peasant party in spite of its “pro-peasant” image and Nehru’s admission that it was the peasantry that gave it its real strength. This is clear from a review of its history which reveals sustained resistance to substantive peasant demands for three decades. In 1919, for instance, the U.P Kisan Sabha urged it to pressure the state to give cultivators ownership rights, waivers on rent, improved irrigation facilities, free access to pastures and forests, and relief from high food prices. Instead, the Congress only affirmed that the “revenue policy of the different provinces should be reexamined” (in Kumar, 1979: 58). Similarly, in 1927 the communist-founded Bombay Workers and Peasants Party (WPP) appealed to it to adopt a resolution for independence and universal adult suffrage in addition to a program aimed at ending the subjugation of the people. Even though the WPP did not demand the “abolition of private land ownership by the big landlords,” (Choudhary, 1971:238-39), the Congress disregarded its proposals. Yet again, in 1936, it turned down a proposal, this time from its own president, Nehru, for “collective affiliation of the workers’ and peasants’ organisations” with itself, agreeing only to set up Mass Contact Committees to initiate closer contact with “other organisations, with peasants, workers, and those whose aim it is to win freedom [in order to] make the Congress into a

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United Front of all the anti-imperialist forces” in India (in Balabushevich and Dyakov, 1964: 310). However, with peasant no-tax movements escalating, growing pressure came from the Left groups in the party for reform. In 1931, on the eve of constitutional negotiations with the state,18 the party adopted its Fundamental Rights Resolution promising the peasantry “substantial reduction in agricultural rent,” exemption for uneconomic holdings for as long as necessary, and relief to small peasants (in A.M. Zaidi, 1987: 187). A decade later, in 1946, confronted with a new election, a larger peasant electorate and the prospect of impending freedom, it took up the peasant question again. A special committee was set up that recommended ceilings on land as well as redistribution of surplus land to peasants. However, the party did not endorse its proposals; nor did it implement these policies even after 1947 (Gautam, 1985). Given this sorry record, how did the Congress succeed in winning subaltern class support? In this context, it may be argued, first, that not all segments of the peasantry or labor were uniformly active, organized, or class conscious. Thus, while the subaltern groups “were not so weak and divided as to remain supine in the face of what they perceived as injustice” (Arnold, 1980:237-39), they could not always sustain organized political activity in civil society either. Moreover, their parties and associations tended to be small and localized because of which they could not counter the Congress which was able to emerge as the only “national” party in India. Second, as theorists have noted (Desai, 1966; Dutt, 1949), the Congress benefitted from the diversion of class antagonisms into the national struggle due to which the focus of resentment became not the local elites but the British. In fact, the struggle served to legitimate the political authority of the former. The Congress’ success in winning and retaining peasant support can also be ascribed to the nature of their own common sense, specially the way in which they came to view not only Gandhi, but also his message. As early as his Champaran satyagraha, for instance, when they knew nothing "about his past career and disinterestedness, and had no idea of what he looked like,” the peasants began to endow him with messianic attributes. “The name of god was frequently used by [them] to denominate Gandhi, and their obstinate quest for his darshan, [sighting] gives further evidence of this deification of the Mahatma.” In addition, it was popularly held that he had been sent “by the Viceroy, or even the King, to redress all [their] grievances,” and that his mandate overruled "all the local officials and the courts.” Finally, he was also reputed to be about to abrogate the “unpopular obligations which the planters had imposed” on them (Pouchepadass, 1974:82-83).

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Similarly, in his study of Gorakhpur peasants, Shahid Amin (1988:289) notes that while Gandhi was in the area for “less than a d a y ... the ‘Mahatma” as an ‘idea’ was thought about and reworked in popular imagination in subsequent months.” The outcome of this magical-realistic reworking, expressed in a spate of rumors, was to ascribe to him not only policies aimed at ending the peasants’ oppression, but a succession of wondrous miracles as well. As a result, in their minds, some of his injunctions came to be seen as “a linked set of spiritual commandments issued by a god-like personage” which were compatible with those myths about his “ ‘divinity’ which circulated at the time.” According to Amin (316) these myths were inspired by Gandhi’s ability to satisfy “the condition o f‘saintliness’ both in his appearance and public conduct.” Choudhary (1971:266), on the other hand, contends that it was his ordinary, even penurious, appearance that gained him the peasants’trust since they found it easy to identify with a man who, “despised soft pedalling of life,” and who, in his half-naked dress came to be counted more than any glittering prince or rich lawyer. To the mass of common people he appeared as the unparalleled, unchallenged spokesman of their misery and misfortune. Wherever he went, even the poorest of the poor felt that he was a bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.

Even those who thought Gandhi “utterly unlike a peasant,” like Nehru, tended to see him as “India made accessible” (Cronin, 1989: 132). Among the British, too, there was a tendency to view him as a faqir, or holy man (Moon, 1984). Conversely, D.N. Dhanagare (1983: 47) claims that it was Gandhi’s "idealistic aim of a ‘return to the past,” ’ and his novel approach to “purging the age-old social evils in Indian society such as ‘untouchability’... that drew the rural masses to the Indian national movement.” Judith Brown (1974), on the other hand, traces Gandhi’s appeal to his “championship of particular rural interests” as well as his issues-oriented approach. In many cases, she says, the initiative came from the countryside, and it is therefore not surprising that his appeal rested on his handling of the issue at stake. Whenever he tried to operate on wider questions ... his power to attract support was much weaker (Brown, 472-80).

In any event, not only Gandhi, but also his message came to mean “different things to different people” (Chatteijee, 1993a: 125). For instance, among the list of things he had permitted or prohibited, the

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complimentarity of the dos and don’ts was often lost on the peasants who reinterpreted his missives independently of their content and the intention of the local Congress’ leadership (Amin, 1988; Sarkar, 1985). However, it was not only Gandhi’s piety or spiritual appeal that attracted the peasants to the Congress, but also its more worldly promise of “Gandhi Raj” as a new era in India’s history that would transform it into a fabled land of milk and honey. While it is difficult to ascertain how far such views resulted from the over zealousness of the Congress cadres and how far they were a corollary of the peasants’ own reinterpretation of their message, they are preserved in rural folklore to this day. For instance, a popular ballad proclaims that: If the Gandhian movement is Victorious Crores of Hindu coolie [laboring] people Adopting charkha [the spinning wheel] would get plenty of cloth and food. If the Gandhian movement is Victorious Hindus and Muslims become [each other’s] well-wishers [cow slaughter by the Muslims would end so that] ... we [can] retain our cattle wealth. If the Gandhian movement is Victorious Burden of taxes being less, production increases Famine leaves motherland faster Pleasures of prosperity would blossom and thrive. If the Gandhian movement is Victorious Hard working weavers’ labour ultimately Bear(s) fruit and would get them So much food and money (prosperity) for ever. If the Gandhian movement is Victorious All the skills of handicrafts increase All the daily necessities become cheap; People would thrive in prosperity If the Gandhian movement is Victorious (in Murali, 1988:192).

This vision of “Gandhi Raj” (in anticipation of which peasants in some areas even stopped paying taxes to the British Raj!) was inspired not only by Gandhi’s own persona and the sense of “identity” the peasants came to feel with him, but also by the “pro-poor” image of the Congress to which the socialists and communists contributed. In fact, it was the Left that prevented “the youth, labour and peasantry from drifting away” from the party by serving as a link between it and "the lower classes” (Gautam, 1985:182). Thus, it was the socialists who drafted the Funda-

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mental Rights Resolution as well as the party’s 1936 agrarian program which secured it the peasant vote. They also led the “Quit India” movement in the absence of Gandhi and the moderates who were in jail. Similarly, the communists’ efforts resulted in the “wider participation of the trade union, peasant and other organisations” in the national struggle (Balabushevich and Dyakov, 1964: 309). By helping to give the Congress its national-popular image, then, it was paradoxically the Left which also reduced risks to it from itself. Thus, the intellectuals who could have posed the most serious ideological challenge to the party themselves led the subaltern groups to its portals! As this rather outlandish fact helped to strengthen the Congress, it is important to review the Left’s relationship with the party.

Congress and the Left The Indian Left, according to Gautam (1985:178), was a “conglomerate of shifting individuals” including socialists, communists, Gandhian socialists, some "like Nehru and others who defied any categorization,” in addition to "Marxists, Fabians, Hindu nationalists and others.” In spite of this profusion of leftists, however, all left-wing parties “emerged from within the Congress rather than being outside groups trying to ‘infiltrate’ and ‘capture’ ” it. Most communists, too, were Congress members whose aim was to act as a “left mass wing of the Congress—thus radicalising the party and perhaps transforming it” (A. Mukherjee, 1983: 12).

Although the Congress socialists and communists followed different strategies, both were weakened by their inability to unite, or to adopt a consistent or autonomous political line. The communists in particular were hurt by the dithering of the Third International. The International began by opposing cooperation with the bourgeoisie because of its view that this class was pro-imperialist on the one hand and linked to the feudal groups on the other. However, as Aditya Mukherjee (1983: 35) notes, this view emerged “just when the Indian bourgeoisie was, in the postworld War I period, increasingly gaining in strength and growing independently and in opposition to foreign capital.” Nor is there evidence to suggest, says Mukherjee, that the bourgeoisie had any feudal links that compelled it to be “politically reactionary (in this context pro-imperialist).” However, because of their misreading of its nature, the Indian communists ended up pitting themselves against the “national” movement in its formative stages. By 1933 with Fascism menacing Europe, the International reversed its policy, this time sanctioning collaboration with the bourgeoisie. This policy, reaching India as the “Dutt-Bradley Thesis,” advised the commu-

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nists to “join hands with the left tendency within the Congress in order to transform [it] into a truly Anti-Imperialist People’s Front” (Josh n.d.: 117). As a result when the state banned the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1934, the communists joined the Congress Socialist Party, merging their identities with it. After the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, however, the International revoked its policy again this time encouraging the communists to cooperate with Britain in its war effort, a strategy which the British Communist Party also sought to popularize in India by declaring the war, a “people’s war” (Javed, 1988). The advice, however, was catastrophic since, as a CPI document of 1930 itself admits, by withdrawing from the national movement, the communists “left the field entirely to the Congress.” As a result, in the workers’ minds there grew an opinion that we are doing nothing and that the Congress is the only organisation which is carrying on the fight against imperialism and therefore the workers began to follow the lead of the Congress (in Mukherjee, 1983:36).

Thus, in 1942 at the height of the “Quit India” agitation, the largest in colonial Indian history, the communists found themselves on the wrong side of the fence yet again. By supporting the British and criticizing Gandhi who was riding the crest of an enormous popularity wave, they did incalculable harm to themselves. Not only did the Congress expel them in 1945, but charges of treachery were to dodge them in the postcolonial state as well. In addition to their erratic stance towards the national movement, the communists were also weakened by their isolation from reformist trade unions, their failure to realize the potential of a peasant revolution, and state repression. The Raj singled them out for severe terms of incarceration in addition to bringing several conspiracy cases against them in an attempt to expose them as Soviet agents; as a result by the 1930s, only “four inexperienced persons [were left] in the field.” Finally, it is alleged that the communists were damaged by sectarian deviations. However, as one member of the CPI, Ranadive, rhetorically put it: “four communists and a sectarian deviation?” (Lieten, 1984:248). The socialists, on the other hand, regarded the Congress as the major anti-imperialist party. They did not, therefore, try to form their own party, restricting their membership to Congress members only. Their attempts to reform it from within met with some success. However, since for many of them, including Nehru, socialism was a “personal issue” rather than a framework for revolutionary change, (as M. Mukherjee [1983:435] says socialism meant “development” to many of them), they neither formulated their own policies nor even the drive to take over the

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Congress which remained under the control of a moderate, pro-capital group. The Left’s inconsistent tactics and its failure to challenge the Congress not only permitted the moderates in the party to institute their own leadership over it, but also, through it, over segments of civil society. However, for this fact acclaim also needs to be given to Gandhi’s political initiative. It is time, therefore, to consider his role in, and contribution to, Indian politics.

Congress and Gandhi Gandhi’s role in politics is truly enigmatic. It was Gandhi who could not be voted to Congress offices in 1915 and 1916, and it was he who became its self-proclaimed general and undisputed dictator three years later.19 It was Gandhi who reconstructed the party, and it was he who tried to disband it in 1934, resigning in protest against the growing influence of the socialists.20 It was Gandhi who attracted the subaltern groups to the Congress and it was he who facilitated bourgeois hegemony within it. It was Gandhi who decried the “satanic” Raj and it was he who offered his services to keep it afloat.21 It was Gandhi who spoke of Hindu-Muslim equality and it was he who dismissed the latter’s nationalist claims on the grounds that they were merely a “body of converts” not entitled to such rights.22 It is thus no mean feat to assess his political bequest accurately.23 Without professing to do so, I focus on only three of its aspects which helped the dominant classes to overcome their own subalternity in the colonial order and to institute their hegemony over civil society: his contributions to “Indian” nationalist thought, his use of mass movements to beseige the state, and his reorganization of the Congress. Hindu nationalists until Gandhi’s advent had not only identified closely with the colonial state, but had also been inclined to accept the superiority of Western culture because of their acceptance of Western modes of rationality and reasoning. Bankimchandra Chatterjee, for instance, had claimed that it was India’s culture, specially its lack of modernity, that had prevented its people from effectively confronting the British. Gandhi, on the other hand, argued that it was not India’s premodern culture, but its worship “of modern civilization” that had enslaved its people. Yet, Western civilization was based not on moral considerations, but on greed and competition which, by increasing the desire for comfort and self-indulgence had also produced “poverty, disease, war and suffering” (Chatterjee, 1993a: 86). The system of industrial production—which had subordinated morality and politics to “the primary consideration of economics”—had spawned not only imperialism, but also exploitation, divisions between cities and rural areas and

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the gap between the intellectuals and the people. Bourgeois politics, with its emphasis on atomistic individualism and self-interest, was no panacea as it fostered a lack of pubic morals. It was only when politics was “directly subordinated to a communal morality” that the people could resist the exploitative minority and end these “inequalities and divisions” (Chatterjee, 55; 91; his emphasis). Pace Chatterjee (97-100), Gandhi’s critique of Western civil society resulted from his rejection of not only the “historicism of the nationalist writers,” but also their belief in Western “rationality and the scientific mode of knowledge.” For him, truth was not embodied in history nor did “science have any privileged access to it.” It was “moral: unified, unchanging and transcendental. It was not an object of critical inquiry or philosophical speculation. It could only be found in the experience of one’s life, by the unflinching practice of moral living.” According to Chatterjee, the “universalist religiosity of this conception was utterly inconsistent with the dominant thematic of post-Enlightenment thought.” In other words, it was Gandhi’s epistemic position that allowed him not only to critique Western society, but also to raise the question on which the nationalists had so far been quiet: “Britain’s right to rule India” (Guha, 1988a: 51). In addition to providing the political framework for a theory of nationalism in opposition to the colonial state, Gandhi also helped to undermine the ethical and cognitive bases of colonialism itself through his unorthodox theory of oppression. Thus, as Nandy (1983: 100) says, his view that “freedom is indivisible, not only in the popular sense that the oppressed of the world are one but also in the unpopular sense that the oppressor too is caught in the culture of oppression” (63) not only threatened those Englishmen who saw colonialism as evidence of their own cultural and moral superiority, but also "queered the pitch [for them] at two planes.” On the one hand, it allowed Gandhi to judge colonialism by Christian principles and find it to be “an absolute evil,” and on the other, to make “his ‘odd’ cognitive assessment of the gains and losses from colonialism a part of his critique of modernity” and find “the British wanting in both ethics and rationality.” This, says Nandy endangered the inner legitimacy of the ruling culture by splitting open the private wound of every Kipling and quasi-Kipling to whom rulership was a means of hiding one’s moral self in the name of the higher morality of history.

However, it was not only its pre-modem critique of colonial rule that allowed "Gandhism” to acquire its extraordinary power but also its ability to unlock the potential for realizing the most significant

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historical task for a successful national revolution in a country like India, viz., the political appropriation of the subaltern classes by a bourgeoisie aspiring for hegemony in the new nation-state (Chatterjee, 1993a: 100).

In India, the largest class was the peasantry, and it was Gandhian ideology that helped to incorporate it into the political structures of the postcolonial state through its distinctive framing of the problem of economic disparities between the rural and urban areas, the cultural power of an urban elite, and the legitimacy of resisting a despotic state which encapsulated "perfectly the specific political demands as well as the modalities of thought of a peasant-communal consciousness” (Chatterjee, 1993a: 100). Finally, Gandhism contributed to the success of the national struggle and to bourgeois hegemony in its capacity of an organizational movement as well (Chatterjee, 1993a). Central to the organization of this movement was his concept of ahimsa or non-violent resistance through satyagraha,24 his preferred medium, which he described not as an instrument of the weak, but as a weapon of the strong that prohibited the use of violence in any form. (However, as Balabushevich and Dyakov [1964:35-36] note, he was not “an unconditional opponent of violence” since he not only backed Britain in World War I, but was also a recruiting sergeant for the Indian army.) While there was nothing new in the Indian context about nonviolence or passive resistance—the “extremists” of yesteryears had advocated both—Gandhi achieved a measure of success they had not. His triumph can be ascribed to his more organic political philosophy as well as to the eruption of subaltern class unrest upon which he was able to capitalize adroitly and at consummately opportune moments to give an impetus to civil disobedience and the national movement. Thus, he launched the first movement (the 1919 Khilafat Movement) that secured his name in politics, in the aftermath of the First World War, at a time of acute turmoil resulting from the economic burdens of the war, the imposition of the Treaty of Sevres on Turkey by Britain that had incensed the Indian Muslims, the passage of the offensive Rowlatt Act, the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, the declaration of martial law in the Punjab and the meager allowances of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. As Roy (1971: 235) says, the “powder magazine was there [and] Gandhi set fire to it.” Similarly, he initiated the second movement in the 1930s, when the effects of the Depression had begun percolating down to India sparking off spontaneous workers strikes and peasant no-tax movements. Likewise, the 1942 “Quit India” agitation came in the midst of the economic burdens imposed by the Second World War and the growth of an assertive nationalist feeling in India.

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When assessing the impact of these movements, theorists usually focus on their importance for the national struggle. However, although the movements helped to forge a sense of national identity, on balance, they were not very effective in driving the British from India. In fact, the first two did not even aim to oust them! Indeed, by 1933, it was clear even to Gandhi that civil disobedience could not wring freedom from a government bent on maintaining its supremacy. It was [his] tragedy that satyagraha, the means he had chosen to unite India and prise her free of imperial control, neutralised the Congress as a party of opposition (Moore, 1974:292).

It would take not only the movements, but also a mutiny in the Indian navy, mass protests against the state’s trial of the Indian National Army personnel, and Britain’s collapse as a superpower before the Raj was to fold up. (In fact, the cordial attitude of the Congress towards them allowed the British to depart Indian shores unharmed; the repressed anger of the people inverted itself, expressing itself in the wanton killings attending Partition.) However, even though the movements were not successful in expelling the British, they were crucial for allowing the dominant classes to carry out their "passive revolution” for three reasons. First, it may be argued that participation in the collective rituals of disobedience enabled the creation of a public sphere25 in India that was essential to the definition of national identities, and unity. Thus, by pitting unarmed and nonviolent Indians against the state, the movements not only increased the personal aplomb of the dissenters, but also horizontal and vertical solidarities between them. For instance, Gandhi’s edict to the peasants not to vote throughout India because their “unarmed Punjabi brethren [had been] fired upon,” (in Amin, 1988: 302) while unlikely to have instilled a sense of "nationness” among them was nonetheless the first step in sensitizing them to the larger context of disobedience. This sensibility, in turn, was important for allowing the dominant groups in the Congress to confront the state effectively as well as to establish their own authority over the public arena. More important than the creation of horizontal ties was the creation of vertical links between the leaders and the led. Thus, the movements not only gave the Congress an opening to become the instigator of an upbeat political savoir faire, but they brilliantly surmounted the major structural impediment to dominant class leadership of civil society: the gap between state and society occasioned by the fact that control over the former was enabled more by British policies than by leadership of the latter, and the absence of political structures linking the dominant

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and subaltern groups. Mass disobedience, however, required no formal political structures and joined high and low, peasants and landlords, workers and capitalists, women and men, Muslim and Hindus, Untouchables and Brahmins, in a joint political activity in the public arena but under the leadership of the (moderates in the) Congress. Third, each movement not only increased the party’s stature and membership, but also allowed its leaders to define politics in its impressionable stages. By taking part in the movements, the satyagrahis not only entered into an explicit covenant with Gandhi to obey him—as he put it, they could not make him “your General on your terms. Know, therefore, that I will insist on my conditions which are inexorable,” (in Javed, 1988:175)—but also tacitly accepted the party’s right to define the boundaries of what constituted legitimate politics. Since, at the first sign of spontaneous subaltern class activism, Gandhi called off the movements or mass participation or both, the dissenters had to agree to accept the discipline of non-violence and class harmony that he sought to impose on them as the criteria for their participation. While the movements frequently spilled over the bounds that Gandhi considered appropriate, they nevertheless allowed the dominant groups in the Congress to identify nonviolence and class harmony as the larger “national” goods. For instance, the party’s leaders could condemn with a straight face the “loose talk about confiscation of private property and necessity of class war,” on the grounds that both militated not against their own interests, but against their creed of non-violence!”26 (in Zaidi, 1985: 66). This is why Prakash Upadhyaya (1992: 837) argues that Gandhian nationalism sought to construct a ‘moral unity’ of India’s social classes—of the landed and landless, rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged—through non-class metaphors, a unity in which the dominant would maintain their position and the weak would accept their dominance with resignation and without envy, in the name of India's spiritual heritage.27

Hence, while Gandhi’s political philosophy “translated the realities of the Indian situation into the non-secular language of community, tradition and spirituality,” it also suggested “that India’s religious morality would hold it together both as a society and as a nation state.” This is why the inter-twining of religion and politics was put forward (despite its many and obvious failures) as the philosophical basis of the Indian nation. Religiosity and spiritualism represented, both to Gandhi and his followers, the uniqueness of Indian political culture and ‘Indianness’ (Upadhyaya, 1992:833-37).

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Yet, says Upadhyaya (939), no serious attempts have been made to expose the non-secular basis of Indian nationalism; instead its secularism is “simply accepted as a self-evident truth.”28 In reality, however, some of the "strands of nationalist discourse ... were ... avowedly religious in their imagery and focus.” Hence to claim, like Bipin Chandra (1981:189) does, that “Gandhi’s politics was, of course, fully secular,” is to misrepresent it flagrantly, indeed. Not only was Gandhian nationalism no more secular than that of the “extremists’” but its rejection of the hegemonizing discourses of colonialism necessarily entailed a rejection of secularism, with its claim to universality. In this context, Nikhil Aziz Hemmady (1994: 7-8) argues that while secularism began by justifying pluralism and the legitimacy of dissent, it ended up disallowing both in the name of its own universalism. However, Western universalism has always been a discourse of the particular since it has excluded non-secular categories on the grounds of their primitiveness, inferiority, or unscientific nature. In rejecting the Western, “modernist project,” therefore, Gandhi also had to reject Western universalism, hence secularism, says Hemmady. (According to him, this does not make Gandhi a relativist; it only means that his “universalism was not grounded in the hegemony of one particular.” Yet, it may be claimed that in so far as his universalism was grounded in Hinduism, it was also a form of particularism, even if it was non-secular in nature.) Gandhi’s realization that “religious customs, deep-rooted in the ancient past" were a determinant of social behavior, specially of the peasants (Balabushevich and Dyakov, 1964:37), may have been another reason for his rejection of secularism. Certainly, it was in the name of religious values that he attempted to elevate non-violence and class harmony to political virtues. To the peasants, for centuries little more than political fringe dwellers and inured to the structural violence inherent in poverty and caste discrimination, his appeals for harmony could not have been as odious as they have been to all those frustrated at the lost chance for a revolution in India. Thus Joan Beauchamp (1934: 170) claims that Gandhi’s "happy knack (from the Congress point of view) of putting up an almost impenetrable barrage of religious prejudices and sanctimonious slogans enclosed in a mist of saintliness” served to hide “his real character as a shrewd, unscrupulous servant of the Indian bourgeoisie.” While such views of Gandhi are unduly harsh, his approach towards the subaltern classes gives them some credibility. Brown (1974: 474), for instance, argues that by banning violence he shut the “door to the most obvious path of peasant participation” in the national struggle. In fact, a secret British report of 1941 conceded the role of “Gandhi’s movement [in putting] an end to the sort of agrarian discontent that Nehru had been endeavoring to stir up” (in Desai, 1988:167).

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Even as sympathetic a commentator as Chatterjee (1993a: 125) admits that Gandhism conceived of a politics “in which the peasants are mobilized but do not participate, of a nation of which they are a part, but a national state from which they are for ever distanced.” If Gandhian “nationalism” had this rather unhappy consequence for the peasants, it was no more felicitous for the Muslims. On the one hand, Gandhi sought to bring them into the political mainstream by promising them equitable treatment, as “brothers.” On the other, not only did he retain the we-they distinction on which “Indian” nationalism had so far been predicated (Kumar, 1990), but he dismissed their claims to nationhood on the grounds that there was “no parallel in history for a body of converts and their descendants [to claim to be] a nation apart from the parent stock” (in Ahmad, 1970: 449). Moreover, his tendency to rely on “Hindu idioms” like “Ramrajya, satya and ahimsa, indicate that he viewed India’s spiritual heritage as exclusively Hindu (Upadhyaya, 1992: 837). This is why it may be wrong to claim that the national movement during the Gandhian period sought communal unity or harmony, in the main, through deals or compromises at the top, between the elite leaders of different communities, but shied away from seeking it from below, through the militant unity of the Indian masses, of all communities, fighting together for their common national and class interests (Singh, 1990:45).

This is because even at the “top” communal harmony was shaky. True, under Gandhi the Congress was able initially to draw to itself segments of the Muslim elite, but this entente did not survive the 1920s.29 The aims and methods of the Congress as well as the overtly Hindu bent of its ideology brought it increasingly into conflict with the Muslims in the League (Robinson, 1987: 173). Even the more secular members of the Congress, says Robinson showed a hatred of Muslims the depth of which still takes us aback: British rule is hailed for supplanting Muslim tyranny; Muslims are accused of robbing Hindus of religion, wealth and women; they are outsiders in India;... only Hindus are Indian; while relics of Muslim power are presented as ‘wounds in the heart' kept afresh by the sight of a mosque by the holy temple of Vishwanath.

Men like these, continues Robinson (179), were disposed to see in the Muslim League a “betrayal of India’s real self, a bastion of feudal privilege which stood in the way of socially radical reform, an organisation of

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place-seekers” who in pursuit of their own ambitions “helped to keep the imperialists in power and to sabotage their own sacrifices.” As a result, whenever the Congress appeared to draw closer to the Muslims, "there was a Hindu backlash” (175). (See also Gordon, 1975.) By 1928, even British officials noted a new “model” of Hindu-Muslim antagonism that was revealed in organized political action for political ends. It is something deeper, more enduring, more embracing in its objectives than the old traditional, semiinstinctive antagonism which vented itself in street fights, and stonethrowing (Coatman in Moore, 1974:101).

This new model is also evident in Gandhi’s attitude towards the Muslims and the League after the 1930s. Thus, by the 1940s, he would seek to deny the League’s right to exist by claiming that “damn it by whatever name you may, there can be only one party in India, and that is the Congress.” The only test of nationhood, he said, arose from “our common political subjugation” and in this test, he aspired to “represent all the sections that compose the people of India” (in Ahmad, 356; 449; 456). As Jinnah was eventually to say exasperatedly, “on the one hand he wants a League-Congress agreement, and on the other he denies its representative character and authority to speak on behalf of the Mussalmans of India. Mr. Gandhi is an enigma” (in Ahmad, 475). (Incidentally, while Hindu-Muslim antagonism augured ill for India’s unity, it was an added reason the Congress supported a system based on the representation of numbers [“democracy.”] In such a system, not only would the Hindus be assured permanent control through constitutional means, but it would end the British-instituted communal arrangements that threatened to open a Pandora's box of claims in a multi-religious country like India.) Although Gandhi’s ideology estranged the Muslims and marginalized the peasants, it was crucial for allowing the dominant Hindu groups to challenge the colonial state and to institute their own leadership over the subaltern groups, as argued. However, in this context, it is important to note that their success in doing both can be ascribed not only to their “innate strength as an internal, subjective force,” but also to the specific “international conjuncture”30 in which the national struggle occurred: at a time of declining British hegemony, both internationally and in India. While the Raj was capable of enormous coercion even at the time of its termination, what had given it legitimacy in British and Indian eyes thus far was not only its use of force or a massive British presence in India, but notions of its justice and “benevolent paternalism.” That some thousand men could rule over nearly 400 million souls for two centuries,

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not without bloodshed, but for the most part peaceably, leads one to question the validity of the claim, often made by the less discerning Englishman himself, that they held India only “by the sword” (JoysonHicks in Dutt, 1949:280). In fact, as Tidrick (1992:274) notes, to "the end they believed implicitly, in true imperial style, that force was not the extension but the failure of politics.” This does not mean, of course, that violence played no role in British colonialism. In fact, to the extent that it involved not just spoliation of land but a distortion of the Indians’ self as Nandy (1983) argues, British rule inflicted deep-seated psychological violence whose repercussions South Asian intellectuals still feel as Nandy’s work suggests so perceptibly. However, implicit even in Nandy’s critique is an acknowledgement of British intellectual hegemony. This was rooted in notions of their integrity and disinterestedness on the one hand and the invincible nature of their rule on the other. These notions, however, began to corrode in public consciousness as early as World War I. As noted in Chapter 3, the famous Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, writing about the loss in British prestige recalled the time when Indians “had great faith in the justice and truthfulness of the British Government” but had now begun to doubt the veracity of even their war reports! (in Ray, 1977:505). Moreover, by exposing Britain’s need for “our help and support for the empire” (as some Indians were quick to note), the War not only accentuated English weakness but also inspired a “new self-consciousness and self-confidence” in the Indians (The Bengalee in Andrews and Mookerjee, 1938:246). Yet, this self-confidence did not turn instinctively into anti-British sentiment. As Seal (1968:13) says, “the observation that the oppressors were foreigners was the contribution of the intellectuals of Calcutta.” However, as long as notions of their paternalism remained in tact, it was difficult to dislodge them. It was to take the economic repercussions of two World Wars and three mass movements over a period of 30 years before Gandhi’s demystification of the “satanic Raj” was to allow the Indians to drive the final nail in its coffin. That it was the Congress which had the privilege to do so, can be ascribed not only to its leadership of the national struggle but also to the organizational changes introduced into it by Gandhi. Accordingly, it is necessary to conclude this review of his contributions to politics by outlining the nature of these changes. It was with the 1920 Gandhi-drafted constitution, that the Congress began to acquire “the form of a party with its organisations in the localities—in towns, villages and even in small settlements” (Balabushevich and Dyakov, 1964:62). With every extension of the franchise (1919,1936 and 1946) it was able to expand not only vertically, but also horizontally, by lowering the age of membership to 18 and by opening its doors to

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women and the “Untouchables,” groups which so far had been excluded from it. (However, in 1934, confronted with a rise in subaltern class unrest and the growing influence of the socialists in the party, Gandhi proposed a new constitution which sought to control popular participation by reducing the number of delegates to its annual sessions and by restricting the franchise in it to “habitual wearer(s) of khaddi [who] put in at least eight hours of manual labour in a month or spin a prescribed quantity of even yarn” in an obvious attempt to strengthen his own supporters [in Rajkumar n.d.: 70.]) The 1920 Constitution also set up a “clear chain of command from the top to the lowest unit” thereby allowing the centred party to tighten its control over the provincial branches. At the center, it concentrated power in the hands of a Working Committee that became not only the “most powerful body” in the party but also in “Indian political life” (Rajkumar, 46). This feature, which became permanent, allowed Gandhi to exercise control over the party and, after his departure, guaranteed its “inner circle ... collegiate dictatorship” over its affairs. As a result, the All-India Congress Committee to which the Working Committee was in theory responsible as well as the party’s annual sessions simply became “rubber stamping institutions” (Gautam, 1985: 111).31 This centralization of power allowed the party to knit together the three levels at which politics took place under the Raj: the national, provincial and local into a coherent pattern of control under the center’s leadership (Johnson, 1973; Seal, 1968; and Tomlinson, 1979). It was also in the Gandhian phase that the Congress grew from a coterie of dapper, English-suited, men into a mass party whose ranks were filled to an increasing degree by dhoti-clad Congressites espousing a wide range of ideologies. (As Shepperdson and Simmons [1988:8] note, the party showed a rare ability to synthesize “even ostensibly incompatible elements.”) Among these groups were the liberals (the erstwhile moderates), the Gandhians, and the Marxists. The liberals, who had been conservatives all along, brought to it an ideological vision shaped by a commitment to defend a capitalist system within the framework of “bourgeois” civil liberties. However, in spite of their calls for “democracy” they were skeptical of mass participation in politics. The Marxists, on the other hand, were instrumental in bringing to the fore class issues and for giving the Congress an egalitarian demeanor, thereby attracting the subaltern classes to its fold. Even though they were unable to make a dent in its conservatism, they helped to broaden its agenda by getting it to address issues of exploitation and equity. Finally, more than the highbrow liberals and iconoclastic leftists, it was the khaddi-clad Gandhians who, with their panache for mass politics and their emphasis on humanitarianism, moral reform and class harmony gave the party its im-

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age as a “national” party. The interface between all these groups was conducive to the emergence of debates that, in comparison to those in the League,32 showed a high degree of maturity, tolerance and progressive thought. Yet, as Brass and Robinson (1987: 50) note, the Congress ideology also “contained an element of intolerance towards opposition, manifested during the nationalist movement in the uncompromising hostility towards the Muslim League,” and after independence, in its policies against not only the Left but “all opposition.” Though not always unified and, in fact, split into factions aligned according to caste, personality, or ideology, the Indian National Congress prevailed in the end not because it was invincible, but because it managed to emerge as “India's” only national-political symbol. Not only did no other party acquire its status, but sizeable segments of civil society came to accept, actively or passively, its vision of India as its most authentic representation. While popular support for the Congress was vital for the success of the national struggle, it was the emergence of class conflict and subaltern class opposition to the party that helped to “democratize” its agenda. It is necessary, therefore, to examine the role of class conflict and the subaltern groups in politics more explicitly.

The Subaltern Classes and Politics In the colonial period, it was customary for state officials to depict subaltern class unrest, specially peasant insurgency, as communal riots and banditry. In more recent times, theorists, specially on the right, have been inclined to refer to the subaltern classes as a “mass” suspectable to elite “mobilization” through “manipulation” of religious or political symbols. Implicit in these views is the denial not only of political or class consciousness, but also independence of thought and even agency, to these groups. As a rejoinder to these views the subaltern scholars argue that the domain of subaltern class politics was not only distinct from, but also independent of elite politics (Guha, 1988b). The “co-existence of these two domains was,” in fact, “the index of an important historical truth, that is, the failure o f the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation" (Guha, 41: his emphasis). While the dominant classes often benefitted from subaltern class movements (in so far as they strengthened their own hand in the national struggle), they could not generate, manipulate, or orchestrate these at will. Moreover, the response of the subaltern groups to the national struggle was shaped not by the elite’s directives but by their own reconceptualization of the principles on which it was based. Finally, peasant insurgency not only preceded the national struggle but

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was a conscious undertaking involving a political struggle over rights (Chatterjee, 1988a; Desai, 1979; Guha, 1983; Kumar, 1984). The fact that these rebellions did not specify a blueprint for replacing the existing order does not put them outside the pale of politics, argues Guha. In fact, according to Guha (1983) while peasant revolts in the early phase of British rule revealed “a somewhat inchoate and naive state of consciousness,” the militant ones showed “an almost universal tendency to take on the entire range of British authority in both its official and nonofficial" forms (11:26). Thus, to the peasant, the three sources of oppression were the sarkar, the sahukar, or money-lender, and the zamindar, and “in directing his violence against all three members of this trinity irrespective of which one of them [had] provoked him to revolt in the first place,” says Guha, they showed a “certain understanding of the mutuality of their interests and the power” on which this was based. However, according to him (1988b: 42) many revolts, some “massive in scope and rich in anti-colonialist consciousness [waited] in vain for a leadership to raise them above localism and generalize them into a nationwide anti-imperialist campaign.” Claims like these, which go to the other extreme from mainstream historiography by imputing a nationalist awareness to various groups from a very early period in colonial history are, however, no less problematical and need to be examined closely. First, the fact that peasant revolts were conscious undertakings says nothing about the content of their consciousness. Irfan Habib (n.d: 40), for instance, claims that what is apparent from the “peasant uprisings in the seventeenth century,” is not so much their failure—“such was the case with peasant revolts all over the world,” he says—but the lack of any “elementary class consciousness among the peasant rebels.” Thus, there is no evidence of “any demands for a reduction of land-revenues for peasants in general, or for removal of other disabilities and burdens.” Even if allowances are made for the paucity of records, he continues, “one has to accept a difference in the levels of consciousness” of the Indian rebels and the English peasants in the fourteenth century, the German in the sixteenth, or the Chinese who “appear to have stood up with a fairly clear recognition of themselves as a class.” In fact, peasant consciousness in India was marked by its “backwardness” as late as the Revolt (41). Similarly, David Arnold (1980:235) argues that the peasants in spite of being in a “state of perpetual turbulence [and] constantly at war with their masters and creditors,” were usually driven to violence by “subsistence crises” rather than by the desire to “overturn the established social order.” Even working class violence, in spite of the Left’s influence on labor, was not the “revolutionary violence of a proletariat striving to replace industrial capitalism with a new socio-economic order.”

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Second, while some peasant33 insurrections did entail resistance to the state, they were also characterized by a simultaneous submission to its authority and faith in its benevolence (Bhadra, 1989; Patnaik, 1988). For instance, a British intelligence memorandum written in 1921 on Gandhi’s influence on the peasants notes that as a “general rule [he] is not thought of as being antagonistic to Government, but only the zamindars. The sarkar is still conceived of as something above and aloof from such considerations,” (in Pandey, 1988:287). Similarly, in his study of Bengal, Chatterjee (1986b: 187) argues that while the peasants could be rallied against it "on the question of taxes or Union Boards,” the state seemed to acquire the “role of a benevolent protector” in their consciousness during anti-landlord revolts. While he attributes this ambiguity to the primacy of the landlord-peasant tensions in Bengal, elsewhere (1988: 383) he traces this dualism to the nature of peasant ideology itself that distinguishes “between kings and kingship” which is why a revolt against the former may not necessarily be a revolt against the latter, he says. In fact, according to Eric Hobsbawm (1973:15), even though peasant movements can lend themselves to revolution, it is a mistake to “think of every incident of peasant challenge by force as a ‘rising’ or an ‘insurrection.’” Therefore, while many peasant uprisings may, in fact, have been political in nature, they may not have been anti-imperialist insurrections, per se. For them to have been so, they would also need to have been informed by a less inchoate view of imperialism. After all, as Guha (1983) and Chatterjee (1993a) themselves argue, it was precisely their inability to recognize the oppressive nature of colonialism that confined the early nationalists’ critique of it to an essentially “comprador” framework. However, even if one accepts Hobsbawm’s (1973: 12-13) argument that what is crucial for a revolution is not the “theoretical aspirations of the peasantry, [but the] practical political conjuncture in which they operate,” (since revolutions have been “made de facto by peasants who [did] not deny the legitimacy of the existing power structure,”) then the potential for the bourgeoisie to have transformed peasant insurgency into a nationalist or anti-imperialist campaign before the 1930s was restricted. Nationalism, as noted above, matured only slowly and was not anti-British in its early stages. This is why the pax Britannica endured in India for nearly half a century. Not only did local groups come to repudiate the idea of opposing the British after the Revolt, but even the official class, sought only to change its “machinery,” not colonial rule itself until the 1930s (Majumdar, 1969). Third, claims like Guha’s suggest that there is nothing problematical about "a national peasant movement or a national peasant revolt.” Hobsbawm (1973:9), on the other hand, doubts that “there can be such

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a thing” since peasant notions of community tend to be spatially confined (as Guha himself confirms) and because while they are "able to judge the local political situation... their real difficulty lies in discerning the wider movement of politics which may determine it” (13). This may be why Guha, in spite of his round condemnations of the “comprador” bourgeoisie, expected it to give a lead to the peasants and, in fact, to “speak for the nation.” However, the problem with this view is that apart from sounding suspiciously like a plea for elite mobilization, it also and much more tendentiously, reifies “the” nation, a tendency shared by other subaltern scholars as well. This view not only takes the existence of “the” nation as a given, but also suggests that nationalism meant the same thing to all social and religious groups. However, if the history of “Indian” nationalism is testimony to the successful “imagining” of a nation, it is also a compelling commentary on its fragmentary nature: its failure, that is, to visualize a truly inclusive community. As I have argued, not only did Hindu and Muslim intellectuals come to theorize nationalism in mutually exclusive ways, but dominant class (Gandhian) nationalism served to marginalize the peasants in the postcolonial state as Chatterjee (1993a) has argued. In this context, it is also important to specify how the peasants came to view nationalism, and the national struggle. Brown (1974:463), for instance, argues that to them, it was often quite simply an issue of available methods to protest against felt grievances or the expression of fear, whether of hardship and exploitation, or of competition and coercion in a society deeply influenced by traditional beliefs and divided by caste, community or tribe.

Even if this reading in only partially true, it raises the broader theoretical question of how peasants conceive secular constructs like “the nation.” In fact, if Benedict Anderson (1983) is right that the need to conceptualize the nation as an “imagined political community,” arose because of the breakdown of premodern (religiously organized) communities, then it follows that where organic communities still survive, nationalist "imaginings” may be weak; at the very least, nationalism may mean something different to peasants than it does to secularized intellectuals. For all these reasons, therefore, claims that early peasant revolts were nationalistic or anti-imperialistic or that nationalism had universal appeal or meaning need to be made with care. None of this is to suggest, however, that subaltern class movements, specially when they began to coalesce with the “national” struggle in the twentieth century, did not have a powerful impact upon it. In fact, without subaltern class support, the dominant groups would have been hard

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put to launch the struggle itself. Indeed, subaltern class movements and, specially unrest, were vital not only for lending credence to the “national” struggle, but also for liberalizing and democratizing dominant class politics. A good indicator, in this context, are the changes that occurred in the Congress after the 1920s. Until then, the party’s platform and ideology remained fairly static, showing few signs of endogenous change (specially after the expulsion of the "extremists.”) The litany of demands it recited by rote annually show only modest changes even after Gandhi’s advent. However, starting in the 1930s, the Congress began gradually to widen its own agenda and to define more clearly its idea of a liberaldemocratic order. While these changes have been credited to Gandhi and to the initiative of the dominant groups, they seem to have been inspired by those of the subaltern classes as well. Thus, the growth of militant trade unions and kisan sabhas outside the party’s control, demanding not only freedom and political reforms but also socialization of the means of production and confiscation of land, posed if not a political threat, at least an incipient ideological challenge to the dominant classes at a time when they had just embarked on their struggle for hegemony. Therefore, much like the moderates who had exorcised the “extremists” but retained their populism, the Gandhians also realized the importance of broadening their political imagination if they were to retain the support of workers and peasants as Gandhi and later Das had warned. (In fact, by 1916, the Congress was already out of step with the radical aspirations of its own rank and file and it was Gandhi’s ability to close this gap that allowed him to capture the party [Gautam, 1985.]) In this context, it is significant that the Nehru Report (1928), the 1931 Fundamental Rights Resolution, as well as the Congress’ election manifestos (1936 and 1946), all of which solidified its commitment to a “democratic” order followed subaltern class demands for political and economic reforms. A good example is the Fundamental Rights Resolution of 1931 which contains, though in watered-down form, parts of the program formulated by the Third Annual Conference of All-India Workers and Peasants Parties held that year which included regulation of the working day, state insurance against unemployment, old age and sickness, abolition of forced labor, land revenue assessments based on income tax, abolition of such revenue on land irrigated by wells, etc. (in Javed, 1988: 92-93). Similarly, the Nehru Report’s call for universal adult suffrage followed on the heels of a similar demand made earlier by the WPP. Although it is difficult to suggest a strict causality here, it is more than coincidental that the Congress began to broaden its platform only after

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(a) the advent of workers and peasants parties committed to subaltern class uplift and (b) the outbreak of significant social strife. In the latter context, Hobsbawm (1973:12) argues that while the “potential power of a traditional peasantry is enormous its actual power and influence are much more limited.” Thus, while the peasants’ actual participation in the Congress induced only modest changes in it, fears of India’s “teeming millions” (as a popular, and revealing, phrase of the time went), being unleashed upon them, may have been an important factor in obliging adjustments in the platform of the party’s elites. Fearing subaltern class unrest but dependent on social endorsement for their confrontation with the state, they had to find ways of calibrating the former’s demands and interests with their own. It may be argued that it was this search for a balance between accommodating the needs of the subaltern classes, which they could not fully concede, and protecting their own, which they could not fully safeguard without the latter’s support, that liberalized Congress politics. Since there were objective limits to the “sacrifices” the dominant groups could make at the economic level, they attempted to compensate for this at others. For instance, they took up the issue of social reform, unlike the liberals and “extremists” who had steered clear of both because of their view that the Congress was not a reform party. Under Gandhi, however, the Congress embraced a more holistic view of politics that involved not only a broader definition of it, but also attention to social uplift. While social and moral reform was an inadequate substitute for economic restructuring, it allowed the Congress to popularize a new and shared conception of the world by providing the people with rules of not only political but also moral behavior, thereby transforming politics itself to some degree. (Its reform activities also brought the Congress handsome political rewards an illustrative example being Gandhi’s “Constructive Program” that included an uplift of the Untouchables, whom he dubbed Harijans or the Children of God. These efforts were amply recompensed when the Congress captured all the seats reserved for them in the 1936 elections.) Moreover, having struggled historically for inclusion in the colonial order, the leading Hindu classes were well aware of the advantage of assimilating the subaltern groups into their own party. While this alliance was clearly not a partnership of equals, nor did it reflect a genuinely national-popular coalition, it nevertheless paved the way for an appreciable degree of political accord between the two groups around a broadly shared agenda. It is this accord which, it may be argued, provides the real basis of Indian “democracy.”34 In this context, it is important to stress that this accommodative “tradition” had its origins neither in some innate "Indian” characteristic as mainstream theorists argue (e.g., Manor, 1990; Weiner, 1967), nor was it a devious plot to hoodwink the

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masses, as some Marxists like to contend. Instead, it was the outcome of a political conflict between the dominant and subaltern classes. That the dominant classes turned to a policy of accommodation rather than repression to achieve their ends can also be ascribed to political factors rather than simply to their own class “nature.” Thus, after the 1930s, their ability to expand their control over political society came increasingly to hinge on their ability to form alliances with the civil in order to dislodge the British. Such an ambition encouraged a policy of collaboration vis-a-vis the subaltern groups, specially since some of them had begun to question the legitimacy of the extant social and political order. (There is where Gandhi’s ideology of class harmony and nonviolence proved so beneficial to the dominant groups: in its ability to bring the dominant and subaltern classes together, but under the former’s leadership on the basis of powerful moral arguments.) Moreover, the Raj controlled the repressive state apparatuses and it had itself favored a collaborative policy after 1857. In such a scenario, it was even more difficult for the Hindu elites to be repressive. Finally, since segments of civil society came to back the Congress, repression was rendered unnecessary. As a result, when the Constituent Assembly met in 1946 to decide upon the future form of the Indian government, that is, whether it should be based on a network of panchayats so as to establish democracy from the grass-roots and eschew all forms of centralization, or should it set up a parliamentary form of government on the British model or should it emulate the Soviet system or reproduce the corporate state of fascist theory? (Ghose, 1975: 110)

the leading classes could sanguinely “opt” for democracy. Socialism was clearly not an option given the presence of a powerful bourgeois class and the bourgeois leanings of the Congress leadership (barring some exceptions); neither was Fascism, since the conditions that had fuelled it in Italy were missing in India. Not only did the Indian working class movement not approximate the struggle of Italian workers in scope or content, but the basis for effective political collusion between the colonial state and the Indian elite was limited in so far as their interests ran counter to one another’s. Therefore, to "reject” Fascism is no proof of the democratic nature of the “middle” classes. In fact, in so far as the vote for parliamentary “democracy” involved a rejection of panchayati raj, which not only had deep historical roots in Indian society but which would also have devolved some power upon the villages rather than concentrating it in their own hands, it showed the limits to the liberalism of the dominant groups.

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However, in so far as the “choice” of parliamentary government (“democracy”) was enabled by the effective leadership of civil society (hegemony) of the dominant groups, the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly are instructive in clarifying the relationship between both. Had the dominant classes failed to secure hegemony (even if of a passive nature), they may have been less supportive of a (“democratic”) system which required them to secure a mandate for their rule from the subaltern groups. However, having already acquired such a mandate, a “democracy” posed no threat to them. This is why I believe that without a class engaged in a counter-hegemonic struggle against the state, and simultaneously in a struggle for its own hegemony, and without subaltern class challenges to it, colonial Hindu politics may have remained much more undemocratic than it was. That, at least, is the conclusion suggested by a comparison with Muslim politics.

Conclusion Although the advent of a Hindu official class was essential for organized politics, neither its commitment to democracy nor its hegemony were spontaneous. Instead, both were induced by shifting state-class and interclass alignments, specifically, by openings from above generated by a decline in the colonial state’s hegemony and pressures from below in the form of subaltern class unrest. Thus, as long as colonial rule remained in tact and the subaltern groups disorganized, and as long as the official class itself did not aspire to hegemony, its politics remained anti-democratic in spite its call for elections. When, on the other hand, the state’s hegemony began to decline and subaltern class unrest began to acquire an organized form, a policy of conciliation became necessary to establish its leadership over civil society. It was this policy that also “democratized” Indian politics. The success of the leading Hindu classes in acquiring hegemony, on the other hand, can be ascribed to their having been able to formulate a counter-hegemonic project that allowed them to emerge from their own subalternity, as well as to erosions in the colonial state’s authority and the inability of the subaltern groups to challenge the Congress. This interpretation differs from other Gramscian views in that it distinguishes between the historical processes that enabled the bourgeoisie to acquire hegemony and those which contributed to the emergence of democracy. In this context, it locates the former in the ability of the leading Hindu classes to create a counter-hegemonic project vis-avis the state which simultaneously became the basis of their own hegemony rather than assuming it a priori, and the second in the nature

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and outcome of political and class conflicts between the dominant and subaltern groups.35 While “democracy” has failed to ameliorate the social and economic problems of the Indian people, its failure has to do partly with the nature of the “bourgeois” system itself and partly with the historical conditions under which it emerged. Given the restricted nature of both liberalism and democracy in the “British Indian” protocol, and the prevailing conditions of semi-feudalism, penury, and extreme socio-economic underdevelopment in the country, it is no small miracle that even a thin form of democracy managed to emerge in India. Indian Muslim politics, on the other hand, culminated in a rather different outcome as Chapter 5 shows. Notes 1. Conflicts between the dominant and subaltern classes acquired a systematic and theorized form only after the 1920s, as I argue later in this chapter. 2. Only Bengal, Punjab and Maharashtra were the most active in national politics. See H.F. Owen, “Towards Nationwide Agitation and Organisation: The Home Rule Leagues, 1915-18,” in D.A. Low (ed.), Soundings in Modern South Asian History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. However, compared to the League (for which, see Chapter 5) the Congress had an advantage in having some provincial roots from the start. 3. For an analysis of the “relationship between the content of nationalist discourse and the kind of politics which nationalism conducts” see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, London: Zed Books, 2nd edition, 1993a, p. 40. 4. In a more recent exposition Chatterjee attempts to explain this contradiction by distinguishing between the “inner” (cultural) and “outer” (state-related) dimensions of Hindu nationalist discourse. Whereas in its outer dimensions, Hindu nationalism succumbed to colonial values, he says, in its inner, it tried to retain its own culture, and it was in the latter that the foundations of “the nation” were laid. See The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993b. 5. See Chapter 5 on the landlords’ politics. 6. The first marks the advent of “extremist” politics while the last three correspond with the Gandhian phase. 7. The second phase actually comprised two periods: 1905-1907 and 19071919. Although the latter was longer, it was uneventful compared with the first and is not being dealt with here. 8 .1put the word “extremists” in quotes because they favored nonviolence and passive resistance, something that the label “extremist” conceals. 9. For a discussion of Muslim politics see Chapter 5. 10. In 1927, the Madras session (held without Gandhi) adopted the goal of independence under pressure from the Left and subaltern class parties but this

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was changed to dominion status in 1928 under Gandhi’s influence. It was only in 1934 that the goal of independence was adopted. 11. For an assessment of the Home Rule Leagues see Owen, “Towards Nationwide Agitation and Organisation: The Home Rule Leagues, 1915-18,” op. cit. 12. The Indian name for homespun cotton cloth. 13. While the Report sought dominion status for India, it proposed extending some of the prerogatives underwritten by the state, such as universal adult franchise. 14. Although the largest movement in colonial Indian history, it involved only 100,000 people, less than one half of one percent of India’s total population. 15. See the discussion on the Left’s role in the Congress in the text below. 16. British secret documents pertaining to the 1942 Quit India movement detail the role played by Birla and the Marwari businessmen in encouraging laborers to launch strikes and acts of sabotage while being paid full wages and a bonus of three months salary. The Indian capitalists, it seems, hoped to use the movement to undercut their British counterparts in India. See P.N. Chopra (ed.), Quit India Movement: British Secret Documents, New Delhi: Interprint, 1986, specially p. 51 and 193. 17. See Jacques Pouchepadass for an analysis of the reasons why the rich and middle peasants asked for Gandhi’s intervention. “Local Leaders and the Intelligentsia in the Champaran Satyagraha (1917): A Study in Peasant Mobilization,” in Contributions to Indian Sociology (NS), Number 8,1974. pp. 67-87. 18. Gandhi had just called off the second disobedience movement after signing a pact with the viceroy, Irwin (known as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact). Accordingly, when he set sail for London to negotiate with the British (as the sole delegate of the Congress accompanied unofficially by India’s leading capitalist, Birla) he was greeted by black banners and “down with Gandhi” signs. Joan Beauchamp, JBritish Imperialism in India, London: Martin Lawrence, Ltd., 1934. 19. According to Hari Singh, his rise to power was facilitated by Gokhale’s death in 1915, Tilak’s confinement to Maharashtra, Lala Lajpat Rai’s absence from India and Naroji’s death in 1917. Only Mrs. Beasant [an Irish woman associated with the Home Rule Leagues] was left and she was “66 and was a European.” Gandhi Rowlatt Satyagraha and British Imperialism: Emergence of Mass Movements in Punjab and Delhi, Delhi: Indian Bibliographies Bureau, 1990, p. 70. 20. However, even after his resignation from the Congress, Gandhi continued to play the role of king maker, emerging periodically from his self-imposed exiles to lead agitations and negotiate on the party’s behalf. 21. As Kathryn Tidrick notes, this “was the m an... who joined the British army and worked as a stretcher bearer in the Zulu rebellion of 1906, giving as his reason that ‘the British empire existed for the welfare of the world.’ ” In fact, according to her, the “boldness of Gandhi’s political tactics obscured to a large extent the modesty of his political aspirations, which were very much in line with what moderates, taking their cue from the British, had long set their sights upon: selfgovernment within the empire.” See Empire and the English Character, London: I.B. Tauris and Company, Ltd., 1992, p. 236.

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22. See in the text, below. 23. For a detailed and more sympathetic analysis see Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973 and Romain Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi: A Study in Indian Nationalism, translated by L.V. Ramaswami Aiyar, Madras, India: S. Ganesan, 1923. 24. Satyagraha involved both individual and mass protest and Gandhi employed both to spectacular effect. 25. Sandria Freitag has examined the impact of collective rituals in creating a public arena/sphere in India that was integral to the development of communal identities. Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 26. The Congress and Gandhi also used arguments about nonviolence and class harmony selectively, employing them to defuse tensions within Hindu society rather than between the latter and the state and/or the Muslims. See Shive Kumar, Peasantry and the Indian National Movement, 1919-1933, Meerut, India: Anuprakashan, 1979-80, and Sukomal Sen, “New Phase of Mass Struggle during 1928-31 and the Contrasting Roles of the Bourgeoisie and the Working Class/’ in K. Kumar (ed.), Congress and Classes: Nationalism, Workers and Peasants, New Delhi: Manohar, 1988. 27. Gandhi’s emphasis on spirituality and religion as the larger social and “national” goods in whose name a moral unity could be forged between antagonistic classes reveals not only how religious ideologies can help to unify the social bloc but also how they can serve different functions for different groups. 28. For an analysis of why theorists of different persuasions tend to deny communal strands in Indian nationalist thought see N.C. Saxena, “Historiography of Communalism in India,” in M. Hasan, (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, Delhi: Manohar, 1981. 29. See Chapter 5. 30. This is Anne Showstack-Sassoon’s view of any class trying to acquire hegemony. See “Passive Revolution and the Politics of Reform,” in ShowstackSassoon (ed.), Approaches to Gramsci, London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Society, Ltd., 1982, p. 145. 31. These parallel tendencies—mass membership and open ideological debate on the one hand, and the authoritarian control of an “inner circle” on the party on the other—have persisted until today. 32. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the League. 33. According to Dipankar Gupta, many of the militant revolts were tribal revolts, a distinction Guha fails to note. See “On Altering the Ego in Peasant History: Paradoxes of the Ethnic Option,” in Peasant Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, Fall 1985: pp. 5-24; p. 20. 34. Conversely, it is the breakdown in this accord, resulting from the Congress’ inability to deliver the goods, that is fuelling state repression on the one hand, and the rise in social movements on the other. See Smitu Kothari, “Social Movements and the Redefinition of Democracy,” in Philip Oldenburg (ed.), India Briefing, 1993, Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1993. 35. This is not to suggest that the two processes were entirely discrete. It is merely to note that they had specific implications for democracy and hegemony.

5 Colonial Muslim Politics: Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism The Janus-faced nature of the British colonial legacy in South Asia survives, among other things, in the political contrast between India, the world’s largest “democracy,” and Pakistan, which has been under the control of a landlord-military-bureaucratic junta almost continually since 1958. As noted in Chapter 1, Marxists attribute this fact either to the (underdeveloped) nature of the economy or the (overdeveloped) nature of the state itself. However, as I argued earlier, both theories raise methodological problems. A Gramscian methodology, on the other hand, suggests that it is only possible to derive the forms of a state by analyzing “the political history, forms of consciousness, and modes of organization of the classes,” in particular, the nature of the relationship between the dominant and subaltern groups. In this context, Chapter 2 argued that it is the elaboration of hegemony which, by allowing the former to transcend their “economic-corporative interests connects the concrete forms assumed by the state with the particular kind of compromise established” between them (Vacca, 1982:56-58). Since the most notable feature of the Pakistani state has been the inability of any class to establish its hegemony within it in spite of the ascendancy of the landlords, it is necessary to examine not only how British rule underdeveloped Muslim civil society, but also the nature of the relationship between the dominant and subaltern groups that contributed to this fact. This is what I do in the present chapter. However, while its intent, like that of the previous one, is to assess the relationship between state, class, party and politics, historically, its structure is different since Muslim politics tended, for the most part, to take place outside the framework of the major Muslim party, the All-India Muslim League. As a result, the party did not come to play a role in politics similar to that of 143

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the Congress. To understand why, it is necessary to begin by specifying the nature of state and class relationships among the Muslims since it is only against this backdrop that the League’s saga becomes intelligible.

The Colonial State and the Muslims For the Hindu “middle” classes, the passage of control from that august assembly of British peddlers, the East India Company, to the English Crown in 1857 proved largely beneficial, as the transition marked a gradual shift in British policies from excluding the educated strata from governance to incorporating it slowly into their “system of control,” and from impeding India’s industrial development to sanctioning it. The resulting improvement in the status of the leading Hindu classes, as noted in Chapter 4, allowed them to strengthen their own control over India’s political-economy. For the Muslims, however, the switch did not prove as advantageous since the policies of both the Company and the Crown retarded their social and political development, though for differing reasons and in different ways.

The Company and the Muslims The British conquest of India, facilitated by erosions in the ruling Mughal dynasty’s power, resulted not only in the political displacement of the Muslim elite, but also, in many cases, its economic ruin. This was specially true in Bengal, the largest Muslim majority1province in India, where the British inaugurated their Permanent Settlement. As noted in Chapter 3, under its terms, land passed from the Muslim gentry to the Hindus who ended up comprising the majority of the new landlords (Ahmad, 1992:8). The Company’s exclusion of Indians from governance and its discontinuance of Persian, the language patronized by the Muslims, also displaced the Muslim officials who had customarily earned a living by serving the state (Gopal, 1959; Hasan, 1979). As a result, the Muslim elite in Bengal not only lost the status it had enjoyed during the preceding centuries of Mughal rule, but gradually fell behind the Hindu “middle” classes in all aspects of life (Sen, 1976). The Settlement and Britain’s intemperate taxation policies also ruined the predominandy Muslim Bengali peasants, sparking off a number of revolts. While most of the revolts were directed against local landlords and money-lenders and were non-denominational in character, the so-called “Wahabi” rebellion that erupted at the turn of the eighteenth century is considered to be illustrative of the disaffection of Muslim peasants against “the Honourable the Company Bahadur.” The latter,

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however, was able to quell the rebellion by depriving belligerents and non-belligerents alike of their lives and properties (Smith, 1945). However, since the British did not pursue uniform political and economic policies in India, not all segments of the Muslim community suffered the same fate at their hands. Not only did the Company find it judicious to prop up the Mughal aristocracy in Delhi (with its authority restricted to the confines of the city) until the Revolt of 1857 as a way of securing its own legitimacy, but the Raj, having learnt from the Company’s errors, “introduced fewer drastic changes in the administrative machinery of northern India” (Hasan, 1979:16). As a result, the Punjabi and U.P. elites did not suffer the same fate as their counterparts in Bengal. Not only that, but the colonial state also took several precautionary measures to ensure the well-being of segments of the peasantry, specially of the Punjab, from which the army drew most of its recruits, as noted below. Notwithstanding the variance in their political and economic policies, at an ideological level British attitudes towards the Muslims tended to remain more consistent, and, on the whole, unsympathetic. Thus, their initial reverence for Mughal accomplishments and sympathy for their end (Hardy, 1972) soon gave way to the belief that Indians had forfeited their right to self-governance due to “their own weakness, which led to their subjugation by a succession of ‘foreign’ rulers, stretching back to the Aryan invasions, and, in the more recent past, to the British conquest of [the] Mughals” (Cohn, 1983:166). Not only did the British emphasize the Muslims’ weakness, but they also depicted them as intruders in India. In their eyes whatever "national” glory the Indians could aspire to accrued to the Hindu “nation” alone. Hence, when their defeat of the (Muslim) Afghans allowed them to return the Gates of Somnath (a Hindu temple the latter had sacked six centuries earlier) to India, British officials did not find it improper to laud the event as the “ ‘proudest record of your national glory’” (in Cohn, 175). When one adds to these views the customary Orientalist representations of Islam itself as an enemy of the West, it is easy to see how colonial rule engendered a discourse that was quintessentially hostile to the Muslims. This tradition of animosity towards Islam, as Said (1979: 59) has shown, was well-established in Europe for which it was “a lasting trauma; [a] constant danger” because of Christian fears of the "Ottoman peril.” However, it was not only in Europe that its intellectuals could denounce the religion with impunity as an “ ‘incurable enemy of reason,’” (Renan in Nadvi, 1987:199). In India, too, their portrayals of Muslims as “always armed with the sword in one hand and the Quran in the other,”

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(Hardy, 1972: 62) followed the standard Orientalist constructions of the followers of Islam. (That British Orientalists in India, in spite of their avowed tolerance, should have continued to cling to such bigotry is, of course, clear evidence of the internal consistency of Orientalism as a discourse.) Even an ostensibly sympathetic advocate of Muslim well-being like W.W. Hunter could thus hope that by improving their material condition, the British could wean them away from their own religion towards “ ‘a higher level of belief, i.e. Christianity’” (Hardy, 210). Colonial rule, and Orientalism in particular, then, not only failed to imbue the Muslims with the same sort of “national,” political, or religious pride as it had the Hindus, but it put them on the defensive by throwing into question not only their standing in India, but their status as Muslims as such. In conjunction with the Evangelicals’ attacks on Islam, its effects were to cause them to turn increasingly “inward” (Nehru, 1946; Zakaria, 1970) in an attempt to protect their identities. However, greater orthodoxy and insularity were not the only Muslim responses to the colonial assault. On the contrary, their reaction ranged from reinterpreting their religion along modem lines to attempting to oust the British from India. Thus, on the one hand, Muslim intellectuals like Syed Ameer Ali and Syed Ahmed Khan undertook a modernist exegesis of Islam with the intent of presenting it as a religion at once close to and superior than Christianity. Segments of the clergy as well as lay-people also entered into acrimonious, if eventually unproductive, debates with the missionaries in some areas. (According to Barbara Metcalf [1992: 236] it was these Christian-Hindu-Muslim debates that fuelled “claims to being ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim.’”) At the same time, numerous movements seeking to reconstruct Muslim identities also materialized in many provinces. In the U.P., for instance, the “Deobandi [an Islamic seminary] techniques of religious reform [helped to foster] a greater awareness of Muslim identity and a more general application of Islamic tenets to everyday life.” Even women began contributing articles on Islamic issues to newspapers (Minault, 1992:183). Similarly, in Bengal, the “earlier manifestations of Islam’s challenge to Western domination and Western ideas was though reform movements seeking to organize the Muslims on the basis of a definite ideology” (Ahmed, 1992:115). Finally, as noted in Chapter 3, a number of militant movements seeking to destroy British power broke out during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 These movements, as John Esposito (1988:123-27) notes, were inspired by Islamic revivalism which engulfed the entire Islamic world during this period. In India, it was the works of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and Shah Wali Allah that provided the basis for revivalism. Both sought not only to expunge Indian Islam of the “syncretism that threatened [its] identity, moral fiber, and survival ... in its multiconfessional setting,”

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but also to revitalize the social and political lives of their communities. While their influence remained limited, it is necessary to acknowledge the role of factors internal to Islam in also actuating “claims to being Muslim.” By 1857, a combination of reasons, some internal to Islam and Hinduism and other deriving more immediately from the skirmish with colonialism had climaxed in the Revolt. The Revolt, however, proved abortive. Defeated by the Raj and later coopted by it, India’s landed gentry, Muslims among it, laid down arms for the duration of colonial rule, becoming its ally instead. Curiously, collaboration with the Raj also proved harmful to Muslim politics in many ways.

The Crown and the Muslims The Raj inaugurated itself in 1857 convinced that in the Muslims it had antagonists far more dangerous than in the Hindus (Hardy, 1972). Such fears were inspired not only by their participation in the Revolt, but also, as David Lelyveld (1978:9-12) notes, by British adherence to “a domino theory of Muslim expansion throughout the world.” Moreover, of the two viewpoints about Muslims prevalent at the time—as a “united body permanently antagonistic to imperial rule” and a fragmented group, itself part of a divided society—the first was considered more politically accurate. Accordingly, the Raj undertook to impress upon its Muslim subjects that only those with a record of fealty to it were likely to receive its approbation by hanging thousands of Muslim rebels and bestowing their property on loyalists and by conferring office on the basis not of merit or educational qualifications, but “family background and tried loyalty” to itself (Hasan, 1979:16). Consequently, at a time when the Hindu official class turned to the Congress to press its claims to power, the Muslim gentry under the guidance of Syed Ahmed undertook to establish the faithfulness of the “Loyal Muhammadans of India” to the Raj by turning away from political activity. In fact, the fallout from the Revolt induced Syed Ahmed to spend his entire life trying to reconcile the former and present rulers of India by stressing upon his community the value of rejecting another confrontation with the British. As a result, the word “politics” came to symbolize for the Muslims “a mild form of collusion with Government,” as the Aligarh Institute Gazette wrote in 1903. The fact that the “educated Mahommedan is ... the most conservative element in Indian society,” as the British themselves noted (in Al-Mujahid, 1990: 36-40; 113) resulted not only from their own political policies, but also from the Orientalists’ attempts to tutor the Muslim elite at Aligarh, the Islamic Cambridge of India. As a result, by 1890, observers found in Aligarh “a striking example

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of a rapprochement taking place between the rulers and the ruled” (in Zakaria, 1970: 248). Expectedly, quietism and loyalty to the British also became core axioms of the Aligarh Movement, the name given to the cultural “renaissance” associated with the university. Because of its break with doctrinal Islam, and its advocacy of Western education, Aligarh is said to have had a "modernizing” impact on the Muslims (Malik, 1980). However, critics contend that its traditional curricula, emphasis on fidelity to the Raj, and the social origins of its students, most of whom came from landed families, bred a "sectarian” milieu instead. Hence, while the Hindus “took to liberal ideas, the Muslims drew comfort from time-honoured, aristocratic values.” In spite of the “seeming similarity in curricula,” therefore, not only was education “much less broad-based” for the Muslims but it was not favorable for the growth of liberalism (Zakaria, 1970:351). (Radicalism, when it emerged, was a measure not of a revolutionary Weltanschauung of the intellectuals but often their stance towards the British and Hindus. Thus, the men who broke with Aligarh’s timidity to protest British policies or to cooperate with the Congress became known as “radicals.”) If it is true, as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983: 14) argue, that the “national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without careful attention to the ‘invention of tradition,’” then the traditions the British helped to invent for the Muslims through their Orientalist-style education, ceremonials, and creation of a gentry whose very coat of arms they designed themselves3 were hardly conducive to the growth of progressive thinking. In fact, if their rule had had some modernizing impulses prior to the Revolt, it became increasingly conservative in its aftermath as the British, in wanting to avert future cataclysms, decided to leave intact institutions and customs formerly regarded as a hamper on India’s advance. Not only that, but they actually endeavored to turn back the hands of the clock by attempting to impose the feudal durbars on India and requiring its people to adopt the obsolete etiquette and apparel of the Mughals. While the Hindu elite was able to resist some of these attempts at social engineering, the Muslim seems to have fallen easier prey to them both because of its own conservatism and its nostalgia for Mughal rule which, though of dubious repute now, continued to give it a sense of a legitimate connection with India. This conservatism and the idea of a Muslim nexus with India are unmistakable in Muslim “nationalist” discourse when it began to crystalize in the late nineteenth century. Prior to analyzing it, it is necessary to mention that it has received little attention from the subaltern scholars in their analyses of “Indian” nationalism. One reason for this neglect may be historical since the first proponents of nationalism were all Hindus; the Muslims only emerged on the all-India scene a half century

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later and their impact on it remained negligible until the 1940s. Since the subaltern scholars have focused on deconstructing Hindu “nationalist” texts, they are necessarily restricted in the scope of their own analyses. However, given their self-professed aim to narrate the histories of politically and intellectually submerged groups (which the Muslims certainly were for the greater duration of colonial rule) a more basic reason for ignoring them may have to do with the prevalent view that “in one case (Hindu) the invocation of community ideology took the shape of nationalism, in the other (Muslim) of communalism” (Freitag, 1989:218). The idea, however, that Hindu nationalism was secular while the Muslim was a communal aberration and that, too, created by “imperialism to fracture the secular national identity thereby destroying the larger national unity,” (Khan, 1989:42) is both simplistic and misleading. First, as I argued in Chapters 3 and 4, nationalist and religious identities were inextricably linked among both the Muslims and Hindus. Certainly, a dispassionate reading of Muslim nationalist thought reveals in it the same strands of religiosity and secularism that were woven together by Hindu nationalists from Chatterjee to Gandhi.4 Second, the idea that there was an existing “national unity” (and an awareness of it) that Muslim communalism destroyed has also been shown to be a myth.5 Third, many Muslims were (and continue to be) Indian nationalists. Finally, it may not be irrelevant to note the similarity between claims about Muslim communalism and thé Orientalist view that it is “characteristic of Mohammedanism that all national feeling assumes a religious aspect, inasmuch as the whole polity and social forms of a Moslem country are clothed in a religious dress” (Smith in Said, 1979: 236). Apart from its prurient essentialism, this view ignores the fact that in so far as "politics involves a set of active links, both positive and negative, between civil society and institutions of pow er... there has been little separation, certainly none in our time, between religion and politics anywhere” as Eqbal Ahmed (1985: 17-19) notes. Moreover, as he says, while the “fusion of religion and political power was and remains an ideal in the Muslim tradition, the absence of such a fusion is a historically experienced and recognised reality.” For all these reasons, then, one needs to use the same yardstick to analyze Muslim nationalist discourse as the Hindu. Unlike Hindu nationalist discourse, however, the Muslim emerged not in Bengal, home of British Orientalism and a Muslim majority province, but in the U.P., a Muslim minority province. In fact, according to scholars, the provocative nature of Bengali Hindu historiography (which laid the basis for Hindu nationalism), generated no response from Bengali Muslim intellectuals. While by the late nineteenth century, some of them had become concerned at the writing of Bengali text-books by Hindus, their own works continued to show a strange “lack of curiosity about life

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and the world” (Hai in Ahmed, 1974:308). Thus, one of the major novels written by a Muslim in the early twentieth century dealt with a subject that “had no connection with contemporary Muslim society—the love of the young queen Revati for her step-son Narendra” (Ahmed, 309). Muslim fiction, says Sufia Ahmed (1974:336-37), remained “completely divorced from any contact with ordinary life. Nothing in the account of scene or custom would indicate that the writers were Bengali.” Not only that, but the stories had “no connection with and in no way [reflected] the social life of the time when the author wrote.” As for politics, “surprisingly few works” dealt with the subject, even in 1906 when the Muslim League, the first “national” party of the Muslim elite, was launched at Dacca. (Nor does Bengal’s partition seem to have had the same vitalizing impact on Muslims as it had on the Hindus.) Muslim historical works, on the other hand, says Ahmed (354) emphasized the “wider history of Islam rather than that of Islam in India,” their aim being to make the Muslims "aware of their religious, not their national history.” However, in a recent study, Chatterjee (1993b: 108) argues that at least two Bengali Muslims responded to the call of writing “a national history appropriate for the Musalman of Bengal.” These works were written in the belief that a “true account of the glorious achievements of the Muslims in India would produce ... greater amity between Hindus and Muslims.” Moreover, in its structural aspects, this historiography resembled the Hindu (109). However, from Chatterjee’s account, it is unclear what, if any, impact Muslim historiography had on the Hindus. In fact, he notes that in attempting to free themselves of colonial influences, they came to link colonialism not only with British, but also Muslim rule, something he himself does not deem inconsistent since “in both cases, the object of national freedom was the end of colonial rule” (109). (The fact that Muslim "colonial rule” had ended years ago and that, therefore, it was no longer a fetter upon “national” freedom seems to be lost on Chatterjee.) Part of the reason for the Muslims’ failure to challenge Hindu versions of Indian history and their political apathy was that the Bengali Muslim community was the most educationally backward in India. Another reason, says Rafiuddin Ahmed (1981), was that it was socially fragmented between the ashrafor elite (of foreign descent) and the ajlaf, or local “low boms.”6 It was the former, he says, who by failing to provide effective leadership were responsible for the tardy progress of the Muslims. Not only did they remain preoccupied with the purity of their racial pedigree to the exclusion of other issues, but they refused to accept Bengali as their mother tongue, viewing it as a Hindu language instead. Unlike them, the Hindu middle class lived dispersed throughout “the province [and] did not speak a language different from the masses; they were very

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emphatically Bengalis: their thoughts and ideas, language and culture, remained firmly rooted in the soil of Bengal” (25). (Incidentally, neither of the Ahmeds clarify why the development of a Bengali identity was essential for the growth of Muslim nationalism.) The Muslim elite’s sense of itself as a “nation,” then, emerged not in Bengal but in the U.P., as a result partly of its adherence to a “religious tradition whose relationship to power was deemed to be both necessary and divinely ordained,” and partly as a reaction to British views of representation (Shaikh, 1989: 9). Thus, as Shaikh (74) has argued, and as noted in Chapter 3, while the British wished to secure a representative assembly, being Indian could not establish “representative status” as the very idea of “ ‘Indian’ was subject to question in so diverse a society.” It was also necessary to show a socio-cultural, religious or racial connection between representative and represented. It was in part this (decidedly premodem and non-political) view of representation that persuaded Muslims to argue that only they could represent themselves since they shared such affinities. Unlike Bengali Hindu nationalists, then, they were not (yet) inspired by feelings of territoriality.7 Instead, they sought only the right to represent themselves, an endeavor that led them not only to define themselves as a nation, but to question the merits of “representation” itself. To both Syed Ahmed’s labors were centred. What made the Muslims a discrete quam,8 or community, according to Syed Ahmed, was the fact that they were a political minority, albeit an important one since it had once ruled India. (Hence, while Muslim nationalists would also seek some of their inspiration from history, they would turn not to Orientalist renditions of it, but to the claim that as the former sovereigns of India and a community that still played a vital role in its cultural life and defense, they were entitled to certain rights under the Raj, a view that would receive its formal articulation in the address of the Simla Deputation, which I discuss below.) Like those of the Hindu “nationalists” of his day, Syed Ahmed’s arguments did not preclude the possibility of India being ruled, perhaps indefinitely, by the British. On the contrary, they were motivated by his belief in just such an eventuality. If the British were indeed in India to stay, as it appeared, then it was prudent for the Muslims, already implicated in their eyes by their part in the Revolt, to defend their interests by establishing an amiable relationship with them. Such a relationship, Syed Ahmed believed, could best be constructed by avoiding the agitational politics of the Hindu-dominated Congress, a course of action he justified by claiming not only that the Muslims were a separate “nation” with their own interests, but also by exposing the drawbacks of the representative system for which the Congress liberals were struggling.

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Commenting on J.S. Mill’s views on representation, Syed Ahmed argued that in a system that depended for its functioning on majorities, the first criteria was that “the voters should possess the highest degree of homogeneity;” that is, the “people should have no differences in the matter of nationality, religion, ways of living, customs, morals, culture and historical trends” (in Ahmad, 1970:12). His conclusion that a representative system was ill-suited for India was based partly on his view that its “different castes and creeds” did not constitute a nation because of which their “aims and aspirations fcould not be] one and the same.” As such, representative institutions could not benefit everyone equally (in Ahmad, xxvi-viii). In spite of a modicum of agreement between Hindus and Muslims, then, (as he bluntly put it, “there are no things in the world which have no points in common—there are many things in common between a man and a pig,”) the Congress could only “be called ‘national’ when the ultimate aims and objects of the people of which it is composed are identical” (in Al-Mujahid, 1990: 216-17). Secondly, in a system that privileged the supremacy of numbers, where they were outnumbered four to one, the Muslims would end up like the “unfortunate Irish members in the English Parliament who have always been outvoted by the Englishmen.” It would be “like a game of dice, in which one man had four dice and the other only one” (in Pirzada, 1969: xxiiiiv). What could possibly compel them to place themselves at such a patent disadvantage? Finally, Syed Ahmed’s verdict against the representative system stemmed from his conviction that history did not provide even one example of such a system being established in “a country over which a foreign race rules.” Moreover, as a people who had for centuries held sway over different countries, the Muslims “know what it is to rule. Be not unjust to that nation which is ruling over you, and think also on this: how upright is her rule” (in Pirzada, 1969: 208; 211). Unlike Hindu “nationalists,” then, Syed Ahmed would take up the question of Britain’s right to rule India and would justify it not only in terms of its own merit, but in terms of the partly Aristotelian argument (quite unintentional) that to rule and to be ruled in turn was only in the fairness of things (a view he seems to have had little difficulty in renouncing when it came to the possibility of Muslims being ruled by the Hindus!) While favorably inclined to such views, the British showed little inclination to take them into account in their formulation of policy. However, with segments of the Hindu elite turning to agitation after Bengal’s partition, they realized the benefit of propitiating the Muslim by accepting its claim to be a distinct group and setting it up as such through separate electorates in 1909. (As they came increasingly to rely upon the Muslim Punjab peasantry, the celebrated “sword arm of India” to keep peace at home and fight their imperialist wars abroad, the British were

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even more persuaded of the advisability of keeping the sword and the arm that wielded it under control by accommodating the Muslims, specially of the Punjab, as noted below.) Viewed by their critics as a diabolical plot to divide India, separate electorates are seen to have had their origins in religious differences alone9 (Sharma, 1987). However, they appear to have been a logical extension of British policies towards the landed classes after the Revolt, in addition to having been prompted by the conflicting political interests of the Hindu “middle” and the Muslim not-so-middle classes. The Revolt, as mentioned, had sensitized the English to the importance of coopting segments of the elite into the colonial order. As the most powerful group even under the Raj continued to be the landlords, the British sought not only to include them in their councils, but also to protect their interests via more informal means (detailed in the sections on the U.P. and Punjab below). In propping up the Muslim gentry, therefore, the Raj was also backing the landlords who had stood by it in the past and could be banked on to do so again. Muslim landlord support nicely counter-balanced Hindu “bourgeois ferment” providing the English the latitude to play the two groups against one another. However, while it was fortuitous for the Raj that the Muslim elite tended to be landed while the “middle” class was Hindu, it was not only religious differences that allowed it to use them as a counterpoise to one another but also their divergent class and political interests. Had the two shared an identity of concerns, the Raj could not profitably have played them off against one another, either. After all, it did not attempt to split the Hindu and Muslims princes. On the contrary, political reform was predicated on the expectation of their continuing collaboration with not only the English but with one another, as well. That Hindu and Muslims princes could act as a bloc while the “British Indian” (Hindu) official and (Muslim) landed classes could not, was due to the convergence of the former’s interests. Even in "British India” whenever Hindu-Muslim political interests intersected, the Raj could not prevent their temporary unity exemplified, for instance, in the signing of the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the League and the participation of Muslims and Hindus in the 1919 Khilafat Movement under Gandhi’s leadership.10 That it was not simply religious differences which prompted the introduction of separate electorates is also borne out by the fact that the British later attempted to push provincial Muslim and Hindu landlords to organize in order to counter urban Hindu and Muslim politicians operating from the center, an enterprise in which they were nominally successful as some provincial Hindu and Muslim landlords did manage to unite. In the Punjab, the Unionist party was a coalition of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh landlords, while in the U.P., Muslim landlords abandoned the

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(Muslim) League to cooperate with their Hindu colleagues in the Zamindar Party after the 1919 Reforms and during the 1936 elections as well (Hasan, 1979; Noman, 1942). At the root of colonial policies was the desire to stem challenges to the landlords from the official class (trying to fight its way into the countryside through the Congress and the League), as well as from peasant revolts since both threatened the rural balance of power that was so functional for the Raj. This is why it refused to stand by passively and permit official class encroachments or peasant revolts in the rural areas. It is against this strategic British concern that separate electorates need to be viewed. For the Muslims, who by the twentieth century lagged behind the Hindus not only educationally (which boded ill in a system where the franchise was partly education-based) but in political experience as well, separate electorates seemed the ideal solution to saving them from the rough and tumble of electoral politics that threatened to decimate them. Yet, they also had some injurious side-effects. First, they released the League from the pressure of having to compete with the more progressive Congress. As a result, it was under no compulsion to broaden its political horizon. On the contrary, by emphasizing religious solidarity, it was able to get by with a rather impoverished agenda. Second, separate electorates deepened Muslims’ reliance on the Raj since the leading Hindu classes, which viewed such measures as an assault on their own entitlements, refused to guarantee a similar carte blanche to them under their own rule.11 This animosity, by heightening the Muslim elite’s insecurity, made it difficult for it to sever its umbilical cord to the state, thereby rendering it more vulnerable to British pressures than the Hindu classes in the Congress. In sum, while the Company’s sanctions augmented the backwardness of the Muslim elite by marginalizing it in the colonial order, the Crown’s patronage engendered political debility and dependence, specially since a Muslim “middle” class interested in challenging British control failed to materialize. Instead, Muslim politics was dominated by a landlord class whose power was underwritten by the Raj.

The State and the Landlords For reasons enumerated earlier, the British found it expedient to inaugurate policies that encouraged the growth of a powerful landowning class in India. While not all landlords were Muslim, of course, the group that remained “overwhelmingly feudal, landed” (Smith, 1946: 164) in India was the Muslim. To understand why this group’s ascendancy in politics

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was detrimental to the Muslims, it is necessary to delineate the nature of its relationship with the state. The British view “that the established social hierarchy and the landlord system were there to stay” (Reeves, 1968: 261) prompted them not only to endorse the social power of the landlords, but also to construct a network of political alliances with them that ran deeper than and circumvented electoral politics when the latter was introduced. For instance, in the U.R, where the Raj’s “Oudh Policy” assumed that the landlords were “those whom the masses naturally and instinctively regard as their leaders,” (Reeves, 262) it tried to sustain them at the head of rural society through not only constitutional but extra-constitutional means as well after the extension of the franchise in 1919. Thus, when the Congress threatened to undermine their influence, governor Hailey attempted to brace the landlords by not only enacting measures aimed at improving rural conditions, but also by trying to get them to organize by warning them that under the Congress they would find “an administration so chaotic that you may bid farewell to ... your social and material progress” (in Reeves, 264). The indefatigable Hailey’s efforts to scare and cajole them proved unavailing, however. The landlords “showed no inclination” to heed his warnings and harried officials could not find “any response whatever, not even a feeble response, to the great and important question of the Zamindars forming their own party” (Reeves, 265-66). As an intelligence report of the time notes, their position was “that they and their forefathers have been well-wishers of the British Government, and it is up to that government now to help them out of their difficulties” (in Pandey, 1988: 284). Even when some Hindu and Muslim nawabs did organize the Zamindar Party, it was a coterie of “individuals who had little or no allegiance to their organisation except in name. ... Clumsy, naive and self-seeking [it] remained fragmented and out of touch with the changing realities of politics” (Hasan, 1979:211). A major reason for the landlords’ political apathy was “the contractual agrarian system fashioned by British administrators” which, says P.D. Reeves (1968:280), kept them at the head of rural society through artificial means. Moreover, since the British retained the right to bestow ministerial positions after the advent of electoral politics, the landlords were assured representation in state councils without having to rely “for political organisation upon their own efforts and not upon the machinery of the administration,” as secretary of state, Zetland, deplored in 1937 (in Chopra, 1985: 224). Of course, the administration was not averse to taking advantage of the internecine squabbling among them, the perpetual falling out of ministers and ministries, and fragile coalitions to exercise a free hand in selecting persons for office, often with scant re-

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gard for their standing in their own community. Thus, far from weakening the state-landlord concord, electoral politics fortified it as it obliged the British to design strategies to protect the landlords from its effects. The indolence of the landed class also resulted from its hold over the peasants which gave it access to the vote-banks referred to earlier12 as well as from its ability to swing votes on the basis of biradari or kinship, specially in the Punjab where “the kinship system ... embodies the primordial loyalties which structure its social organization” (Alavi, 1972:1). Both decreased the need to rely on parties, which is why “parties” like the Unionists emerged not at the grassroots level but from within state legislatures. Finally, the landlords’disunity derived from their own Quixotic views of honor and social etiquette as the Raj found to its consternation. Thus, in province after province it discovered that the landlords, though “perfect gentlemen with few exceptions ... suffer badly from individualism and narcissism;” that they were consumed by “regional jealousies ... an aristocratic disdain for ‘mundane’ work, personell vanities and rivalries, and a marked lack of commitment to anything” other than their own gain; that every lord had "notions about himself;” that few were ready to “follow the lead of others [or to make the] sustained effort needed to organise and maintain parties” (Reeves, 1968:269-71). Consequently, while the Raj could pressure them to institute parties, it could not fabricate either class or political solidarity as a crucial determinant of both was missing: an incentive! The tacit understanding between the colonial state and the landlords, which allowed them to network without intermediaries like parties, encouraged the landlords not only to remain outside the pale of party politics longer than the official class, but also impeded their commitment to it which is why their parties tended to collapse when state support was withdrawn. As long as the state was willing to certify their power, there was no need for them to take electoral politics or parties seriously. Where they did organize, the landlords did not distinguish themselves by their liberal politics. Since their status derived from their symbiotic relationship with the state, the latter’s defense perforce became a cornerstone of their own politics which thereby lacked a progressive content. With little to tie them together and few stakes in uniting, the landlords remained ungovernable and unruly, coming together only briefly to press concerns that could best be pursued at the center. However, there were not many issues that needed the intercession of a central party between 1919-1946, the halcyon days of provincial autonomy. Until the state, under pressure from the Hindu official class, opened the door to power-sharing at the center, thereby obliging realignments in the provinces, the Muslim official class in the League fought out the battle for constitutional reform wholly by

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itself at Delhi. This disjuncture between the two groups further enervated Muslim politics.

Muslim Provincial Politics The British initiated their policy of including local elites in governance by nominating the landlords to the Viceroy’s councils at the national level starting in 1861. When obliged by increasing pressure from the Hindu official class to introduce representative institutions, and in their desire to avoid making allowances to it at the center which would “centralise the problem and strengthen [the Congress’] authority ... as an all-India body,” (Zetland in Chopra, 1985: 225-26), they began devolving power to the provinces after 1919. This measure, while meant to restrain and mollify the Hindu official class also bolstered the power of the provincial landlords, specially of the Muslim majority province of the Punjab, in addition to giving the Muslim provinces a powerful veto in all-India (central) politics. While demission of power to the provinces allowed the Hindu official class in the Congress to entrench itself in the state and to improve its standing in civil society, it had a diametrically opposite effect on the Muslim official class in the League because of the divergence in the political interests of the Muslims from the minority and majority provinces. Thus, the interests of the official class, composed mostly of Muslims from the minority province of the U.P., hinged upon the accommodativeness of the Hindus and could best be served by a center willing to “redress the provincial balance” in its favor (Jalal, 1985: 51). This objective, in turn, rested upon two prerequisites: a unitary government with a strong center, and a central Muslim party able to speak for all Muslims (Jalal, 1985). The majority Muslims of the Bengal and Punjab (landholders in the main), on the other hand, were committed to just the reverse: a weak center that would allow them a free hand in governing their provinces. As a result, not only was it difficult for a party like the League (composed mostly of minority Muslims at the center) to establish its authority over the majority provinces, but this distinctive class configuration (a minority official class at the center and a landed class in the majority provinces) resulted in zero-sum situations where a gain for one segment was often a loss for the other. The strains inherent in this situation were exacerbated by political reform which, by making “numerical superiority a political asset” after 1919 propelled the majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab into the forefront. As a result, the “real power of the Muslim community” came to lie in them (Page, 1982: xi; 40). In fact, by 1920s, all-India politics "had become in essence the sum of the politics of Muslim provincialism, and

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the all-India Muslim politician without a provincial base [was forced] either to withdraw from politics or to submit to these forces” (Page, 260). As a result, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, (the League’s president and Pakistan’s “founder,” and an all-India politician), was made a virtual hostage to the majority elites, specially Punjab’s landlords. Had there been a congruity of interests between them, this may not have proved so unpropitious. However, the minority and majority Muslims had differing stakes in central politics because of their conflicting locations in the colonial order as well as the differing nature of their relationships with the state and the Hindus.13 This created two problems for Muslim politics: first, it made farcical the League’s claims to be the “sole spokesman” of the Muslims since the majority elite found its intervention in their affairs not only superfluous, but counterproductive. Second, it produced a disjuncture between the minority and majority Muslims reflected in the biggest paradox of Muslim politics: that nationalism was the outgrowth of the former, not the latter. Thus, of the five majority provinces (Bengal, Punjab, Sind, Frontier and Baluchistan), that formed Pakistan, none distinguished itself by supporting the League or the Pakistan Movement. Instead, nationalism found its proponents among the minority U.P. Muslims. Yet, as noted, it was the Punjabi (and to a lesser extent Bengali) Muslims who came to acquire a greater say in all-India politics. To understand the relationship between the minority and majority Muslim elites and the implications of political reform for them, it is necessary to review the social and political matrix in the three provinces that came to play a decisive role in colonial Muslim politics: the U.P., Bengal and the Punjab.

The U.P. Elite and “Nationalism” “At the heart of Muslim separatism,”14 says Francis Robinson (1974: 5), were the U.P. Muslims. Throughout the period of Muslim separatism, “whenever the politics of All-India Muslim organisations were vigorous they were more the politics of UP Muslims than those of any other group.” It was a U.P. Muslim, Syed Ahmed, who initiated the Aligarh Movement and it was the U.P. Muslims who formulated the Pakistan demand and imparted to the “separatist movement the strength and vigour” it eventually acquired (Robinson, 4). The political vision of the U.P. Muslims and their influence in all-India politics stemmed in part from their own standing in the province and partly from their control of the League which fell to the U.R "Young Turks” soon after its founding and which, after a lapse of two decades, reverted to them in the 1930s due to lack of majority interest in it until 1946. Thus, two phases are discernible in the U.P. elite’s involvement in

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central politics: the first from the League’s inception in 1906 to the 1919— 1921 Khilafat Movement; the second from 1937 to 1947. Both phases bear the imprint of this group’s influence and, according to Robinson, reflect its changing fortunes in its own province. During the first phase, the U.P. elite's customarily secure position in the province, deriving from its cordial relationship with the Raj and its own educational and social ascendancy, began to decline because of the letter’s efforts to redress the communed balance in favor of the Hindus. By fixing a “a communal quota for Muslims in public service,” and by putting at par with the Muslim language, Urdu, the devanagri script used by the Hindus, the state reduced not only the proportion of jobs held by Muslims, but also their cultural dominance in the province (Hasan, 1979:47). Initially, Muslim elite agitation acquired the form of associations designed to protect Urdu, revealing the same type of language-consciousness among it as Guha (1988) has noted among the Bengali Hindu “nationalists.”15 However, the associations could not be sustained for long and it was to offset the resulting erosions in its influence that the U.P elite turned to national politics (Robinson, 1974). Lacking a party of its own, the "radical” segments proposed cooperating with the Congress. However, older landlords preferred to canvass the Raj directly, sending a deputation to Minto in 1906 at Simla to solicit separate electorates and weightage, a task in which they were successful. Thus began the Muslim entry into politics in an organized way since it was after Simla that the League was formed. By 1915, the U.P. "Young Turks” had captured the party only to join hands with the Congress to sign the 1916 Lucknow Pact that brought the two to the same platform. In return for a joint front against the Raj, the Hindu elites agreed to separate electorates for the Muslims. Hindu-Muslim cooperation reached its zenith during the 1919-21 Khilafat Movement (undertaken by the Ali brothers in collaboration with and under Gandhi’s direction) which was the Indian Muslims’ protest against Britain’s cavalier treatment of the Turkish Sultan (whom they regarded as their spiritual caliph, or khalifa) at the end of World War I. Since it is considered a milestone in the growth of Muslim nationalism and the history of civil disobedience in India, it would be instructive to recount the Movement’s legacy briefly. On the positive side, it is said to have awakened the Muslims to nationalism by stressing the need “for an independent centre for the Muslims, reject(ing) the territorial concept of nationhood advocated by the Congress, and emphasis (ing) the distinct political identity of the Muslims.” In its international dimension, too, “it represented, though in distorted form, a struggle against western imperialism” (Dixit, 1981:55). Aware of the value of freedom but unable to de-

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fend their own, India’s Muslims, says Dixit, sought instead to support “those Muslim countries which were now engaged in a struggle to avoid enslavement at the hands of the West.” This is why some Hindu Congress leaders decided to join it (Dixit, 62). Critics, however, contend that the Movement was neither nationalistic nor anti-imperialistic; in fact, its religious rhetoric concealed a weak and ambiguous political agenda. Moreover, not only did it rely on methods that were both authoritarian and destructive (Callard, 1957) but when it failed to “right the Khilafat wrong,” as Gandhi had somewhat rashly demanded of the British, the religious fervor it had whipped up degenerated into communal hysteria when it ended anti-climatically (Smith, 1946). Second, it enabled the Muslim clergy (which emerged as its main beneficiaries, barring Gandhi), to establish its influence in politics. This did not auger well for Muslim politics either since the clergy was neither incorruptible nor was its political role determined solely by spiritual considerations. Instead, it was often prejudiced by the nature of its relationship with the state (Mujeeb, 1967). Thus, in the Punjab where the state had set it up as a landed gentry (see below), it had no compunctions in backing the Raj. In the U.P, however, it opposed not only the Raj but also the Pakistan demand.16Accordingly, some pir, fakir, or sajjada nashin could always be hustled up to furnish an appropriate fatwa, or religious decree, in favor of any individual or party without regard to their political or moral merit prompting even Raj officials to condemn their lack of scruples, specially at election time. Also, while the Movement strengthened the Congress, which came to see itself as the only national party (having given a successful lead to Hindus and Muslims, in addition to spurring the growth of numerous Khilafat Committees), it relegated the League to obscurity. Finally, it failed to lay the basis for a lasting Hindu-Muslim entente. In fact, by 1923, “the Muslim front in Indian politics” had fallen “to pieces” depriving the Muslims of their “power to dictate Congress policy” (Robinson, 1974: 5). However, for this some culpability must be assigned to the influence of Hindu revivalism on the Congress which proved inimical to communal harmony, as well as to the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms which not only tipped the political balance in favor of the Punjab and Bengal, but also brought the U.P. Muslims’ “social and economic importance, which had made them so valuable to the system of control... under fire” (Page, 1982: 261-62). However, the state did not abandon the U.P. elites, specially the landlords, immediately. On the contrary, it attempted to palliate the disagreeable effects of the reforms through some of the measures alluded to above, as well as by limiting the number of urban seats and extending the franchise beyond the urban politicians’ canvassing power, deep into

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the rural hinterland. It also created an additional 500,000 electors over and above the number visualized by the reforms, almost half the rural electorate, by redefining the criteria for enfranchisement in order to strengthen the landlords (Page, 1982: 32). State officials also attempted to shore up the sagging fortunes of the landlords by urging upon them the necessity to adopt modern electioneering methods. Finally, the irrepressible Hailey went so far as to finance rural uplift programs “in the hope that improvement in village conditions would redound” to their credit (Reeves, 1968:282). However, as noted in Chapter 3, the effects of some of the state’s own policies began to erode their influence after the 1920s. Yet, by 1937, the Muslim landlords had managed to stabilize themselves (Brennan, 1984). However, the policies of the Congress ministry inducted into office that year, specially its tenancy legislation, threatened their new-found stability. Lacking confidence in British abilities to protect its interests, the Muslim elite, say the Cambridge historians, having “lost its illusions,” turned to Muslim "separatism” (Robinson, 1974). According to them, the ideological evidence of this separatism, the “two-nation” theory (the view that Hindus and Muslims were two nations rather than a majority and minority community), was the U.R elite’s response to the collapse of the position it had built up in the U.P. over three decades. However, this interpretation raises two problems. First, as R.J. Moore (1988: 113) says, the two-nation theory was “clearly not synonymous with separatism,” as an analysis of the 1940 Lahore Resolution—the “Pakistan demand”—and the circumstances surrounding it show. Thus, as League officials themselves clarified at the time, the Resolution did not “run counter to the idea of India’s political unity, nor does it mean the vivisection of India,’’since it implied the “establishment of independent and separate Muslim States with a confederating outlook” (Hamid in Pirzada, 1970:356). In fact, the claim to separate nationhood, as articulated by Syed Ahmed and other U.P. intellectuals, was grounded in the demand for equal, but separate, representation in a state where they expected to continue living alongside the Hindus under British tutelage. It was only in such a scenario that claims to equality with Hindus made sense. (In passing, it needs to be mentioned that even in this form, the Pakistan demand was denounced not only by the Hindus, but also by segments of the Muslim clergy17 as well as by Punjab’s landlords who rushed posthaste to distance themselves from it for reasons discussed in the section on the Punjab.) Moreover, while it was the U.P. elite that formulated the Lahore Resolution, its crux—greater provincial autonomy— was a demand initiated by Punjab’s landlords at the Round Table Conferences in 1930-32, as noted below. The difference was that the landlords’

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demand was based not on claims to Muslim nationhood, but on provincial exigencies. Second, to reduce Muslim nationalism simply to the displaced insecurity of the U.P. elite is to disregard the complex historical processes that shaped the appreciation of non-minority Muslims like Iqbal, whose address to the League provided the core of the Resolution’s text18 about the status of Muslims not only in India, but throughout the world in the aftermath of Western colonialism. Thus, Esposito (1988:128) argues that by the nineteenth century, “Western imperialism [had] precipitated a religious as well as a political crisis” for Muslims everywhere leading them to question not only the reasons for their decline, but also how they could “realize God’s will in a state governed by non-Muslims and nonMuslim law” as well as how best they could respond to the Western challenge to their “identity and faith?” Their response, he says, took three tacks: “Western, secular adaptationism on the one hand and religiously motivated rejectionism on the other,” with modernism (as an alternative to both), situated in between. The modernist response, manifest in the works of minority Muslims like Syed Ahmed and majority ones like Iqbal, pressed for reform through a process of reinterpretation or ijtihad, and was, says Esposito (139), a “process of internal self-criticism, a struggle to redefine Islam to demonstrate its relevance to the new situation that Muslims found themselves in as their societies modernized.” The issues Syed Ahmed raised, for instance, concerning Islam’s relationship to “modern Western thought, the place and role of reason in interpreting religion, and the relationship [between Muslims and Hindus] were real questions that future generations would continue to grapple with.” To overlook this contextual basis of Muslim nationalism, is to imply that Indian Islam was insulated from the processes of reformulation in Islamic thought, a view that the Cambridge historians themselves find untenable. Finally, the tendency of these scholars to present the U.P. Muslims as a middle class because of their “separatist” and "radical” politics, is also not accurate since this group comprised mostly landlords, even those living in urban areas (Kaura, 1977). In the elections held under the 1919 reforms, for instance, 25 out of 29 Muslim members of the provincial council were “returned by rural electorates, and a majority of these were leading zamindars” (Hasan, 1979: 209). Even in the 1940s, landholding, not state service, was the “economic mainstay of the Muslim elite” with three times as many Muslims deriving their income from land as from state service (Brennan, 1984: 239). Second, while the “Young Turks,” in addition to being young, were also urban and professional, at an ideological level, they showed few signs of being a “bourgeoisie,” at least if the League’s agenda during the period of their ascendancy is any indica-

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tion. Thus, the party focused its demands on separate and weighted representation, “less emphasis on university education as a qualification for office, no simultaneous examinations for the civil services,” (in Kaura, 5) more jobs in the military for the “younger sons of Ruling Chiefs and the scions of other noble houses,” (in Pirzada, 1969:213) security of the religious endowments on which depended many landed families, and protection of Urdu and the Khilafat. It was silent on the issue of excise duties, state protection for industries, etc., measures that may have benefitted a bourgeoisie. If anything, the party noted that the Muslims had “held themselves studiously aloof from this national movement of industrial reorganisation” (Khan in Pirzada, 1969: 228) testifying to the absence of a bourgeois class. Notwithstanding this fact, however, the U.P. elite can be credited with having provided significant leadership to the Muslims, specially during the second phase of their ascendancy in the League, which I analyze below. This is more than can be said of the majority Muslims of Bengal.

Bengal and Muslim Politics The first to fall to the Company, Bengal became the testing ground of British rule. It was here the British inaugurated private property in agricultural land and it was here that British-controlled industry emerged. It was here, too, that English education first developed. Yet, Bengal became the hub of Hindu bhadralok politics even though it was the largest Muslim province in India! This is because for the Hindus, the Settlement, English education and the growth of capitalism fostered a “new urban milieu, definitely pro-British in character” (Chaudhuri, 1972: 9). For the Muslims, however, the Settlement and the Company’s policies had more ruinous consequences because of which not only did a Muslim bourgeoisie fail to develop, (Gankovsky and Polonskaya, 1964), but the community remained the most socially, economically, and educationally backward in India. The impetus for British support of the Muslim elite in Bengal derived from their belief that the “Punjab and to a lesser extent Bengal must be the bulwarks against Congress domination” (Emerson in Chopra, 1985: 507). Thus, it was in their desire to prevent the “politically aggressive” Hindu bhadralok from “hijacking British-imported institutions” that Raj officials proposed “constitutional safeguards—built-in barriers to bhadralok ambition [that would develop] the strength of others who might serve as a counterweight.” It was in pursuit of this objective that they proposed enfranchising a “mass, peasant electorate which the bhadralok would be unable to control,” a measure that helped to strengthen the Muslim landlords (Broomfield, 1968:329-330).

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Consequently, an integral feature of Bengali Muslim politics was the polarization between a Muslim official and landed class and the Hindu bhadralok who dominated politics and administration on the one hand, and between Muslim peasants and a class of Hindu and Muslim landholders and money-lenders, on the other. Conflicts between these groups were aggravated by the growth of Hindu chauvinism after 1905. Communal hostility, with its roots in a sense of deprivation and exploitation along with a growing consciousness of their own religious identity (Ahmed, 1981) shaped the Muslim elite’s resolve “to maintain a distinct political identity” after the 1920s (Broomfield, 326). The emphasis on a Muslim identity, however, failed to engender a united political front between the dominant and subaltern classes because of tensions between the landlords and the peasants. Thus, the landlords, who had founded the League, also floated other parties (like the United Muslim Party) which could protect their interests. The peasantry and petit bourgeoisie, on the other hand, was drawn to Fazlul Huq’s non-denominational Krishak Praja Samity, (the "Tenants Party,” founded in 1928 as the Nikhil Bangla Proja Samity) whose leadership was in the hands of a rural Muslim class that had emerged after the founding of a university in Dacca in 1921 (Sen, 1976). The agenda of this class reflected not only its own craving for “modernization” but also issues of concern to the peasantry with which the Samity formed organizational links. The political schism in the Muslim community was reflected in the contrast between the platform of the Samity and the landlords’ parties. In the 1936 elections, for instance, the Samity issued a manifesto that promised to abolish landlordism, reduce rents, end the landlords right of preemption, establish Debt Settlement Boards, and institute complete self rule. The United Muslim Party and the League, on the other hand, spoke only to the issue of religious unity and political reform (Sen, 1976). Yet, a conflict between the dominant and subaltern Muslim classes failed to emerge partly because of the opportunism of the Samity’s leaders which splintered it into factions, with one faction merging with the League, because of which it became increasingly deradicalized. At the same time, the merger compelled the factions excluded from power also to turn to the League in order to "mobilise and organise Muslim public opinion” (Zaidi, 1976: 57). In the event, it was the Samity’s program that the League appropriated when the need arose, as, for instance, during the 1946 elections. The rise in its popularity derived only partly from its appeals to Muslim solidarity. According to Zaidi (57) the “dominant factor which brought about the great upsurge” of support for it was its em-

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phasis on the “cultural, social, economic and political emancipation of the Muslims.” “Nationalism” for the Bengali Muslim elite also did not mean the same thing that it did for the U.P. Unlike the latter, who supported the League, or the Punjabis who fought it off until 1946, the Bengalis were situated in between. On the one hand, they could profit from the League’s appeal to Muslim sentiment to buttress their own position, if needed. On the other, since they were in power and could keep themselves there through intercommunal alliances, they did not need to rely so frequently on the League; in fact, its appeal to Muslim separatism, specially after the passage of the Lahore Resolution, threatened their ambition to rule over an autonomous and undivided Bengal. (They also viewed the Resolution, and rightly so, not as a summons to merge with other Muslim provinces into one state but as the pledge of a free and united Bengal under their own control.) In other words, the Bengali Muslim elite’s interest in the League after the 1940s sprang from its desire to employ the party to further its own claims to power within a united Bengal, a goal that eventually brought it into conflict with Jinnah at the center. Although by 1944, he was obliged to define Pakistan as a single state, Jinnah was not averse to Bengal’s independence. In April 1947, four months before Pakistan’s creation, confronted with the possibility of its being partitioned as its price to join Pakistan, he endorsed H.S. Suhrawardy’s “plan for a ‘Free State of Bengal’ ” (Moore, 1988:133). (In the event, however, Bengal was partitioned, with the Eastern section becoming East Pakistan, until the civil war with West Pakistan in 1971.) Jinnah had no such scheme in mind for the Punjab, which was central not only to his own political strategy, but to colonial Muslim politics.

“The Punjab and the Raj”19 The strongest alliance between the colonial state and the provincial landlords was cemented in the Punjab, the bastion of colonial rule, and the eventual heartland of Pakistan. It was in the Punjab that the British declared the first martial law in 1919, and it has been the Punjabi-dominated civil and military bureaucracy that has continued to rule Pakistan, mostly through martial law, for more than half the country’s history since 1947. The last to fall to the British, it was brought under their control at the end of the Second Sikh war in 1849. Although it comprised only about one-tenth of “British Indian” territory and population, its strategic location as a buffer between India and the north-west frontier (Fox, 1984) and its "agricultural wealth and military importance [gave it] a political

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significance disproportionate to its size.” It was here that the British constructed the largest irrigation system in the world, transforming it from “one of the poorest agricultural areas in the subcontinent into its granary,” (Talbot, 1988:38), and it was from the Punjab that the “British Indian” army drew more than half its recruits during the two World Wars. (One reason for the refurbishment of irrigation facilities was to provide “safe employment” for disbanded soldiers [Fox, 1984: 466]; another may have been the state’s desire to avoid a repeat of the agrarian crisis that occurred during Mughal rule, and which according to Irfan Habib [1963], expedited its decline.) Accordingly, British strategy in the Punjab centered on not only acquiring and retaining the “loyalty of the village proprietors and leading men, who had occupied a prominent position under previous regimes,” but also keeping the peasantry from which the army drew its troops “contented and uncontaminated.” To this end, they did not consider any measure “too small or too drastic to keep this weapon in fighting order” and balanced their policy of quashing opposition with lavish material perks (Josh, n.d.: 29). Thus, as the Punjabi Muslims “became a vital element in Imperial military strategy,” the state promoted their interests in various ways. When irrigation schemes allowed the reclamation of land in the West Punjab in the 1880s, the Muslims of that area were “the chief beneficiaries.” In fact, “this development marked the most important accession of landed wealth to the community during the British period” (Page, 1982: 9). Not only did the Raj bestow the canal colony lands on the leading estates, but it even awarded the canals to them! (The value of these estates, incidentally, was determined by the number of recruits they could provide for the army.) When the estates fell into debt or were “being badly managed, or for reasons such as family dissensions or the minority of the owner,” they were taken over by the Court of Wards for recovery (Ali, 1988: 83). This is how the British helped to prop up “landlordism through additional economic resources” when this class was declining in other parts of South Asia (Ali, 78). The Raj institutionalized its relationship with the landlords through the Unionist Party, a Hindu-Muslim-Sikh alliance that dominated provincial politics until the second World War. The party’s monopoly of “office and patronage” made it “the powerhouse of Muslim policy” not only in the Punjab, but also at the center. Thus, in the 1930s, Fazl-i-Husain, the leading Muslim politician, countered “Congress initiatives to inherit the central government” with the All-India Muslim Conference20 and a scheme for “entrenching the Muslims in quasi-sovereign provinces” (Moore, 1988:108). It was also his line that prevailed at the Round Table Conferences in the 1930s. This strategy was to secure for the majority

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Muslim provinces more autonomy from central control, an objective the landlords were successful in obtaining since constitutional reform after 1935 extended the reach of provincial autonomy. It was also the Punjab strategy that influenced Muslim politics between the two World Wars and it was the Punjabi landlords who could throw the most punches at the center during talks on political reform in the 1940s as well (Jalal and Seal, 1981). Collaboration between the landlords and the colonial state acquired numerous forms. For instance, when the 1919 Reforms extended electoral politics, the state came to the aid of the Unionist party by showing a rural bias in allocating seats. It also fixed a voting qualification twice as high as in other provinces and “proposed quite unashamedly” that state-appointed lambardars should be enfranchised, adding 65,327 headmen to a “total rural electorate of 161,610.” It also prevented “urban politicians from standing in rural constituencies” even if they owned land in these areas by stipulating a three-year residency requirement (Page, 1982:55). On the Punjab peasant-soldiery with its distinguished record of service in the army, the Raj conferred the franchise, giving it a “preponderating voice in the elections” (in Page, 58). It also allocated the canal colony lands to ex-soldiers making “military service very attractive to the Punjabis [since] no other career held the prospect of such material rewards on retirement” (Ali, 1988:239). (Small-holders were given a minimum of 25 acres “which was much above the provincial average” [Fox, 1984:473.]) The state also allowed cultivators to retain increased profits from higher yields generated by improved irrigation facilities in addition to enacting other measures to protect the peasants, the most heavily indebted in the Empire (Darling, 1934) from the money-lenders’ rapacity and the brutal consequences of debt.21 Recognizing that “the free working of natural economic laws” was at odds with its desire to maintain a “stable agrarian society,” (Gilmartin, 1988:28) the state also tried to set limits on the former by preventing land alienation through its Land Alienation Act of 1901, that forbade the sale of agricultural land to “nonagricultural tribes.” To prevent local ingenuity from using the loopholes in it to fleece one another, the state amended it no less than ten times. When this, too, proved futile, it fixed interest rates and allowed restitution of mortgaged lands without compensation. It also renewed the village panchayats, instituted rural cooperative societies to ensure availability of credit, and tried to educate the prodigal peasants in the ethic of thrift (Siani, 1975). The state also transformed Punjab’s clergy into a landed gentry of sorts. By incorporating the sajjada nishins, or hereditary protectors of religious shrines, "into the framework of the British administration” un-

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der the 1901 Act and by classifying them as “agricultural tribes,” it protected their lands from expropriation. It also augmented their wealth by conferring “landed gentry” grants upon them. Thus, the “structure of British administration supported the main institutions of religious influence in rural areas [the shrines],” a measure that frustrated the attempts of Muslim reformers to redefine Islamic norms in more egalitarian directions (Gilmartin, 1988: 72). As a result of its policies, the Punjab remained an agricultural province in spite of its industrial potential, a fact attributed to the state’s desire to keep the peasants free for military service (Javed, 1988). There was “no competing indigenous or foreign industrial bourgeoisie [and barring] the state-owned railway workshop, modern industries were virtually non-existent” (Fox, 1984: 466). In 1939, there were only 800 small scale industries, one-third of which were “seasonal” (Gankovsky and Polonskaya, 1964: 185). Moreover, Punjab’s few capitalists were either Hindu or Sikh, not Muslim. (As Talbot [1988] notes, Hindus had dominated the cities, owning up to 60% of all registered factories in Lahore even before the colonial conquest.) The state’s “rural colonisation” policies, which benefitted not only the landlords but also the Punjabi bourgeoisie, discouraged both “from adopting a radically nationalist posture” (Ali, 1991: 45). Additionally, its restructuring of the educational system also proved detrimental to the growth of a nationalist intelligentsia. Not only did the state establish schools along the line of English public schools (like Aitchison) to educate the sons of “chiefs,” but, having learnt a bitter lesson in Bengal, it shifted the emphasis from higher to primary education because of which Punjab also remained educationally backward. S.C. Mittal (1977), for instance, notes that only 1 in 26 persons was educated; of these only 1 in 69 was a Muslim, as against 1 in 15 who was Hindu. Moreover, by changing the medium of instruction from Punjabi to Urdu, the state also made inaccessible to the Punjabis their own literary traditions, specially the “resistance poetry of the great Punjabi writers.” Had the local vernacular and literature been included in the curricula, argue critics, literate Punjabis would have become conversant with the resistance of their ancestors to “invaders from Alexander to the British” (Llyod in Mirza, 1992: 43). As it was, the educated native affects to despise anything that is written in spoken vernacular. He regards it with the same kind of cultivated shudder that a lady of fashion would feel if a lout from the country came into her drawingroom with muddy boots (in Mirza, 90).

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Finally, large-scale induction of the Punjabis into the military, backed up by well-orchestrated acts of violence against the “martial races” of the province, also helped to keep any plausible radicalism on their part under wraps. After the Jallianwalla Bagh protest in 1919, for instance, the British ordained whipping as the “kindliest method of punishment" for the protestors, while some went so far as to unveil women forcibly in public places, denouncing them as “gandi makhi” or filthy flies (in Mirza, 133-35). Yet, the triple alliance between the state, the landed classes and the clerics allowed the Punjab to survive not only the Revolt, but also the “Gandhian satyagrahas of the 1930s with overwhelming loyalty [while] other regions were in open rebellion”22 (Talbot, 1988:2). (The reason the Punjab held during the Revolt says Tidrick [1992:25-26], was because of the customary aversion of the Sikhs “towards the men of Hindustan,” as well as “the extreme rigour and promptness with which the administration put down any sign of revolt. Anyone who talked treason, very liberally defined, was instantly hanged.”) Until the Second World War “buckled the system of local British control in the Punjab,” (Talbot, 224) not only did the province hold, but Unionist influence deterred the League from making headway within it. The Muslim landlords not only refused to have truck with Jinnah, but sternly rebuked him to keep his “finger out of the Punjab pie” (Sikandar in Jalal, 1985: 21) that they had apportioned among themselves. Even when self-interest compelled the Muslim premier, Sikandar, to sign the Jinnah-Sikandar Pact it was to keep the League out of the province. Sikandar not only used the agreement to undercut the local League, but, as the British Governor noted, in spite of it, the Unionists’ position “in provincial concerns ... remains unchanged” (in Chopra, 1985:37). The landlords’ aversion to the League stemmed from its overtures to religious sentiment which threatened their inter-communal base and ambition to rule over an undivided Punjab. It also resulted from the League’s attempts to barter majority landlord control in the provinces in return for weightage for the U.R official class at the center. It was not until the Unionist coalition fell apart with the collapse of the Raj and the death of some of its leaders, that the “sons of the Unionists having deserted the party of their fathers” (Oren, 1974:417) joined the League, becoming the self-anointed godfathers of Pakistan in the process. British policies in the Punjab, in particular the state-landlord-peasant relationship, had two implications for Muslim politics. On the one hand, it ensured a relatively discord free relationship between the landlords and the peasants. Military recruitment not only brought the peasants

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under the discipline of a professional army, but also formalized the social authority of the landlords over them since it was from the landed strata that the officer corps was drawn. Second, it allowed the landlords to cater to some of the peasants more pressing concerns. For instance, in 1937, Sikandar inaugurated a 6-year Program of Rural Uplift, which by the 1940s was “well under way” even in "backward” areas. He also amended the Land Alienation Act in order to restrict the money-lenders’ activities, measures that came to be known as the “Golden Acts” (Talbot, 1988). As a result, while the Unionist party’s influence over the rural areas was limited in comparison to some Hindu parties (Qalb-i-Abid, 1992) it was much better situated than the League to pull the rural vote. On the other hand, and for the same reason, the League could not make advances into the rural areas until the mid-1940s since it could not match the Unionist’s ability to “protect” peasant concerns. Its offensive was eventually mounted with the help of landlords who, having had a falling out among themselves perceived the benefit to themselves of falling in with Jinnah, the aid of spontaneous grassroots activism, communists, and many of the erstwhile religious “divines” who, sniffing changes afoot, “scuttled out of the Unionist camp” (Jalal, 1985:143).

The Center-Province Disjuncture These distinctive provincial configurations, by generating political strategies that were specific to each province, also created disagreements between the elites of the majority and minority provinces, specially on the issue of “nationalism.” Thus, where the Muslims were well positioned in relationship to the existing power structure, as in the Punjab and, to some extent in Bengal, they were less supportive of nationalism and the League than where they were a minority, as in the U.P. (Hasan, 1979). Since, moreover, provincial politics was dictated by local contingencies while the “general questions come little into the picture” (Emerson in Chopra, 1985:57) the League, perched at the remote center far from the maddening din of provincial politics, was seen as mostly irrelevant. This is why devolution of power to the provinces pulled the majority and minority Muslims in opposing directions. While it deepened the U.P. elite’s commitment to the League and central politics, it reinforced the provincial particularisms of the majority elite thereby preventing the "central leadership from making inroads into the provincial sphere.” This was specially true after the passage of the 1935 Act. As the federal part of the Act did not come into play, the provinces became the arena for self-government. It was only natural that the “provincial domain which had been the preserve of local or regional leaders [should contain] little room for intrusion from outside” (Zaidi, 1976: 15). Thus, the

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majority elite not only refused to play second fiddle to the Muslims and the League at the center, (Hasan, 1979) but also floated its own parties. None of these parties acquired a national standing or even an interprovincial one, nor were they even remotely “bourgeois” in their orientation. The Unionists in the Punjab, the Agriculturist Party in the U.P., and the Muslim United Party in Bengal were the main landlord parties. The Samity, though based on the peasantry, became aligned with the landlords because of the self-interest of its leaders. The Red Shirts in the Frontier, while also based on the peasants, did not play much of a role in Muslim politics since the Frontier remained a Congress stronghold until 1946.23 In sum, provincial parties were landlords’ parties and restricted to their own spheres. Consequently, while their empowerment by the reforms allowed the majority provinces to wrest “the initiative from the U.P. Muslims” (Hasan, 6) between 1922-1937, their ascendancy proved detrimental to the League. It is not coincidental that the party’s fortunes reached their lowest ebb in this period. Since this was also the time of growing class struggles in India, the League was not only unable to play a role in all-India politics comparable to that of the Congress, but it had ceased to exist as a viable force. It is against this background that an analysis of its history becomes understandable. The party could neither transcend these inauspicious conditions nor secure a foothold in the notoriously split and mutinous “community” it claimed to represent. It was forced to function either outside the ambit of provincial politics, or in short and uneasy affiliation with them, but usually on their terms.

The League and Muslim Politics The League’s history can be divided into a pre-Jinnah and a Jinnah phase. While the first lasted from 1906-1934, for most of this period the party was moribund. Revived by Jinnah in 1935, it had a decade in which to consolidate itself before Pakistan’s creation, a Herculean task by any standards and one it was unable to accomplish.

The Pre-Jinnah Phase: 1906-1934 As noted earlier, the League had its genesis in the Simla Deputation24 of 35 prominent Muslims to Minto in the summer of 1906, in the wake of Bengal’s partition. With Hindu agitation gaining momentum and reforms reportedly in the works (the Viceroy’s Councils, it was rumored, were being enlarged), the Muslim gentry thought it judicious to voice its demands for separate and weighted representation. Basing its demand on the Muslims’ “political importance,” the Deputation drew Minto’s at-

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tention to "the value of the contribution [they made to] the defence of the Empire,” as well as to the status they had enjoyed “a little more than a hundred years ago in India of which the traditions have naturally not faded from their minds” (inPandey, 1969:16). Minto’s response, though civil, was evasive about most of the Deputation’s demands, focusing mainly on the fate of Bengal, a point to which its address had referred only obliquely (Rahman, 1970). Yet, because of the British view, in vogue then, that his reply had enabled “nothing less than the pulling back of 62-millions of people from joining the ranks of [the] seditious opposition,” (in Sharma, 1987: 20) the Hindu intelligentsia was quick to claim that the Raj had concocted the whole thing itself in order to divide the Hindus and Muslims. Hardy (1982:158), however, argues that the Deputation was “the outcome of a marriage of convenience between British political necessity and upper-class Muslim interests—and those of the [U.P. Muslims] above all others,” and was based on the assumption that the British were in India to stay. Moreover, as Matiur Rahman (1970: viii) notes, the Deputation split the moderate Muslims from the radicals whom the Viceroy privately, and inelegantly, referred to as “ ‘Mahomed Ali and his gang,’ ” thus creating divisions among the Muslims. Not only that, but "having listened attentively to [the Muslims’] claims,” Minto could counsel secretary of state, Morley, that “the time appears to me to have arrived when we can wisely refuse to negotiate with them further.” On his part, Morley was to caution the viceroy to “take care that in picking up the Mussalmans, we don’t drop our Hindu parcels” (in Ahmad, 1988:119). Although it took political India by storm, eliciting suspicion and derision from the Hindus, the Muslims’demand was neither very surprising, nor even original. In 1883, a Bihari legislator had proposed the “election of Mohamedans by reserving a certain number of membership for the community” (Yunus in Hasan, 1979:36), a proposal in keeping with the British policy of recognizing “caste and creed distinctions” (Ripon in Zakaria, 1970:118) and their commitment to “hold the scales even” between the Hindus and Muslims (Curzon in Zakaria, 354). It was also in the spirit of the 1892 Act that was based on the "principle of representation by ‘classes and interests’” (Rahman, 1970:152). Finally, it seemed to be a logical extension of Syed Ahmed’s arguments. (Incidentally, while the demand was a throwback to his views, it was not only the durability of his bequest that had kept the Muslims out of politics so far. They were, after all, not a homogenous group to be uniformly influenced by his advice. To those who had joined British ranks when battle lines had been drawn during the Revolt and had been rewarded, there was no need to indulge in politics as a means to empowerment; patronage not persecution had deterred them.)

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Yet, Syed Ahmed’s legacy did surface in the League’s aims, which were to promote “feelings of loyalty to the British Government” and to advance the "political rights and interests” of the Muslims (in Pirzada, 1969:1). (This expression of loyalty was, of course, no different from that of the Congress liberals and was a good indicator of the extent to which the Indian elite, both Hindus and Muslims, started out their political careers by regarding the state as an “absolute,” and identifying strongly with it.) Amongst the trivia that should be noted about the party’s genesis is that the Muslim gentry was galvanized into action not only by Hindu agitation, but also by the radicalism of its own malcontented youth who were being seduced by Congress apostasy. It was as much to keep the misguided youth in control as it was to protect their own interests that the placid Aligarhians took up the political gauntlet; otherwise, they may well have gone about their own affairs, quietly and behind the scenes, neither being seen nor heard. However, they were edged on by the rather bad example of the Congress that had won some minor allowances from the British by insisting on doing both. Yet, the party excluded from its membership the youth, restricting it to 400 members of the gentry, with the chief Muslim landlord, the Agha Khan, becoming its permanent president in spite of his initial reluctance to back it. Of these, no less than six were elected vice presidents. When in 1910, under the leadership of the U.P. Young Turks, the party’s membership doubled, its vice presidents tripled, to 20! (As it started to expand, the landlords began dropping out and between 1914-1916, its membership declined from 800 to 500 (Robinson, 1974.]) In spite of this plethora of executives, however, it lacked a full-time secretary while its president spent “most of his time abroad” (Rahman, 1970:278). The distribution of seats in the party also reflected the imbalance in Muslim politics referred to above, with the U.P. getting more seats than either Bengal or Punjab. Predictably, the gentry soon fell to petty wrangles as each landlord tried to create his own jagirot fiefdom in the party. Thus, from the start they wrestled to construct a pyramid from the top down by insisting on hand-picking members of the provincial branches, a process that rent the party even before it had consolidated itself. For instance, two branches appeared in the Punjab and could only be integrated after some behind-the-scenes horse-trading between the warring factions. Shortly after, the London League’s president, Ameer Ali and some Leaguers fell out. Ali’s resignation, which he was coaxed to withdraw, was followed by that of the “permanent” president himself! As a result of this sorry state of affairs, the League not only failed to stabilize itself, but remained politically marginalized. Between 1919-

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1924, it did not even meet as a "separate body,” existing primarily “on paper, [and] holding its session wherever Khilafat Conferences were held” (Khaliquzzaman in Hasan, 1979:202, n. 65). In 1923, at the end of the Khilafat Movement, the largest Muslim movement in colonial Indian history, its membership had reached a scant 1000! The most telling commentary on its impotence is that it was from the platform of the Muslim Conference (a Punjabi party) that Jinnah announced his “Fourteen Points”25 in 1928 that eventually became a sort of Magna Carta of the Muslim official class. In fact, the tenuous threads that had held the League together had snapped a year earlier in a dispute, with one faction backing Jinnah and the other uniting around the Punjabi landlords. Due to the split and the growth of other parties, the League faded into oblivion exactly when the Congress had embarked on its struggle for hegemony. With Jinnah’s departure for England in 1931, it once again lost its president. While it continued to meet between 1930-33, its sessions were poorly attended. Its 31st session, for example, was a “languid and attenuated House of scarcely 120 people in all” (in Pirzada, 1969: Ixvi) which may explain why Muhammad Iqbal’s erudite presidential address suggesting the need for the creation of independent Muslim homelands failed to stir the faintest breath of controversy. A decade later, two years after his own death, the proposal was to become the nucleus of the Pakistan demand.

The Jinnah Phase: 1936-1947 By the time Jinnah returned to India, the League was almost defunct and it was his efforts that saved it from extinction. However, even though his abstemious personality stood it in good stead, he was unable to reverse certain features of Muslim politics that had become ingrained by the late 1930s. Among these were the absence of a hegemonic class, or even a political alliance, amongst the Muslims, a chronic divergence of interests between the minority and majority elite, and thereby the center and the provinces, and the exclusion of the subaltern classes from the party. In spite of the embellishments of his devotees, Jinnah could not alter these trends since his options, like those of Gandhi, were often dictated by circumstances beyond his control. Therefore, to claim that under him the League grew from a “respectable and somewhat sedate body of aristocratic ... gentlemen for whom politics was a polite diversion [into a] proletarian gathering of impassioned and fervent men who threw balance and moderation to the winds,” (Kabir 1944: 26-27) is to indulge in sheer hyperbole since there are no indications that proletarians of any sort ever joined it. Certainly, its “spontaneous” membership (it did not have regular subscribing members) increased dramatically as thou-

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sands of bemused peasants were inducted into it in the 1940s. It was also finally able to secure the backing of the majority landlords whose truculence had so far paralyzed it. Yet the manner in which it obtained social support, the nature of its agenda, and its swift breakdown after 1947 belie the claim that it was a viable, much less a hegemonic, party. On the contrary, in spite of its expanded base, its improved stature, and its increasingly assured tone, it remained quite rickety at the core, with a small band of loyalists at the center. The landlords joined it out of opportunism, while the subaltern classes were never incorporated into in any genuine sense, as I argue below. At the stage at which Jinnah resuscitated the party, it was too late to draft a manifesto for the upcoming 1936 elections so the League “modelled its programme on the Congress economic programme” (Khaliquzzaman in McDonough, 1970: 38). It was only after the elections that its leaders decided to frame an “economic, social and educational” plan. (Failing to come up with one, they “borrowed” from the Congress once again in the 1946 elections. In other words, unlike the Congress’ agenda which was shaped by the relationship of the dominant and subaltern classes, the League’s was borrowed!) It had “no primary organisation,” (Noman, 1942: 326) “few or no provincial and district branches [and] limited financial and propaganda resources, and that, too, for the first time on an all-India basis” (Pirzada, 1969: lxviii). As a result it was able to bag just 109 out of 482 Muslim seats in the elections, securing a mere 4.6 per cent of the total Muslim vote. Its poor electoral performance prevented it from securing a foothold in the majority provinces where, as Jalal (1985) says, the pendulum of politics oscillated freely of its control. The Congress, too, left it out in the cold when it came time to form ministries even though both parties had collaborated in the elections. (This lent credence to Jinnah’s claims that the Congress leadership was inimical26 to the Muslims thereby strengthening the League in the 1946 elections.) Excluded from office, finding that Muslims in politics were “careerists” (Jinnah in Ahmad 1970: 245) and with his party in “opposition everywhere,” (Rizvi, 1978:226) Jinnah was unable to assemble the Muslim “community” around him. The party’s call for the creation of “free democratic States” for the Muslims in 1937, anticipating the Lahore Resolution by three years, and the Sind League’s adoption of a similar resolution in 1938 failed to elicit notice. It was not until 1939 that the League’s fortunes began to change, a fact that has been attributed to a change in British strategies, if not their hearts. Embroiled in the Second World War and confronted in India by the resignation of the Congress ministries as well as Hindu demands for immediate freedom, the British played their Muslim card, asking Jinnah to come up with a “positive scheme” to counter the Congress. The Lahore

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Resolution is seen to have been his acquiescent response (Jalal, 1985; Rizvi, 1978). However, while the timing (and content) of the Resolution may have proved serviceable to the Raj, to regard it simply as a way for Jinnah to curry favor with it (which such views implicitly do) raises problems. First, it ignores Jinnah’s own integrity, which even the English were known to admit. Second, it was a logical extension of Muslim nationalist discourse, rather than a convenient ploy on his part. Not only had the idea about Muslim “homelands” gained some currency since Iqbal’s address to the League in 1930—evident in the floating of various proposals for a Muslim state throughout the 1930s—but the League itself had adopted resolutions to this effect in 1937, and again, in 1938. Third, not only was the Resolution’s call for provincial autonomy congruent with Britain’s own policies since the 1920s, and specially since 1935, but it did not aim to undercut India’s unity. Finally, if it is true that the Resolution had “the merit [of being] totally unacceptable” to the British, as Jalal (1985:57) contends, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the “positive” scheme they had anticipated. (According to Jalal, its unacceptability to the British meant that “the League would not be given what it now apparently was asking for, but which Jinnah in fact did not really want.” What he really wanted, she says, was to use the Resolution to strengthen his hand in negotiations with the Raj to secure an adequate Muslim representation within an Indian union.) Even if it is true that the eminently circumspect Jinnah decided to play a dangerously (and selfishly) imprudent game by using the Resolution to his advantage, its claim to Muslim nationhood was in consonance with Muslim nationalist discourse since Syed Ahmed’s times. In this context, Jalal’s dismissal of this discourse as having had a “pedigree of sorts” in Syed Ahmed’s “separatist” claims diminishes its importance in shaping Muslim politics. In fact, her view that the two-nation theory was merely the U.R Muslims’ response to “the categories the Raj employed, and the opportunities of exploiting its patronage and favour,” and that subsequent “developments robbed this notion of its political utility” (52, n. 30) not only simplifies Muslim politics (in addition to endowing the Muslim elites with a rather wretched character), but also contradicts her own claims that the argument about Muslim nationhood became central to Jinnah’s strategy for securing adequate Muslim representation in an Indian union. This suggests that later events actually helped to reinforce, not lessen, the value of the theory that Hindus and Muslims were two nations, not a majority and a minority community. However, where Jalal is right, is to question how far claims to Muslim nationhood represented the desire for a state outside the Indian union. In fact, if there was a fatal flaw in Muslim national discourse, it was not the inability of Muslim nationalists (ostensibly part of a spiritually de-

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fined community, or ummah) to develop loyalties to a territorially defined one (state), but their continuing sense of commitment to the Indian state! Since Pakistan’s creation, both Hindu and Muslims have thought it appropriate to deny this fact in the name of the purity of their respective “nationalisms.” Both point to pan-Islamic trends and those instances where some Muslims emigrated from India on the advice of Muslim revivalists, as proof of their anti-Indian leanings. Yet, Muslim national discourse had not managed to “imagine” a Muslim state outside an Indian union until the 1940s! One of the most eloquent expositions of this duality that Muslim intellectuals continued to feel between being Muslim and Indian is Mohammed Ali’s speech at the Round Table Conference in London (in 1930): Where God commands, [he said], I am a Muslim first, a Muslim second, and a Muslim last, and nothing but a Muslim.... But where India is concerned, where India’s freedom is concerned, where the welfare of India is concerned, I am an Indian first, an Indian second, and an India last, and nothing but an Indian (in Ahmad, 1970:119-20).

He belonged, he said, to "two circles of equal size, but which are not concentric. One is India, and the other is the Muslim World,” and, for him, at least, there was no incongruity in having a foot in each. Whatever communal antagonisms there were in India, he believed, had their roots not in some innate antipathy between Hindus and Muslims, but in the “fear of domination,” resulting from Britain’s emasculation of India and its crime of having written “wrong histories about” it (in Ahmad, 119— 20 ).

The same year as this minority (U.P.) Muslim was declaring his allegiance to India in London, back at home, a majority (Punjabi) Muslim, Iqbal, was proposing the creation of Muslim homelands as a solution to the “communal” problem (with an eye, no doubt, on the constitutional parleys in London). Yet, as he clarified, his proposal was rooted in his commitment not only to the Muslims, but also to India, the “greatest Muslim country in the world.” While the creation of Muslim homelands was meant to preserve, through its territorial centralization, the “life of Islam as a cultural force,” it was also meant to "intensify [the Muslims’] sense of responsibility and deepen their patriotic feeling [towards India]. Thus, possessing full opportunity of development within the bodypolitic of India,” they would prove its “best defenders against a foreign invasion, be th a t... one of ideas or of bayonets” (in Ahmad, 127). Since the 1900s, Iqbal said he had watched the “vision of a common nationhood for India” (in Khan 1977:95) dissipate because of the lack of “a common race-consciousness” between Hindus and Muslims. How-

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ever, he could be sanguine of a resolution if the principle that the Muslims were entitled to “full and free development on the lines of [their] own culture and tradition [in their own] Indian homelands was to become the basis of a permanent communal settlement” (in Ahmad, 1970: 125-26). This precept of self-determination, he explained, was inspired not by feelings of “narrow communalism,” but by an associative communalism which, by providing individuals with “its religion, its literature, its thought, its culture [could recreate] its whole past, as a living operative factor” in their consciousness, thereby becoming the foundation for the healthy development of the Self. The creation of Muslim homelands would not only allow them to develop in consonance with the dictates of their own culture, but it would also permit Islam to free itself of the impress of “Arabian Imperialism ... to mobilize its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.” Such a revival was not possible in a unitary system which denied autonomy to the Muslims. As such, while they had a “duty towards India where we are destined to live and die,” they also had a duty to seventy million of their co-religionists (in Ahmad, 1970:125-28). In this context, Iqbal argued that the Muslims' political unity “postulated God's own unity, and was its very raison d ’etre" (Shaikh, 1989:190). Moreover, they were “the only Indian people who [could] fitly be described as a nation in the modern sense of the word.” This is because even though the Hindus were ahead of them in many respects, they had been unable to “achieve the kind of homogeneity which is a necessary for a nation and which Islam [had given to the Muslims] as a free gift.” To him, therefore, it was as “clear as daylight that we are not a minority. We are a nation.” Yet, as he said, a "nation does not live in the air. It lives on land, and it must govern land and it must have a territorial state.” What was “the use of merely saying that we are a nation. A nation must have territory” (in Ahmad, 1970:135; 97). This was essential wherever Muslims were in a minority since in such cases (majority) nationalism demanded “their complete self-effacement.” However, where they were in a majority, there was no conflict between nationalism and Islam; they were “practically identical” (in Khan, 1977:93). Although Iqbal justified the Muslim claim to statehood on the grounds that the religious, political, and social ideals of Islam were organically related to one another, he did not visualize the state as a theocracy. “The truth,” he said, is that “Islam is not a Church. It is a State conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing, animated by an ethical ideal." While nationalism was necessary to secure it, it could not exhaust Islam’s possibilities; it was

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also essential to create the social conditions that would permit the actual realization of Islamic ideals (in Ahmad, 1970:124-27). This was also the basis for Iqbal’s distinction between Muslim and Western nationalism (Syed, 1979). The latter he condemned for its materialism. The “inner cohesion” of a Muslim nation, on the other hand, he argued, would consist "in the unity of the religious and political ideas; or, in the psychological fact of ‘like-mindedness’ and ‘the ideal territory of such a nation would be the whole earth'” (Khan, 1977: 94-95). (Incidentally, it was not only Muslim “communalists” like him who could dream of such a prospect. Hindu “nationalists” like Vivekananda had also fantasized about the “conquest of the whole world by the Hindu race” [in Ahmed, 1974:192.]) Although today Iqbal’s arguments are considered to have marked a high point in Muslim nationalism, at the time their impact, including on Jinnah, remained modest (Naim, 1979). It would be a full decade later (some years after Iqbal’s death) before the secularist Jinnah, once applauded as an “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity,” would pick up the theme of Muslim nationhood, rounding it out and giving it its most elegant and memorable shape in his argument that We are a nation of a hundred million, and, what is more, we are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, name and nomenclature, sense of value and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and tradition, aptitude and ambitions; in short, we have our own distinctive outlook on life and of life. By all canons of international law we are a nation (in Haq,

1970:134).

What distinguished the Muslims from the Hindus was not only their divergent “religious philosophies, social customs, literatures,” but also the fact that they belonged to two separate civilizations that were based on “conflicting ideas and conceptions.” Not only did they not marry or dine with one another, but their “aspects on life and of life” were dissimilar as they derived their motivations from “different sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different and different episodes. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other and, likewise their victories and defeats overlap.” Their “present artificial unity” was a recent phenomenon, dating back to the “British conquest” and was maintained by force (in Pirzada, 1970:338). Yet, the English could not “create a nation merely by subjecting the people ‘to a democratic constitution and holding them forcibly together by the unnatural and artificial methods of British Parliamentary Statues’ ” (in Gilmartin, 1988:183).

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While for Jinnah it was not just religious solidarity that was the basis of Muslim nationalism, as Shaikh (1989: 8) argues, even he “could not devise and organise a unitary Muslim political movement outside Muslim principles.” These principles, while “open to interpretation ... constrained his political practice” in important ways. This is because while the “exigencies of colonial politics had sometimes led Muslims to confront the difficulties of realising [the] most compelling vision [of Islamic solidarity] the power of its appeal was far from eroded” (190). While the tendency of Muslim nationalist discourse to move awkwardly between the secular theme of political rights and self-determination on the one hand, and arguments about religious fellowship on the other, is not very remarkable (Hindu nationalist discourse was itself equally ambiguous on this point as noted in Chapter 4), what is disconcerting is the continuing tension between claims to nationhood on the one hand, and the desire to secure proper representation in an Indian union, on the other. This tension surfaces even in the nationalist texts written in the mid-1940s when Muslim intellectuals began more methodically to refine the idea of Muslim statehood, as well as to critique Hindu nationalist discourse. Western nationalism, they began by arguing, was the corollary of various unifying forces, such as a “common religion, race, language and traditions.” However, even in the West nationalism had proven to be a “disruptive force in countries which have several distinct national groups.” In Austria-Hungary, for example, where the people shared one religion and had “lived together in peace and amity as members of [a] common Empire,” its growth had “hastened the movement for separation” (M.R.T. 1986: 20; 32).27 The lesson to be learnt from this was that a common religion, common system of law, common past traditions, common social customs and above all a common standard of education and culture [had failed to effect] unity and national consciousness.... The real test of nationality was the desire on the part of the members of a nation to group themselves under a separate government of their own (M.R.T., 1986: 32; 54).

However, it was true that in India/nationalism was based on a “common religious and cultural outlook,” specially among the Hindus, and as long as the “question of the social, economical and political solidarity” of their own community was concerned, they were not averse to recognizing “religion as a unifying force” (M.R.T., 18-19). Yet, they wanted to deny the Muslims the "application of the very same principles which they claim for themselves.” This double standard was reflected in the Congress’ claim to be “the sole and authoritative organisation of the

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whole of India,” as well as the fact that Hindu nationalists were "prepared to support all movements for separation and independence,” beyond India’s borders, including for the Kurds, but not for the Muslims of India (M.R.T., 66; 219; 30; 35). Yet, it was not possible for a “political society... to be in a stable and satisfactory condition if its members [had] no other bond to unite them except their obedience to the same government.” Instead, people needed to be “united further by [the] bonds implied in the word Nation.” This, in turn, required not only the occupation of a specific territory, but also their recognition that they represented “a distinct culture and civilisation” which would lose its creative force if they [were] placed in a position of political subjugation.” If the Muslims were to accept the idea of Indian unity, they would be reduced to a minority, dependent for their well-being “upon the favours of the majority.” It was this political consideration that was responsible for their “separatism” (M.R.T., 90-91; 186). Notwithstanding this defense of Muslim nationhood, however, the same text reiterates that the Muslims “simply want [a] readjustment of India and proper distribution o f power at the Centre!" (M.R.T., 212; emphasis mine). This incongruity in Muslim nationalist discourse, as well as the fact that the Pakistan demand envisaged a confederation, that the League itself did not give up on its struggle to secure adequate Muslim representation within a British-ruled Indian union until the late 1940s and, finally, that the passage of the Resolution failed to inspire a nationalist upsurge not only repudiates the idea that after 1940, the Muslims fought unitedly for Pakistan, but reveals the difficulties Muslim nationalists experienced in severing their connections with the Indian state. In fact, throughout the 1940s, the League focused its energies on attempting to establish a more secure foothold within the colonial Indian state, an objective in which the Raj proved willing to help, for its own reasons. Thus, it was the Raj that bailed out the party by creating a “‘Muslim League’ ministry in Assam, under a wealthy and reliable knight,” replacing a nationalist Muslim as Sind’s premier with “another wealthy and reliable knight” who soon joined the League, forcing Huq to resign his premiership in Bengal and replacing him with “still another wealthy and reliable knight with another Muslim League ministry;” and finally, installing a “Muslim League ministry under still another reliable premier” in the Frontier (Smith, 1946:24-25). While the League’s position within the state had little to do with its own strength or popularity in Muslim civil society during the 1940s, this does not mean that Jinnah sat by idly. On the contrary, efforts were made to broaden the party’s base by enrolling thousands of peasants into it. However, not only was the rise in its membership based on a few hasty

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tours,28 rather than on a sustained effort to establish branches at the village level, like the Congress, but the League neither floated its own kisan sabhas or unions, nor associated any existing ones with itself. In fact, as Nehru tartly noted in 1938, Jinnah did not show much interest in “the economic demands of the masses [and the] all important question of poverty and unemployment” (in Kaura, 1977: 121). While his barb was intended, no doubt, to embarrass Jinnah by exposing his elitism and the “feudal” nature of his party, there is no denying that the League's enlistment of peasants failed to produce the same type of changes in it as had occurred in the Congress after its alliance with them. Reasons for, this, however, need to be sought in the nature of class relationships in Muslim society, in particular, the absence of a dominant-subaltern class conflict, which released the League from the necessity of trying to coopt the latter on the basis of a broad-based agenda, like the Congress. Part of the reason that serious conflicts did not materialize between the dominant and subaltern Muslim groups was that in the two largest Muslim provinces of Bengal and Punjab, there was also some collaboration between them. In Bengal, the petit bourgeoisie and official class had links to the peasantry through the Samity which allowed the League to capitalize on its constituency and agenda to rally the peasants around itself. Conversely, in the Punjab, the state itself had gone to great lengths to ensure an agreeable relationship between the landlords and the peasants which also benefitted the League when the Unionists decided to back it. In Sind, there was not much peasant unrest while in the Frontier, the peasants though active and radicalized, were absorbed in Congress politics. While this lack of conflict between the dominant and subaltern Muslim classes helped the League, it also deterred the party from making the kind of political compromises the Congress had had to make after the 1930s. Thus, instead of expanding its agenda, it relied on ad hoc measures and religious rhetoric in lieu of political activity (rather than in addition to it, like the Congress) to get by. While this helped to do the trick at the election booth, it proved to be the party’s greatest strength and its Achilles’ heel. In the short term, it allowed the League to surmount its lack of grassroots cadres, an effective structure and weak agenda to make the quantum leap to “mass” party like the Congress. In the long run, however, once the Pakistan Movement ended, the dominant-subaltern class “alliance” also dissipated, with no political associations to link them. As D.A. Low (1991: 6) notes, in spite of the “commitment and enthusiasm which the movement for Pakistan generated, it left little of any substantial political value behind on which the post-Jinnah political leadership could rely for support.”

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If the League failed to effect an alliance with the subaltern groups, it did no better with the dominant, either the bourgeoisie or the landlords. A perusal of its agenda reveals its continuing irrelevance to the needs of a middle class even during this alleged heyday of its ascendancy. Thus, only in 1943 did the party even raise the issue of Muslim economic development in the “Pakistan zones” (note, not state). However, the theoretical understanding of its leaders of what this might entail left much to be desired. For instance, G.M. Syed (who was claiming Sind for the Sindhis) raised an appeal to “buy from the Muslims.” However, what he proposed was not a Muslim swadeshi but the plea to “well-to-do Muslims [to] please direct their activities in the field of trade and commerce to this land” so that it might in the “future, become economically independent and self-supporting” (in Pirzada, 1970: 446). Jinnah himself was noncommittal on economic issues. He was being asked, he said, why the League should not establish a bureau to set up national industries for Muslim India all over India, and especially in Pakistan. Why should we not undertake planning? Why should we not undertake the establishment of big and heavy industries in Pakistan?” (in Pirzada, 1970:451, my emphasis).

Why not, indeed! No one in the party undertook to explain. Similarly, the Economic Planning Committee appointed by Jinnah the following year also set itself the task of discussing “future economic planning in the framework of undivided India,” that is, the "potentialities ... not merely of Pakistan, but of the Hindustan areas as well where thirty million of our co-religionists reside.” In this context, it came up with the fascinating conclusion that “capitalism, with its principle of laissezfaire (sic) is a method of exploiting the inertia of the multitude and it has failed.” Since industry was a “social function carried out in the interests of all [it] must be regulated so as to progressively eliminate the element of private profit” (in Hasan, 1991: 33; 67). One is led, then, to wonder at not only the significance of the committee’s proposals for a Muslim “middle” class, but its theoretical understanding of the workings of capitalism itself! Not only did the League fail to make its agenda relevant to the needs of a bourgeoisie but it also failed to subdue or attract the landed class. Its lack of control on the majority provinces was manifested in the waywardness of the provincial branches which, says Ram Gopal (1959:202), like the “Nawabs under the later Mughals... were going their own way.” The Punjab which had played host to the Lahore session, and Fazlul Huq, the “Tiger of Bengal,” who had moved the Lahore Resolution, soon broke with Jinnah who expelled Huq from the League in 1941 and Punjab’s premier, Khizr, three years later. As a result, even in 1945, the party

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could not hold a session in the Punjab for fear of revealing his powerlessness. In Bengal, on the other hand, Jinnah was forced to back a ministry “League in name but coalition in fact [while the party] outside the ministry was split down the middle, with Jinnah’s closest associates excluded from the ... control room.” In 1945, he “lost the League ministry in the province which contained about half the Muslims in India” (Jalal, 1985: 101; 108). While there was nominally a League ministry in Sind, half the party’s members were in opposition, while in the Frontier the Congress was once again in power. Lacking not only the ability to control provincial politics but also funds—in spite of Jinnah’s appeals, money was slow to materialize and came not from a program of regular subscriptions, but donations either from odd Punjabi landlords or Bengali capitalists29—Jinnah channeled his energies into restructuring the party at the center. Even in this endeavor, however, he seems to have encountered entropy. As late as 1943 he was remonstrating that the League’s work had exceeded his physical capacity and that it was essential “to set up an organisational machinery” (in Pirzada, 1970:450; my emphasis). (The call to share responsibility, coming from the man alleged to have been a little dictator is interesting commentary on his avowed megalomania.) In spite of his entreaties for burden-sharing, however, the League remained very much his own show and his efforts only culminated in a “steady centralization of power” in his own hands which reduced the Working Committee into his “creatures” (Sayeed, 1968: 185-86). While Jinnah needed tight control to maintain a semblance of “unity” during colonial rule, the powers conferred upon the president degenerated into dictatorship after 1947 since they were not counterbalanced by rank and file participation in the party, or strong provincial branches. On the contrary, its branches, reflecting the obstreperous nature of provincial politics, remained feeble and faction-ridden. They came into being for election purposes and vanished soon after. The League tried to compensate for this by relying on other parties as well as volunteers, a strategy that proved disastrous since once the volunteer activism, itself an outcome of the election hype and the Pakistan Movement ended, the provincial branches collapsed one after another, like the disreputable dominoes of U.S. political theory. On the ideological level, too, debates within the party remained muted after the passage of the Lahore Resolution. In spite of verbose speeches and occasional pandemonium (which Jinnah appears to have been unable to control) once the “two-nation theory” had become its creed, the League could not entertain other views, or even debate the theory’s relevance for Muslim political praxis for fear of opening up the issue to criticism or, worse, clearer definition. Thus, Jalal (1985) persua-

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sively argues that it was in the party’s best interests to define Pakistan as loosely as possible in order to keep its options open (much the same way as Gandhi had kept his open by declining to give swaraj an explicit content).30 In fact, after 1940, the League increasingly came to believe that a shared religion was the only basis of nationalism, and to regard any dissenting views as “anti-national” (Sayeed in McDonough, 1970: 53). If, as Muslim nationalists themselves had argued, a common religion was not the surest or only guarantee of nationalism then it was also incumbent to construct political alliances to hold the Muslims together. Yet, as noted, the League was unable to do so. Instead, the pervasiveness of a religious ideology induced a false “unity” among the Muslims hiding the absence of a political or class alliance between them. This unpropitious situation persisted until 1946 when, in the face of escalating demands for India’s freedom, the Cabinet Mission brought with it a proposal for a federation comprising Hindu and Muslim provinces, and Princely India, forcing a reversal in Muslim provincial strategy. By tying provincial autonomy to the demission of power at the center, the Raj inadvertendy whipped the battling Muslim elite into shape. The official class, led by Jinnah, could not negotiate with the state or the Congress at the center without the support of the majority provinces; the latter, meanwhile, needed a party at the center to protect their interests in the anticipated federation (Jalal, 1985). It was now that the scions of the notables who until recently had wanted to extract Jinnah’s finger from their pie, hastened to thrust their own in his, a truce enforced by political reform rather than by mutually shared interests. The League went into the 1946 elections lacking funds, an effective organization, and a clear-cut agenda. Jinnah’s only trump card so far as the landlords were concerned was his assurance that Pakistan would be constituted "on the basis of the existing Provinces without any further investigation or plebiscite” (in Jalal, 1985:135). As a result of its ambiguity and Jinnah’s assurance, the Pakistan demand came to be viewed as the very opposite of what it would eventually entail (India’s partition) since the landlords believed until it was too late that Pakistan meant more autonomy for unpartitioned provinces, a demand they themselves had raised in the 1930s. Paradoxically, then, the Pakistan demand which had been formulated to consolidate Muslim political power, generated a profusion of claims and counterclaims, as the provincial elite hustled to protect its own principality. Hence the “Sind for the Sindhis” slogan; hence, too, the reluctance of the Frontier or Bengal to amalgamate with the Punjab and the latter’s hostility to the idea of taking on impoverished provinces like Bengal and Sind as albatrosses around its own neck. The mirage of greater provincial autonomy in an Indian federation obliged political realignments in the provinces as the provincial elite

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hastened to disembark from their own associations to climb aboard the League’s bandwagon. As Lawrence Ziring (1971:8) puts it, the transfer of allegiance to it was “a story of personalities and promises, mixed well with human emotions.” Thus, in the Punjab the “traditional opportunism, [their] new grievances and even the vague Islamic millennialism” pushed the landlords into its arms (Jalal, 1985:139). The peasants on the other hand were captivated by its communist-drafted manifesto pledging an end to landlord exploitation. In Bengal, too, the peasantry rallied to communist Abul Hashim’s manifesto promising the “abolition of zamindari and the Permanent Settlement, equality and socialism—all sweet millennial tunes to an oppressed peasantry” (Jalal, 107). In Sind, where the Jinnah had once wagered the British governor that he could buy all the Muslim politicians for five lakh rupees (and the latter had volunteered to procure them for less), the League was able to win enough backing to emerge as the largest party, but without a clear majority, while the Frontier fell to the Congress once again. Even though the League acquired all the seats in the central legislature and secured more than 75 percent of the total Muslim vote in the provincial assemblies, its imposing performance disguised the awkward fact that Jinnah’s grip over the Muslim-majority provinces was at best extremely tenuous [since] poorly-organised provincial Leagues had hurriedly made terms with the old factional system; they had not won a mandate from the Muslim voters by an organisation and programme which replaced the existing systems of local influence (Jalal, 1985:172).

It was, of course, unlikely that a party dependent on these “systems of influence” could have replaced them; the League had knowingly constructed its politics on the bedrock of “feudalism” though less out of choice than compulsion. Also, while the League’s triumph allowed it to form a coalition ministry with the Congress at the center, this failed to resolve the "communal” tangle as the latter refused to share the more important portfolios with it while League ministers attempted to undercut Indian capitalists. Even in 1946, however, Pakistan’s creation did not seem inevitable. By accepting the Cabinet Mission’s proposals for a federation, Jinnah showed a temporary willingness to accept an Indian union. As late as 1947, he was still ready to see the Pakistan demand “satisfied by the separate dominionhood of provinces.” The Congress, however, “was no less opposed to the instant loss to India of non-Muslim areas or provinces than it had been to their distant loss by secession from the Union” (Moore, 1988:131). Thus, Gandhi, Nehru and Patel all threw their collective weights behind partition in order to rid themselves of an irksome

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Muslim presence at the center. The British, who had feared a Balkanization of India (and had prepared a “Plan Balkan” for such a contingency) accepted its partition as the lesser evil. Thus, in 1947, seven years after the adoption of the Lahore Resolution, Jinnah found himself with a “maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan,” (in Jalal, 1985: 121) courtesy of his own politics, as well as those of the Congress and, most of all, of Lord Louis Mountbatten “of Burma's,” Britain’s last viceroy to colonial India.31 Segments of the clergy which had dubbed Pakistan (which means the Land of the Pure) “Kafiristan” (the land of the heretics) and denounced Jinnah as the leading infidel, felt no qualms in crossing its borders in search of fresh proselytizing opportunities giving credence to claims that the motive force behind its creation was an insurgent Muslim ethos. However, not only had parts of the clergy opposed Pakistan’s creation, but so had the majority Muslims who had fought it tooth and nail, only scampering aboard the League at the eleventh hour. In the event, the ink on the declaration of independence had barely dried when the mesalliance between various groups began to come undone. Not only did the landlords have little interest in party politics, but with their infighting undermined the fragile “coalition” that had emerged in the last year of colonial rule, paralyzing the League. The party, which until 1946 had been a pariah was, therefore, powerless to establish “politics by consensus” (Ziring, 1971) in the new state. In fact, in "spite of all the powers provided to maintain party discipline,” there was no period “since 1947 when some cabinet, central or provincial [was not] in danger from the likelihood of a mutiny among its own supporters” (Callard 1957: 53). In 1958, the army, confronted with this fractious mélange with no firm base in civil society swept it off the political stage. The civil bureaucracy not only survived military rule, but managed to entrench itself in the state in the process. Due to the military’s reluctance to undertake agrarian reform, the "gentry” was also able to crawl out of the woodwork as soon as the dust had settled after the coup. Since then, Punjabi landlords have continued to grace Pakistan’s many civil and military governments, with some Sindhi waderas and Baluchi sardars occasionally thrown in for good measure. To claim, then, that “democracy” collapsed because to the “Moslem elite [it] was a novel system” (Brecher 1963: 626) misses the point. “Democracy” was no more "novel” for the Muslims than it had been for the Hindus. However, the difference was that unlike colonial Hindu society, the Muslim did not throw up a politically liberal or hegemonic class able to unite or to pursue a politics of class harmony which was crucial for the emergence of Indian “democracy,” as I argued in Chapter 4. Similarly, claims made by official Pakistani hagiography that Pakistan's ere-

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ation was a “historical inevitability,” (Hussain in Khan 1985: 195), that Muslim nationalism dates back to the seventh century Arab conquest of Sind, and that colonial Muslim politics was invigorating or unifying, are caricatures at worst and romanticizations at best. Finally, Marxist views of the Pakistan demand as an expression of Muslim “bourgeois” nationalism and of the League as a middle-class party also do violence to history as I have argued here.

Conclusion Colonial Muslim politics was shaped by the interplay of four factors: the dominance of the majority provincial landlords and the vulnerability of the Muslim official class to them; a congenial state-landlord relationship; the absence of a dominant-subaltern class conflict and finally, the inability of the leading Hindu and Muslim classes to reach an accord on power-sharing acceptable to both. In this context, the most important, if disabling, feature of Muslim politics was the state-landlord accord that not only robbed the latter of an incentive to unite, but also to pursue party politics since they could achieve their goals without having to exert organized pressure on the state. While their class interests kept them from advocating a liberal ideology, loyalty to their own provincial turf, the locus of their power, impeded their commitment to the League and Muslim "nationalism.” Not only were they unwilling to rally behind the party until their own survival was at stake, but they frequently subverted its authority as well. The inability of the Muslim official class, on the other hand, to play a more progressive role derived largely from its minority status and the effects of political reform which rendered it vulnerable to not only the Hindus, but to its own landed class. The ease with which the dominant classes, in spite of their weak and fragmented nature, were able to rally the subaltern groups also prevented them from broadening their agenda. In spite of the League’s emotive slogans, the party failed to come up with a program that catered to the needs of all social groups. In fact, its experience shows the problems of relying on ideological exhortations to the exclusion of political organization and a coherent agenda to acquire support. Its victory, in the face of these odds, can be attributed to the state’s policies, the intransigence of the Hindu elites and to the millennial appeal of the Pakistan demand. However, in spite of the popularity of this demand and the eventual success of the Pakistan movement, neither can be viewed as the sign of the hegemony of the League or of any class. The landlords, plagued by factionalism, did not even acquire a national standing, much less a hegemonic one, while the official class, lacking roots in the people

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and dependent on the state and the landlords, was not a good candidate to acquire hegemony; nor was it possible for it to have done so. Torn by dissent, alienated from the subaltern classes, lacking an articulate agenda and an effective organizational structure, the League could not institutionalize itself in India or provide the leadership essential for underwriting stability or democracy in Pakistan. The ideological cement that had held it together, the Pakistan demand, dissolved once Pakistan had been achieved. Not long after, so did the party. Since the same factors (state, class, and parties) but in different configurations helped to shape Hindu and Muslim politics, it is necessary to identify the commonalities and differences between them more explicitly. This is what I do in the next and concluding chapter.

Notes 1. That is, provinces in which the Muslims were in a majority. Thus, out of 11 provinces, Muslims were in a majority in Bengal, Punjab, Sind (created as a province in 1935) and the Frontier (a Congress stronghold). Baluchistan was not constituted as a full province until shortly before independence. The last four formed a contiguous zone in the northwest while Bengal was in the south-east of India. In 1941, Muslims were 55 per cent of the population in Bengal; 57 per cent in Punjab; 75 per cent in Sind; 92 per cent in the Frontier and 88 per cent in Baluchistan. However, only Bengal and Punjab came to play a decisive role in Muslim politics as noted in the text below. 2. The fact that the Muslims’ reaction was in part more overtly political and militant than that of the Hindus which, for a while at least, acquired the form of literary discourses, may be a good indicator of the differing nature of the colonial impact upon them. 3. Indian banners, designed by the British, carried European crests and it “wasn’t clear to the Indians what should be done with them.” Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 204. 4. This does not mean that Indian intellectuals did not try to distinguish religion from politics. If they did not always succeed it was due to the peculiarities of the colonial situation, as I argued in Chapter 3. 5. It seems Indian theorists want to have it both ways by arguing, on the one hand, that there was an existing “national” unity during precolonial times, and on the other, denying Mughal rule a “national” character, or legitimacy. 6. The ashrafthesis, though popular, cannot by itself explain Muslim politics since it fails to clarify why the ashraf was provincially oriented and why it was split into landlords, service groups, ulema, etc. 7. By this I mean association with a specific province (like that of the Hindu nationalists with Bengal). It is argued that since the concept of the Muslim ummah (community) is a spiritual rather than a spatially defined one, national-

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ism is at odds with Islam. However, as I argue below, Muslim nationalists failed not to imagine a “state,” but to transcend their loyalty to the Indian! 8. For problems with the term quam see Mushir U1 Haq, Muslim Politics in Modern India, 1857-1947, Meerut, India: Meenakshi Prakashan, 1970. 9. Incidentally, scholars have not concerned themselves with examining the negative consequences for Muslim politics of separate electorates, only Indian. However, as I argue in the text below, they had a debilitating impact on Muslim politics as well. 10. See the discussion on the Khilafat Movement in the text below. 11. Congress had agreed to separate electorates in 1916 but reneged on them in 1928 in the Nehru Report. 12. See the discussion on the landlords in Chapter 3. 13.1discuss Muslim provincial politics in the text below. 14. While Muslim nationalism was no more “separatist” than the Hindu, there is a pervasive tendency, even among Muslims, to speak of it as separatism, not nationalism. 15. See Chapter 3. The difference is that while the language-consciousness of the Bengali Hindus was tied to the ascendancy of Bengali, in the U.P., it resulted from erosions in the influence of Urdu. 16. The objection of the Muslim ulema (and Indian Muslim nationalists) to nationalism was that it is antithetical to Islamic notions of a spiritual community. 17. The leading Islamic seminary of Deoband sided with the Congress against the partition demand for the reasons given in note 16. 18. See in the text below for Iqbal’s proposal. 19. This is the title of Ian Talbot's study. The Punjab is often viewed as the sine qua non of Pakistan’s creation. See The Punjab and the Raj, 1849-1947, Riverdale, MD.: The Riverdale Co., 1988. 20. The Muslim Conference (1928) backed by Punjabi politicians proposed a federal form of government with full provincial autonomy. Thus, the demand for provincial autonomy originated from the landlords. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 21. Incidentally, British policies also created a greater differentiation among the peasants. See M.M. Islam, “M.L. Darling and The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt. A Fresh Look,” in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, October 1985, pp. 83-98; and Naved Hamid, “Dispossession and Differentiation of the Peasantry in the Punjab During Colonial Rule,” in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, October, 1982. 22. For a dissenting view see Hari Singh, Gandhian Rowlatt Satyagraha and British Imperialism: Emergence of Mass Movements in Punjab and Delhi, Delhi: Indian Bibliographies Bureau, 1990. 23. The fact that the Frontier, 90 per cent Muslim, did not fall prey to Islamic “fundamentalism” or “communalism” strengthens the argument that religion was not the only basis of Muslim nationalism and cannot serve as the only explanation of their politics.

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24. In the deputation the U.P. Muslims dominated. The Punjab and Frontier with 14 million Muslims had seven delegates each while Bengal with more than 25 million Muslims had only one. The U.P. with 7 million, had 11. The address itself was signed by 389 landlords, 145 merchants, 118 lawyers and 12 princes. 25. There were actually 15 points proposing a federal constitution with residuary powers to be vested in the provinces; safeguards for Muslim minorities; separate electorates; one third Muslim seats in the Central Legislature and protection of Muslim religion, culture, etc. See S.S. Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents, 1924-1947. Vol. II. Karachi, Pakistan: National Publishing House Ltd., 1970. 26. For Muslim grievances see K.K. Aziz (ed.), Muslims Under Congress Rule, 1937-1939: A Documentary Record, Vols. I and II, Delhi: Renaissance Publishing House, 1986. 27. The text is important since even though the author is identified only by her/his initials, the preface has been written by Jinnah himself. 28. The Punjab Provincial League secretary claimed the inauguration of 34 branches as a result of a few tours. See Rasul in Mukhtar Masood, (ed.), Eye Witnesses of History: A Collection of Letters Addressed to Quaid-i-Azam, Karachi: Guild Publishing House, 1968, p. 41. 29. Ispahani’s letters to Jinnah reveal the Muslim capitalists' lack of control on Bengali politics. See Z.H. Zaidi (ed.), M A Jinnah-Ispahani Correspondence, 1936-1948, Karachi, Pakistan: Forward Publications Trust, 1976. 30. See Chapter 4 on this point. 31. See Jalal, The Sole Spokesman, op. cit., for Mountbatten’s partisanship in favor of the Congress.

6 Conclusion The political liberation of South Asia from British colonial rule in the middle years of this century was the result of the convergence of at least two factors. One was the evanescence in the colonial state’s hegemony impelled by the inability of an economically and politically enervated Britain to continue shouldering the burdens of Empire after the Second World War. The other was an escalation in the Indian national struggles. In isolation, neither factor may have been decisive; in unison, they made the continuing British occupation of India infeasible, if not impossible. Two centuries of colonialism left behind a Janus-faced legacy: one countenance reflecting some progressive features, the other, a relic of the "feudal” past. This dualism, evident even during colonial rule, surfaced after its termination in the divergent political trajectories of the Indian and Pakistani states.1 Thus, whereas India went on to consolidate itself as a “democracy,” Pakistan fell prey to military rule in 1958. Following Gramsci (1971), this study has traced the divergence in the forms of the two states to the history of state, class and political relationships in colonial India. In this context, Chapter 3 examined the role of the colonial state in engendering two divergent type of politics among Hindus and Muslims, while Chapters 4 and 5 analyzed the political history of the dominant and subaltern Hindu and Muslim classes themselves. In this chapter I draw out the conclusions suggested by this inquiry more explicitly.

The State and Indian Politics As noted in Chapter 3, colonial rule had an uneven and dissimilar impact not only on Hindu and Muslim social classes, but also on their modes of political organization and consciousness. Thus, while the colonial state’s land settlement policies in conjunction with certain aspects of constitutional reform resulted in the ascendancy of a powerful, but politically conservative, landlord class among Muslims, the introduction 193

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of capitalism, English education, and electoral politics fostered among the Hindus the growth of a “middle” class with liberal and reformist aspirations. The state’s policy of underwriting the power of the landlords (often through extra-constitutional means, i.e., by going outside of “channels,”) allowed the Muslim segments to ensconce themselves in political society without having to establish a base for themselves in the civil. In fact, their guarantee of empowerment by the state, access to “vote banks,” and distaste for collective enterprises requiring discipline and cooperation not only kept the landlords from seeking alliances with the subaltern groups, but also undercut their commitment to parties and electoral politics. Although collusion with the state was not novel—the Hindu elites had also profited from it—the difference was that unlike them, the Muslims did not develop an interest in freeing themselves of its tutelage, much less in challenging it. As a result, they never developed a stake in intra- or interclass unity either. Accordingly, long after the Hindu official class in the Congress had embarked on its policy of confronting the state on the one hand and conciliating the subaltern groups on the other, the Muslim elites inside (and outside) the League remained locked into a mendicant mode vis-a-vis the state and distanced from rural Muslim society. If the state-landlord accord harmed Muslim politics, it provided a stimulus to the educated Hindu strata to organize and press for the devolution of power to itself through the introduction of representative institutions. While political concessions allowed this group to install itself in the state, thus enhancing its class unity (and at the same time weakening the Muslims further by pulling the landlords and the official class in opposite directions) the concessions could not keep pace with the political ambitions and development of this class after the 1920s. At the economic level, too, the state's policies occasioned increasing friction with the Hindu bourgeoisie. Thus, by the 1930s both classes had developed a greater political and economic stake in confronting the state than the Muslim landlords and official class who stood to make some short-term2 gains from its policies. Translated into the language of practical politics this meant that the Hindu elites had more incentive than the Muslim to break out of their comprador mode and to forge class and national unity. While it was the Hindu official class that helped to forge this unity through the disobedience movements, its intellectual and psychological underpinnings were provided by the colonial impact, specially Orientalist historiography which by proposing alternative constructions of community-as-nation, laid the foundations of Hindu nationalism. In spite of the tensions in this nationalism deriving partly from its close association

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with the colonial state, it was essential for raising the political consciousness of the Hindus. For the Muslims, on the other hand, Orientalist historiography put them on the defensive, specially during the early years, impeding their assimilation into the colonial order at a time when the Hindus had begun to establish themselves within it. In fact, by the time the Muslims came to develop some identity with colonial rule, the Hindus had progressed to contesting it. Though the ensuing confrontation between the Hindu official class and the state remained temperate, it led to the introduction of self-government and freedom and to this class supplanting British hegemony. This outcome contrasts sharply with the revolts of lords and peasants against the state that had neither succeeded in subverting British hegemony nor in instituting their own hegemony over it and can be ascribed to (a) the nature of the relationship of the official class with the state which, though symbiotic in character, was also more prone to dissension as it involved a power-struggle between them; (b) the ability of this class to construct a counter-hegemonic project based on Gandhian principles; and (c) the historical conjuncture in which the struggle matured: at a time of decreasing British hegemony and increasing political consciousness in India. Accordingly, while colonial rule did not have a uniform (or positive) impact on even the same social group, on the whole, it proved conducive to the unity and hegemony of the dominant Hindu classes. On the other hand, it enfeebled the Muslims by impeding their commitment to class unity, parties, and a liberal ideology. As a result, even though these classes were able to emerge at the apex of political society in Pakistan in 1947, it was due more to the colonial state’s policies than to their own leadership abilities. This is why, when state support was withdrawn in 1947, the “coalition” the Raj had inadvertently (and hastily) helped to put together disintegrated so rapidly. Yet, the political infirmity of the Muslim elite was not so readily apparent during colonial rule because of the British tendency during the final days of the Raj to treat the Congress and the League at par, thereby conferring upon the classes in the two parties the same political status. Moreover, the state’s policies also strengthened the dominant Muslim (and Hindu) groups vis-a-vis their own subaltern classes. Thus, constitutional reform, as well as the centralized nature of the administrative structure allowed the Hindu and Muslim elites to exercise almost full control from the top without accountability to their own people. Also, since subaltern class unrest endangered its own security, the colonial state sought to protect Hindu and Muslim landlords and capitalists from its effects. The arrest and deportation of militant peasant and trade union leaders, the banning of the Communists, and declaration of mar-

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tial law, for example, assured not only its own safety but also that of the local elites’ without their having to resort to repression themselves. It was not only state repression or its commitment to uphold “law and order” that benefitted the dominant groups, but also non-coercive measures like the nature of the franchise. Thus, while its rural bias favored the (Muslim) landlords, its narrow base benefitted the (Hindu and Muslim) official class which could not have controlled a fully enfranchised peasantry, which is why it reacted guardedly to the extension of rural suffrage in the 1920s. In different ways, then, the state provided a measure of indemnity to the dominant Hindu and Muslim classes thereby permitting them to establish their own authority over political society. This control, however, did not approximate the exercise of hegemony by these groups, specially by the Muslim elites, or by the Hindu official class in the early stage of its career, since it was enabled by British policies rather than their own leadership of civil society. Thus, the 1857 Revolt portended the introduction of an affirmative action policy by the state which sought to incorporate those viewed as the “natural” leaders of society, like the landowners, as well as those considered potential friends (or adversaries) like the Hindu official class, into the colonial order. The rest of society was winnowed out from political life by the simple mechanism of restricting the franchise. In such a situation, it was easy for the elites to acquire a political status unrelated to their standing in civil society. This disjunction between the two arenas also limited the state’s hegemony which was further constrained by the fact that since colonial rule failed to effect a thorough transformation of the productive base, it also limited the range of the state’s “educative” functions.3Also, in so far as colonial rule precluded the growth of a politically vibrant civil society through not only repression but also assimilation4 it limited the state’s hegemonic functions since an increase in such functions is contingent on the development of a strong civil society, as Chapter 2 argued. However, notwithstanding the narrow and precarious nature of its hegemony, the state’s quest for it was central to a widening of the political sphere. Thus, in spite of its greater receptivity towards Indian civil society in its Orientalist phase, the state failed to acquire hegemony due to its exclusion of Indians from governance. It was only when it embarked on its own quest for hegemony after 1857 that it also initiated collaborative policies that entailed the introduction of representative institutions into India. Yet, eventually, as Chapters 4 and 5 showed, it was not simply the colonial state’s policies that shaped Hindu and Muslim politics in distinctive ways but also the political aspirations and mutual relationships of the dominant and subaltern Hindu and Muslim classes themselves.

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The Dominant and Subaltern Classes and Civil and Political Society The reproach of the subaltern scholars that mainstream historiography chronicles only the elite’s activities (which may derive partly from the fact that elitism was a feature of colonial rule) alerts a Gramscian analysis to the necessity of discriminating between the role of the dominant and subaltern groups in politics. The most obvious way to do this is by distinguishing between the two arenas—political and civil society—in which they operate. (To make this distinction, however, is neither to endow the arenas with the essences of eliteness or subaltemity—since they derive from the structure of bourgeois society rather than from an intrinsic class attribute—nor to regard one as being more important than the other since viable politics involves establishing an organic link between both through the exercise of hegemony.) In that political society was the domain of the elites, and civil of the subaltern, colonial India was no different from any other “bourgeois” society. Where it did differ was in the absence of organic links between the two resulting from the restricted nature of British hegemony, the fact that control over the state did not always result from the leadership of civil society, and the latter’s weakness due to its exclusion or cooptation by the state and the dominant classes. However, as the following summary reveals, neither one class nor one arena played a more integral role in politics than the other, a fact that not only mainstream, but also Marxist historians ignore, the first because of their failure to distinguish between civil and political society, orthodox Marxists because of their tendency to privilege the latter, and the subaltern scholars because of their exclusive emphasis on the former. The D om inant Classes In so far as political society was monopolized from the start by the dominant Hindu and Muslim classes and in so far as their participation, specially of the Hindu official class, in state-sanctioned politics resulted in the introduction of electoral politics, it was clearly vital for “democracy.” However, this neither means that the official class was democratic by nature, nor that the same type of classes had the same ambitions, or favored the same methods of organization, or espoused the same ideologies, as is clear from a comparison of the Hindu and Muslim classes. The Hindu Classes. The analysis of Hindu politics in Chapter 4 shows that the advent of an official class may not have had necessary implications for “democracy” had it not been for a combination of factors. Thus, although this class launched its career in the 1890s by calling for “representation,” it was not until the 1930s, when realignments in state-

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class relationships made a policy of class conciliation more or less an objective necessity, that this group adopted an agenda that can be regarded as “national-democratic.” The formulation of this agenda, an indication of the growing political maturity of the Hindu official class, owed itsèlf to a decline in the state’s hegemony which opened up the possibility for it to extend its own control over political society, as well as to the onset of class strife that precluded the possibility of its being able to do so without effective leadership of civil society. It was now that this class embarked on a policy of accommodation and conciliation through the Congress. It was this policy which “democratized” its politics and permitted it to institute its hegemony over parts5 of civil society. While, as noted above, a class did not need social endorsement to acquire state power during colonial rule (it needed only state sponsorship), it did need mass support to undermine the state, which the dominant Hindu classes became committed to do after the 1930s. Their success in obtaining subaltern class support for this objective (achieved through the national struggle) and for their own class rule (achieved through political alliances by the Congress), on the other hand, derived not only from the attractiveness of their own initiative and the popularity of the national struggle, but also the disorganization and/or weakness of other social and political forces in India, including the colonial state which never recovered from the effects of the breakdown of the pax Britannica. The Muslim Classes. Although, like the Hindu official class, the Muslim was also an urban, educated, professional strata interested in state power (in fact, the political Armageddon between Hindus and Muslims is usually attributed to the conflict between the two groups over what they perceived to be their rightful shares), it did not come to play a role in politics comparable to that of the former. This was not only because of its social background and ideological conservatism, but also its minority status which made it dependent on the (majority) landlords as well as the state, and vulnerable to the Hindus. As a result, it was not positioned to benefit from electoral politics which not only reduced it to the landlords’ mercies, but also threatened to submerge it permanently in a Hindu-majority India. This is why it tried to resist the introduction of “representative” institutions and, having failed to do that, to seek artificial props like separate electorates to assure its survival. While it did succeed in this goal, it was at the cost of devitalizing its politics, heightening tensions with the Hindu elites and increasing its dependence on the state. Since its status hinged on the state’s willingness to accept its claims to parity with the Hindus at face value, the Muslim official class also never

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acquired a stake in challenging the Raj. On the contrary, it needed the state’s visible hand to ensure its own welfare. Hence, it focused its energies trying to develop a standing within it, ignoring civil society for most of its career. (When it did try to ally with the peasants, it found its ability to do so impeded by its political servitude to the landlords.) Although a schism between civil and political society was an integral feature of colonial rule, the dominant Hindu classes had been able to mitigate its effects by instituting their hegemony over (segments of) the former. The Muslim classes, on the other hand, failed to do likewise with disastrous results for not only colonial but also post-colonial politics. While the state’s ability to mediate class relationships masked their mutual detachment during colonial rule, once its mediatory role ended in 1947, the gap between the landlords and the official class on the one hand and the dominant and subaltern groups on the other manifested itself in the breakdown of party politics ("democracy”) in Pakistan. Thus, having failed to construct the inter- and intraclass alliances that allowed the Hindu official class to work representative institutions both in colonial and postcolonial India, the ruling classes in Pakistan failed not only to sustain the institutions they had inherited from the Raj, but even themselves in power. The crisis in their political unity manifested itself in Jinnah’s growing grip on politics, the bureaucratization of the League and, finally, in the military coup of 1958. This suggests that the basis of Indian democracy was not simply the introduction of representative institutions, or British rule of law and dispensation (i.e., the nature of political society) since, if these had been its only real foundation, the Muslims who were privy to the same law, institutions, and dispensation would also have been able to sustain "democracy” in Pakistan. That they could not had to do with the nature of class relationships in civil society, specifically, the nature of the relationship between the dominant and subaltern classes. The Subaltern Classes While the outbreak of peasant and working class unrest may not have been as pervasive as some scholars like to claim, it was nonetheless a crucial factor in democratizing Indian politics. However, while subaltern class unrest and movements involved both Hindus and Muslims, they did not have a uniform impact on the Congress and the League. The Subaltern Classes and Congress. Gramsci’s argument that a hegemony-seeking class must accommodate the interests of the groups it seeks to lead presupposes not only the former's ability to transcend its corporative interests, but also the latter's to specify theirs. Whether (or to what extent) these interests are then accommodated will depend on

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the nature of class conflicts and compromise in society. In this context, central to the emergence of a certain compromise equilibrium between different classes (and thereby to a tradition of political accommodation in India) was not only the advent of a hegemony-seeking class with a stake in preserving a bourgeois social and economic order, but also radical subaltern class associations able to define the interests of workers and peasants, often from an ideological perspective opposed to the dominant one. It was the ensuing social and political tensions between these groups and their programs that made a policy of class conciliation by the elites, if not an objective necessity, at least the most workable alternative for them. Though this policy defused the chances for a revolution in India, it was essential for the emergence of “democracy.” Moreover, while subaltern class parties did not acquire the theoretical sophistication or appeal of the Congress, subaltern class unrest was crucial for liberalizing dominant class politics and for launching the disobedience movements. The fact that these movements proved incapable of dislodging the British (and did not always even aspire to do so) does not mean they did not yield some tangible political dividends. On the contrary, three can be listed. First, the knowledge that the gap between the leaders and the led had narrowed since the “extremist” phase and that the Congress leadership could employ social tensions to its own benefit obliged the British to show greater flexibility than previously on issues of political reform. Second, the movements helped to impair the all-powerful image of the Raj which was an essential psychological breakthrough for the Congress to confront it effectively. Third and most crucially, the movements fostered some political unity between the dominant and subaltern groups which was central to class cooperation in colonial India and to “democracy” in the postcolonial. While this unity is largely symbolic and has failed to end the peasants’ political marginalization, it has allowed the Congress to retain some legitimacy, and the state to survive thus far without a military coup. Subaltern Classes and the League. A striking feature of dominantsubaltern class relations among colonial Muslims (which carried over to Pakistan) was their arrested nature, an outcome both of the class structure and their own political disorganization. In effect, the relationship while not collaborative was not conflictual; while involving elements of cooperation, was neither based on a class alliance nor a tradition of accommodation or compromise. This peculiarity can be ascribed to the fact that the nature of their own interests and relationship with the state as well as the absence of strong pressures from below deterred the dominant Muslim groups from having to descend from the Olympian heights of political society to the depths of the subaltern. Thus, their dependence on the state and their

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ensuing lack of interest in undermining it reduced any urge on their part to form alliances with the subaltern groups. Reasons for the relative lack of push factors from below, on the other hand, were, first, that in the two largest Muslim provinces of the Punjab and (to a lesser degree), Bengal, the state itself had ensured the landlords’ ability to cater to some peasant concerns thus helping to forestall the possibility of a class struggle between them. Second, the groundswell of support for Pakistan also helped to avert a dominant-subaltern class conflict.6 (This temporary “unity,” however, was not the result of a class or political alliance, as noted in Chapter 5.) Finally, the Muslim elite was also preserved from the effects of social unrest since at its height the Congress, as the main party in India, became the “lightning rod” for it.

Modes of Political Organization These differing class configurations and relationships among Hindus and Muslims had very different implications for the modes of their political organization, as revealed by the contrasting histories of the Congress and the League.

The Congress At the most existential level, the Congress could not have come into being or survived had the Hindu official class relied on old boys’ networks to secure its political interests, like the landlords. However, its own ideological leanings as well as its goal of obtaining a reversal in the British policy of nomination (which favored the landlords) encouraged its reliance on organized (party) politics, a factor that shaped not only its own political history, but also the party’s, in distinctive ways. In fact, changes in the Congress between 1885 and 1947 accurately mirror different stages in the political and economic evolution of the dominant groups. For example, as long as the official class remained dependent on the state for council-entry, and the bourgeoisie for its economic well-being—i.e., as long as both classes were themselves in the process of formation—the Congress' repertoire was also limited to petitioning the state for small favors for these groups. Ideologically, it aspired to no grander future for India than its permanent integration into the British Empire as a colony. However, the growing political maturity of the official class and its hegemonic ambitions also engendered changes in the party which progressed from disparaging the “ignorant peasants,” to trying to coopt them; from seeking dominion status for India, to calling for its freedom; from entreating the state for reforms, to confronting it with mass disobedience; from attempting to finagle con-

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cessions from the Raj for only the elites, to adopting an agenda with “national” aspirations; in sum, from a politics of exclusion to one of limited inclusion. This is what allowed the Congress to build a consensual base for itself, a fact that has been crucial for its own success as well as that of Indian “democracy.” If the Congress benefitted from its association with the leading Hindu classes, the latter’s participation in the party proved equally vital for their own political unity. As the power struggles and splits within the party indicate, it was the process of defining and redefining their goals and ideology that allowed the dominant classes eventually to unify behind a shared agenda. The party also helped to bring together a crosssection of intellectuals, organic and traditional, secular and religious, conservative, liberal and Marxist, all of whom contributed in varying degrees, to the formulation of its agenda. Finally, participation in the Congress was also crucial for creating the rudiments of a “national"7 consciousness among the subaltern classes.

The League The weakness of the Muslim official class, the landlords’ reliance on alternative channels of communication with the state, as well as their distaste for the humdrum of party politics, and the political rupture between different groups occasioned a mode of political articulation among the Muslims which impeded the growth of strong parties.8This is why the League, the most prominent casualty of these injurious trends, was unable to institutionalize itself. The disunity of the Muslim classes as well as the fact that they were not engaged in a hegemonic struggle were also reflected in the party’s narrow agenda, its inability to forge a class alliance, and its slow evolution. Hence, even when its elites advanced from demanding separate electorates to asking for a Muslim state, and even after the ingression of thousands of peasants into its fold, the League’s program continued to revolve around questions of political reform, an issue almost wholly irrelevant to the latter with whom it also failed to establish enduring links. In the absence of class unity, the League also became a victim of the “factional mode of politics,” whose primary feature according to Alavi (1974:420) is that cleavages are “not horizontal... but vertical, constituting factions led often by rival landowners contending for power.” This made the hammering out of alliances an unproductive process as the facade of unity tended to break down sooner rather than later. Moreover, to the making and unmaking of these transient deals, the League proved largely dispensable. Its political weaknesses also made it susceptible to control by a single man. Of course, Jinnah’s domination of the League was no different from

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Gandhi’s of the Congress. Single-handedly Gandhi had foisted two constitutions on the latter in an attempt to strengthen his own control. He had also represented it as its sole delegate to the Round Table Conference and it was he who had laid down the law for its mass movements. Gandhi, before Jinnah, had claimed the appellation of “general” and felt no qualms in designating himself a “dictator.” Yet, the Congress survived his departure while the League declined after Jinnah’s. It may be that Gandhi symbolized the political ethos of a class; while unique, he was not indispensable. Jinnah, the dominant moving force behind the League, was both. In truth he could have claimed “la partie c'est moi." Finally, the League also failed to work out a blueprint for governing Pakistan for which one plausible reason seems to be that its leaders did not expect to acquire a state outside the Indian union, as Jalal (1985) has argued. Another may be that the Pakistan demand rent the Muslim elites politically making the working out of a shared agenda almost impossible. If anything, it opened the door to Muslim claims for autonomy not only from Hindu provinces, but also from one another! This comparison of the Congress and League reveals that while parties are essential to the process of political institutionalization, they may not institutionalize the same type of politics since different classes (or the same class over time) may favor differing modes of organization, which is why similar institutions may play very dissimilar roles in different societies. Hence, not only may a party be unable to sustain democracy, but it may not even be the means through which politics is pursued. For instance, the Muslim landlords who could achieve their goals without the mediation of parties tended to bypass them or treat them cavalierly which is why the League’s leverage over politics, as well as its ideology and agenda were of a substantially different order than those of the Congress. However, while the latter was able to institute the hegemony of the leading classes in society, as well as to formalize the political alliances necessary for sustaining "democracy,” its history as well as that of the League shows that a party’s role is shaped not only by the nature of the class/es associated with it, but also by the type of goals the class pursues, and by the nature and outcome of social struggles. As such, to study political institutions qua institutions—that is, without analyzing the class matrices in which they are embedded—is to neglect a vital dimension of politics.

Political Consciousness: Nationalist Discourses Notwithstanding these differences in the modes of their political organization and the fact that Muslim political consciousness tended to mature at a later period and at a slower pace than that of the Hindus, their

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nationalist discourses were remarkably akin in their blending together of secular and religious ideals which is why it is a mistake to regard one as having been secular and the other communal. In fact, the debate over Indian secularism and communalism ignores that, as Alessandro Pizzorno (1987:31-32) says, godly, or otherwise ‘spiritual,’ or ‘ultimate,’ ends can always be found, in varying degrees, in the pursuance of those activities to which it is today usual to assign the generic name of politics: They aim at bindingly committing the future of a certain collectivity. What makes the difference is the nature of the new ties, not the presence or absence, or degree, of religiosity in the intentions of the actors. What some call ‘modernization of politics’ is this sort of change: a process not of secularization of values—or not as a prime motor—but of territorialization of binding ties, with all the consequences.

This may be why nationalism (territorialism; “politics”) and communalism (spiritual or ‘ultimate’ ends) in India were different points on the same spectrum, or different aspects of the same discourse, not opposites. The choice, then, was not between one or the other but, as Iqbal said, between “communalisms and communalisms” (in Ahmad, 1970: 125) or, conversely, between nationalisms and nationalisms. Thus, in spite of its endorsement of secularism, “Indian” nationalism was grounded in an appeal to Hindu communal sentiment not just in its formative phase (because of the influence of Orientalism) but also and, especially, in its Gandhian because of the religiously oriented nature of Gandhi’s worldview. Not only that, but Hindu communalism was more sophisticated and versatile in that it stretched along a more extensive spectrum than the Muslim with, at one end, militant, right wing parties like the Hindu Mahasabha and on the other, individuals like Gandhi and even Nehru, who was not averse to pandering to religious sensibilities on occasion, like Jinnah, whom he condemned on this score. Similarly, an unjaundiced analysis of Muslim national thought shows that it was grounded as much in political as in religious ideals and that support for Pakistan derived from political considerations. Indeed, not only did the construction of communal identities prove difficult in the Muslim “community” (as revealed by the lack of support for the League and the Pakistan demand in the majority provinces until the last days of the Raj), but “communal solidarity” failed to unify the Muslims. On the contrary, communalism created dissensions not only within the clergy but also between the majority and minority Muslim elites. However, if Hindu and Muslim nationalisms converged on this point, they differed from one another in at least two respects. First, national-

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ism matured more quickly among the Hindus partly because their intellectuals did not have to belabor their claims to nationhood or territoriality since the view of the Hindus as a nation formed an integral tenet of Orientalism. In fact, the British also regarded them as the only nation in India deserving of their own recognition. This conviction allowed Hindu intellectuals not only to view their own nationalism as a self-evident truth, but also to repudiate the Muslim on the grounds that the Hindus were the real “parent stock” in India while the former were just a “body of converts and their descendants,” as Gandhi put it (in Ahmad, 1970: 449). (The tendency to view the Hindus as “the” nation persists into modern times as evidenced, among other things, by Chatterjee’s [1993b] most recent work on Indian nationalism: The Nation and its Fragments, in which the Muslims do not appear even as a fragment of “the” Hindu nation! This runs against the grain of his own objective which ostensibly is to treat the construction of “the” nation as a problematic to be analyzed rather than accepted as an “anthropological fact,” as well as to establish the legitimacy of multiple nationalisms.) Muslims, on the other hand, found themselves not only excluded from “Indian” nationalist discourse from its very inception (even before the struggle for office between the Hindu and Muslim elites commenced, usually considered the source of communal tensions between them), but also having to justify their claims to nation- and statehood. Moreover, while many of their arguments approximated those advanced by the Hindus, they never acquired the same acceptability in the latter’s eyes or in those of the British. Second, while both nationalisms began by identifying with the colonial state, the Hindu was able to break out of its comprador mode following Gandhi’s ethical, political and epistemological deconstruction of not only colonial rule, but also Western frameworks of knowledge. As a result, after the 1930s, Hindu nationalist thought came increasingly to be formulated in opposition to the state. The Muslim, on the other hand, did not fully transcend its territorial identification with, or loyalty to, the Indian state, which is clear from the continuing attempt of Muslim nationalists to remain within an Indian union. In other words, Muslims failed to imagine, not a community but a state, and as a result of their loyalty not to the ummah, but to India! If the ideological content of Hindu and Muslim nationalism differed, it had some similar political outcomes for the dominant and subaltern classes. Hence, while nationalism allowed the elites to install themselves in the postcolonial states by “mobilizing the masses” in its name, it simultaneously became the vehicle for marginalizing the latter, even as mellow and pro-peasant an ideology as Gandhism (Chatteijee, 1993a). That is, nationalism for the subaltern groups turned out to be an anti-

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democratic discourse, a means of neutralizing them by defusing their class demands and absorbing them into dominant class parties, rather than integrating them into “the” nation in any meaningful sense. It is necessary, therefore, to ask what nationalism’s appeal is for groups like peasants who live in organic communities, whose history differs from that of the elites,’ who often do not share the same culture or language9 with them and who, at best, are marginalized by its practices and, at worst, martyred in its name. The only reasonable answer seems to be that to people whose way of life is contingent upon being able to maintain a close, usually spiritual, relationship with the “land” of their ancestors, nationalism’s appeal may derive from its claims to and association with territoriality rather than its view of the nation as a synthetically constructed “fraternity.” In fact, conceptualizations of the nation-ascommunity are problematical in so far as there are multiple definitions of community and in so far as these definitions carry the imprint of those who define them as is evident from the very different conceptualizations of Hindu and Muslim nationalists of “the” nation. At the very least, then views of "the” nation as a community raise problems.10 Finally, it is necessary to point out the role not only of political imagination, but also of violence, in forging colonial nationalisms (Fanon, 1966) including in South Asia. Thus, while the struggle of the Hindu elites against the colonial state was nonviolent in character, the same cannot be said of the confrontation between Hindu and Muslim nationalisms which, in the guise of communal conflict, was characterized by a palpable amount of what Friere (1971) has termed “horizontal violence.”

Conclusion In terms of the argument made in this book, politics among colonial Hindus was shaped by a social and political configuration whose three central features were: first, the advent of a progressive official class (a) with aspirations to state power but reliant on the state’s patronage in the nascent phase of its development and on subaltern class support in its latter to capture it, (b) able to institute and sustain organized politics in civil society, and (c) unable to pursue repression because of its lack of control on the means of repression and its need for social support; second, the outbreak of subaltern class movements which, though nonhegemonic, helped to liberalize dominant class politics, and, finally, the partly collaborative and partly conflictual relationship between the elites and the state which resulted in the widening of the political arena through the introduction of electoral politics. In other words, Hindu politics was shaped by a loosely defined historical bloc comprising dif-

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ferent classes but under the leadership of a progressive and hegemonic official class. The agenda around which this alliance matured was worked out through organized political activity over the course of half a century and reflected a broad consensus for a "liberal-democratic” order. This is what has allowed the Congress, in spite of ideological discord and the corruption of political institutions, to underwrite “democracy” in India. Muslim politics, on the other hand, was distinguished by the absence of a hegemonic class or class alliance; the political ascendancy of a landlord class disinclined to unify behind a joint agenda or to sustain systematic, organized or cooperative political activity; an official class vulnerable not only to the state and the Hindu elite but also to the provincial landlords; political rifts within the dominant groups and the absence of conflict between the dominant and the subaltern; the letter’s exclusion from politics; a relatively congenial state-dominant class relationship and finally, a “coalition” of the Muslim elite inspired by constitutional reform. In other words, Muslim politics was typified not only by the absence of a unified or hegemonic class, but also by the inability of the dominant groups to unify behind a shared program. In fact, the Pakistan demand, the centerpiece of Muslim politics, rent these groups for longer than it brought them together. Nor was the demand based on a compromise between them. When one adds to this an absence of conflict between the dominant and subaltern groups and of cooperation between the former, the lack of sustained political activity, and the monopoly of a conservative landed class on politics, it is easy to see why the League failed to stabilize itself in colonial India. In fact, the seeds of destruction inherent in this situation sprouted in the form of military seizure of power in 1958, and finally in the break-up of the state in 1971. In conclusion, while I have traced the connections between the nature and balance of social and political forces in colonial India and the broad features of postcolonial politics, specially in the period immediately following decolonization, I do not mean to suggest that the colonial legacy alone can explain politics in the two states fully, or in perpetuity. The directions these states take in the future will depend at least partly11 on not only the willingness of the dominant classes to make meaningful economic and political changes, but also on the ability of the subaltern groups to struggle for radical restructuring. As David Held (1987:1) has reminded us, historically “democracy has evolved through intensive social struggles” and it is unlikely that the future will be any different on this score. However, whether, in fact, there will even be a struggle, or in which directions it will lead is difficult to predict. It is tempting to believe that history “is each morning born anew,” as Eduardo Galeano (1983:113) once put it in another, but sadder, context.

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Notes 1. This dualism is also evident in the coexistence of the capitalist and precapitalist modes of production in India and Pakistan (and during colonial rule as well). 2. Short-term since the effects of the state’s policies tended to weaken the Muslims politically over the long haul. 3. As noted in Chapter 2, the functions of an integral bourgeois state typically involve raising the cultural level of society to correspond with the productive base and needs of society. Accordingly, if the base itself remains archaic, the state’s educative functions are also likely to be limited. This may be why feudal states (including the Mughal one) failed to become hegemonic forces. 4. In this context, assimilation by the state and the dominant groups may have been more detrimental to the growth of a healthy civil society since it discouraged groups in it from trying to create organized consent against both. 5. Hegemony could only have extended to those groups which were included or active in politics. This may be why, as new groups become politically active in India, the Congress’s hegemonic base is being corroded. 6. Whatever conflict there was among Muslims was between the elites, as noted in Chapter 5. 7. Although the nature of this consciousness may be a question of dispute and although the subaltern groups absorbed the party’s message in their own unique way, it was participation in the Congress and its disobedience movements that helped to foster some sense of nationalism among them. 8. Two exceptions were the peasantry-based Red Shirts in the Frontier and the Praja Samity in Bengal. However, the influence of these parties was confined to their own provinces. Moreover, the former’s support for the Congress and the latter’s disinterest in the center prevented them from becoming a force in central Muslim politics. 9. This necessarily limits the benefits accruing from the emergence of print capitalism which Benedict Anderson believes has been central to the growth of nationalism. See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. London: Verso, 1991. Instead, as the subaltern scholars have pointed out, in India, verbal communication was more vital. See Ranajit Guha Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1983. 10. Similarly, feminists argue that nationalism as articulated by white, heterosexual, middle class males, generally militates against the rights of women and sexual minorities. See, for instance, Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Nationalisms and Sexualities, New York: Routledge, 1993. 1 1 .1 say “partly” because the options of developing societies are necessarily constrained by the workings of global capitalism and Western notions of what the “new world order” should look like, neither of which has proved beneficial for most “Third World” peoples in the past.

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About the Book and Author Although India and Pakistan were part of a single state until liberation from British colonial rule in 1947, the former has since emerged as the world’s largest “democracy,” whereas the latter has been under military control for most of its history. In this thought-provoking volume, Asma Barlas explores the complex and delicate issue of democracy in India and Pakistan. Analyzing the political trajectories of each country, Barlas provides the reader with both comparative and historical perspectives. She then sets out to establish a relationship between the specific forms of both the Indian and Pakistani states and the political histories, forms of consciousness, and modes of organization of the dominant and subaltern classes during the colonial period, drawing upon Gramscian theory. Within this context, Barlas’s analysis helps to clarify why democracy in South Asia continues to be so precarious, why nationalism still takes a “communal” form, and why the two postcolonial states, in spite of differences between them, continue to be top-heavy, elitist, and authoritarian. Asma Barlas is assistant professor of politics at Ithaca College.

229

Index Adamson, Walter, 22,26,30 Agriculture under colonial rule, 5152,165-166 Agriculturist Party, 171 Ahmad, N., 66 Ahmed, Eqbal, 149 Ahmed, Rafiuddin, 58,96,150 Ahmed, Sufia, 58,103,150 Akbar the Great, 66 Alavi, Hamza, 1-2,5,7,13-14, 19(n35), 48,51,56 Ali, Ameer, 173 Ali, Imran, 53,166-167 Ali, Mohammed, 172,177 Ali brothers, 159 Aligarh conservatism of, 148 influence on Muslim politics, 147148 and modernization, 148 and the Orientalists, 63,147 Aligarh Movement, 148 All-India Muslim League, 2,143-191 and the capitalists, 183 and the Congress, 132,175,180 genesis of, 159 and the landlords, 156,171,183— 184,202-203 loyalism of, 173 and nationalism, 12,176,202-203, 205 and the national struggle, 2,202203 and the officiai class, 156-157,169, 202-203 and Pakistani politics, 5,8

and the peasants, 182,194,202-203 social base of, 5,202-203 Ambirajan, S., 74,78,90(nl3) Amin, Shahid, 118-119 Anderson, Benedict, 17(n6), 135, 208(n9) Anderson, Perry, 22,45(nl9) Anglicists, 57, 65, 69 Arnold, David, 22,30-31,115,117, 133 Bahl, Vinay, 111, 113 Balibar, Etienne, 29 Baluchistan, 6,158 Bangladesh, 5 Barber, Benjamin, 37 Barthes, Roland, 33,45(nl8) Battle of Plassey, 71 Bayly, CA, 51,58,65,76, 78,87 Beasant, Annie, 141(nl9) Beauchamp, Joan, 51,74,105,127 Bengal and the bhadralok, 91(nl7), 102, 163-164 colonial impact on, 54,75 and Hindu nationalism, 62-63, 102-104 and Muslim nationalism, 165 Muslims and politics in, 144,149151,158,163-165 partition of, 81,102 and the Permanent Settlement, 49, 144,163,186 Renaissance, 58,91(nl9), 104 and swadeshi, 102-105 231

232 Bengali language consciousness, 61-62 use of, 61 Bevan, Edwyn, 105 Bhadralok, 91(nl7), 163 and Bengali politics, 163-164 and the Muslims, 163-164 and the Raj, 91(nl7), 102,163-164 Bhaskar, Roy, 41-42 Bhutto, Benazir, 6 Bhutto, Z.A., 5, 7 Birla, G.D., 11,141 (nl6) Boggs, Carl, 27 Bolshevik Revolution implications for India, 82 Bombay Industrial Disputes Act, 1939,114 Bombay Plan, 111 Bourgeoisie. See Capitalists Boycott, 105. See Swadeshi Brecher, Michael, 187 British land settlement policies, 49-50, 193. See also Permanent Settlement and the Mughals, 145,148 nature of rule in India, 48, 86-89 racism, 54, 76, 79, 81, 96 view of representation, 66 views on governing India, 76-77, 81 “British India” administrative structure, 73, 75, 85 nature of constitutional reform, 7389 British Parliament and the Company, 75-77 and constitutional reform, 71, 7576 British Raj, 1, 60, 71 and the Congress, 79, 81, 83,155, 157,163 and constitutional reform, 77-86 and Indian industrialization, 56 and the Muslim League, 181 and Muslims, 53,146,147-148,151, 154-158, 195 Broomfield, J.H., 163

Index Brown, Judith, 118,127,135 Buch, M.A., 100,105 Buci-Glucksman, Christine, 11, 23, 25-26 Bureaucracy colonial bourgeoisie’s attitude to, 111

composition of colonial, 58, 92(n32), 96 , in Pakistan, 3,165,187 role in colonial politics, 84 See also Civil service Cabinet Mission, 1946, 86,185-186 Callender, Ann, 57, 59, 76, 79 Cambridge School, 9-10,161 Cannandine, David, 70-71 Capitalist development, patterns of in colonial India, 2, 54-56, 96 in postcolonial India, 2 in postcolonial Pakistan, 2 Capitalists and the colonial state, 54-56,108 and the Congress, 106,110-113 Hindu, 53, 56,194 and labor, 106,108-109,113-115 and the landlords, 111 Muslim, 53, 56,163,171 and the Muslim League, 183 religious background of, 53, 56 Caste system, 1 2 ,17(n9) Chakravarty, Suhash, 70 Chamber of Princes, 83, 92(n29) Champaran Satyagraha, 105,115,117 Gandhi's role in, 115,117 peasants and, 141(nl7) Chandra, Bipin, 111, 127 Chandra, Sudhir, 65,103 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra, 64-65, 100, 103-104,149 Chatterjee, Partha, 10, 50-51, 6 0 ,100101, 103,112, 118, 122-124, 133135,140(n3), 150, 205 Chipko Movement, 4 Choudhary, Sukhbir, 114,116,118 Christian missionaries in India, 64, 68 Churchill, Winston, 86

Index Civil disobedience movements, 115, 124-126 Civil service in colonial India, 73, 92(n32) in postcolonial India and Pakistan. See Bureaucracy Civil society. See Gramsci’s concept of Civil war in Pakistan, 5,165 Cohn, Bernard, 70,145 Colonial culture, 64, 68 Colonialism, British under the Company, 54, 58, 64,109 under the Crown, 77-86,110 impact on Britain, 69-70,123 impact on India, 48, 69-70 Colonial legacy 1 -3 ,19(n29), 4 8 ,193208 Colonial state and the capitalists, 54-56,96,100, 102,108, 111 and the Congress, 79, 81, 83,155, 157,163 and democracy, 71-86 and English education, 57-58,96, 98,100,102, 163,168 and Indian capitalism, 53-59 and the Indian class structure, 4849 and Indian feudalism, 48-53 and industrialization, 53-59, 75 and labor, 59,109,115,195 and the landlords, 48-54, 78, 81, 83-84, 97,148, 153-157, 159-161, 163,165-170, 193-194,196 and the Muslims, 143-191 and the peasants, 59-60, 75,109, 170.195-196 and political reform, 71-89 scope and nature of hegemony, 60, 79.195-196 and the subaltern classes, 50, 596 0 ,195-196 Communal Award, 84 Communalism British role in, 61-71, 85 definition of, 16(n5)

233 Hindu, 65,103-104, 126-129, 149, 164, 204 Iqbal’s view of, 178,204 Muslim, 149,164, 204 and nationalism, 61-71,103,12&129 Communist Party of India (CPI), 120122 Communists and the colonial state, 121,195 and the Congress, 120-122 and the national movement, 119— 122 and the Third International, 120121 Congress Socialist Party, 121 Constituent Assembly, 1946,138 Constitutional reform and democracy, 71-89 during the Company’s rule, 73-77 during the Raj, 77-86 Coupland, Reginald, 72,75, 80, 85,88, 99,107 Cox, Robert W., 7, 22, 27, 29, 39 Cronin, Richard, 58 ,91(nl7), 102,118 Curzon, Viceroy, 58-59,102,172 Darling, Malcolm, 167 Davidson, Alastair, 31 De-industrialization, 55(tables) Democracy absence in Pakistan, 207 the colonial state and, 71-89 the Congress and, 97-98,197-198, 203 and constitutional reform, 73-86 definition of, 9 , 16(nl) nature of Indian, 3-4,138-139,140, 198-199 theories of Indian, 7,11-12, 95, 206-207 Deoband, 146,190(nl7) Depression of 1930,26, 60, 84, 86, 108, 111, 124 Desai, A.R., 48, 52 Dhanagare, D.N., 12,118 District officers, 59, 73, 92(n32)

234

Index

Dominant classes (Hindu) and civil society, 98,197-198 and the colonial state, 48-59,61-86, 97-102,108-109,197-198 and the Congress, 3-4 ,9 7 -1 3 9 ,197198, 201-202 and democracy, 97-98,137-138, 197-199 and labor, 113-115 and the League, 132,175,180 and national discourse, 2 ,6 0 ,6263,95,102-104,194,202,205-206 nature of hegemony, 195-196,198, 208(n5) and the peasants, 115-120 and political society, 195-198 Dominant classes (Muslim) and civil society, 194,198-201 and the colonial state, 143-191 and democracy, 198-199 and labor, 194 and the League, 143-191 and national discourse, 148-152, 165, 170,176-181,194, 203, 205206 nature of hegemony, 195-196,198199 and the peasants, 169-170,182,194 and political society, 194,198-201 Drain theory, 99-100 Dufferin, Lord, 99,104 Durbars, 80,99 Dutt, R. Palme, 70,88,103,105 Dutt-Bradley Thesis, 120-121 Dyarchy, 83-84

Factory Act, 1911,109 Femia, Joseph, 22 Feudalism, 48-49,52 and the colonial state, 48-50 differences in European and Indian, 48-49 and Indian Muslims, 53 and Mughal rule, 66 Ford Foundation, 13 Ft. William College, 61,63 Foster, E.M., 81 Fourteen Points, Jinnah’s, 174, 191 (n25) Free trade, 77,99-100 Freitag, Sandria, 6 6 ,142(n25), 149 Fundamental Rights Resolution, 112, 117,119-120,136

East India Company, 51,54,58,64, 7 1 ,90(n5), 144,163 East Pakistan, 5 Economic development in colonial India, 50-57,75,100, 108,163 colonial intellectuals critique of, 99-100, in Pakistan, 2 in postcolonial India, 2

Galeano, Eduardo, 207 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 2 and the capitalists, 56,112-113 and civil disobedience, 8 3 ,8 8 ,124125,160 and colonial India, 96,107-108, 110-132 and communalism, 123,126-129, 149,204 and the Congress, 122-132,203

Economy, colonial. See Economic development, in colonial India Education, colonial. See Colonial state, and English education; Intellectuals, and colonialist education Election, 1946 Congress and, 136 League and, 175 Elections of 1936 Congress and, 113,136 League and, 164,175 Electorate composition of, 80,83-84, 86,161, 163,167 Esposito, John, 146,162 Evangelicals, 64 "Extremists,” 81,96,102-107,124

Index critique of colonial rule, 122-123 and Indian politics, 113-132,186 and labor, 113-115 and the Left, 120-122 and the Muslims, 128-129,160,186 and nationalist discourse, 122-129, 149 and nonviolence, 124,142(n26) and the passive revolution, 112-113 and the peasants, 115-120,127 and satyagraha, 124 Gandhi Raj, 119 Gardezi, Hasan, 1,12 Gautam, Om R, 96-97,109,112,117, 119-120 Giddens, Anthony, 32-33 Gilbert, Alan, 16(nl), 26 Gilmartin, David, 167-168 Gilpin, Robert, 74,77 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, 103 Government of India Act, 1935, 73, 84-85,170 Gramsci, Antonio, 1,14,22-38, 111, 193 Gramsci’s concept of civil society, 29-30,32 class and politics, 14,22-42 common sense, 30-31 democracy, 23,25-26,28-29,34 hegemonic culture, 32-35 hegemony, 22-35 historic bloc, 7,27 ideology, 27, 29,32-35 intellectuals, 34-35 passive revolution, 1 1 ,19(n31), 23 political parties, 28-29 political society, 29-30 subalterns, 19(n28), 30-32 Guha, Ranajit, 10,15,31,62-63,100101,103,123,132-135,159 Habib, Irfan, 10,65,133,166 Haq, Zia ul, 5-6 Hardy, Peter, 65,145-146,172 Harijans, 137 and the Congress, 137 and Gandhi, 137

235 Harvard University, 13 Hayat, Khizr, 183 Hayat, Sikandar, 169-170 Hegemonic culture. See Gramsci’s concept of Hegemony. See Gramsci’s concept of Held, David, 16(nl), 207 Hemmady, Nikhil Aziz, 127 Hindess, Barry, 29,32 Hindu Mahasabha, 204 Hindu-Muslim collaboration, 105, 153-154,159 Hindu-Muslim rivalry, 63,67-68,82, 128-129,198 Hindu reform movements, 64 Hindus and British Orientalism, 6 3 ,204205 and caste system, 17(n9) and communalism, 65,103-104, 126-129,149,164,204 and the Congress, 126-129 and Gandhi, 126-128 and nationalist historiography, 626 3 ,101,123,149-150 nationalist intellectuals, 101,103104,126-129 Historic bloc. See Gramsci’s concept of Hobsbawm, Eric, 31-32,134,137,148 Home Rule Leagues, 105,141(nll) Hume, Allan Octavian, 96,98 Hunt, Alan, 26-27,36 Hunter, W.W., 146 Huq, Fazlul, 164,183 Husain, Fazli, 166 Hussain, Mushahid, 6 Hutchins, Francis, 57,60,74,76-81, 85 Imam, Ali, 67 Imperialism, British, 78. See also Colonialism India democracy in, 3-4,140,198-199 postcolonial politics in, 1-4,8,95, 199-200

236

Index

Indian Association, 98 Indian Left and the colonial state, 121 and the Congress, 120-122 and national politics, 84,119-122, 131 and the subaltern classes, 119-121, 133 Indian National Congress, 3, 8,12,15, 95 British view of, 99,102,163 and the capitalists, 110-113 and colonial politics, 79, 81, 83, 85, 95-140, 201-202 and the colonial state, 83-85,99, 102,154-155,157,163 decline in hegemony, 3 and Gandhi, 122-132 and Indian democracy, 7,11,198, 201-202

and labor, 113-115 and the Left, 120-122,132 loyalism of, 98-101 and the Muslim League, 132,175, 180 and the Muslims, 105,128-129,175, 191(n26) and nationalism, 2, 60, 62-63,95, 102-104, 194, 202, 205-206 origins of, 96, 201-202 and the passive revolution, 11,95, 112-113 and the peasants, 115-120,132137,200, 205-206 and postcolonial politics, 3 -4,8,95 social base of, 3,11,95 Industrialization. See Economic development Intellectuals and colonialist education, 58,98, 100-101,147-148,163,168 Gramsci’s concept of, 34-35 and Hindu nationalist discourse, 59, 65, 99-101, 149, 204-206 and Muslim nationalist discourse, 149-152, 203-206 organic, 34

parties and, 28 in peripheral social formations, 34, 65 traditional, 34 Iqbal, Muhammad, 162,174,176-179, 204 Islam colonial Hindu intellectuals and, 103-104 and democracy, 8,149 reform movements in colonial India, 64,146,162 Jackson-Lears, T.J., 32,68 Jalal, Ayesha, 17(nl5), 18(n20), 157, 166,170,175-176,184-185, 191(n31), 203 Jessop, Bob, 12, 23-24,43(n3), 45(n20), 88 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 2,158 and Gandhi, 129 and the League, 171-187, 202-203 and the majority provinces, 158 and Muslim nationalism, 179-180 and the Punjab, 158,165,169-170 Jinnah-Sikandar Pact, 169 Johnson, G., 79,131 Josh, Baghwan, 121,166 Kashmir, 4 Khan, Agha, 173 Khan, Ayub, 13 Khan, Syed Ahmed and Aligarh Movement, 158 and the Congress, 151 and Muslim nationalism, 104,146147,151,161, 172 and representation, 151-153 Khilafat committees, 160 Khilafat Movement, 124,153,159160,174 Gandhi’s role in, 159-160 implications for Muslim politics, 159-160 Kisan sabhas and the colonial state, 59,84 and the Congress, 116,136

Index and the Muslim League, 182 U.R Sabha, 116 Kochanek, Stanley, 56, 76 Kopf, David, 57, 61-63, 69,103 Kosambi, D.D., 48-49, 53, 61, 87 Kothari, Rajni, 3 , 17(nl3) Kothari, Smitu, 13 Kumar, Kapil, 115 Kumar, Shive, 102-103 Labor and capitalist development, 59 and the capitalists, 106,108-109, 113-115 and the colonial state, 59,109,115, 195 and Congress, 113-115 and the League, 194 strikes, 105, llO(table), 114 unions, 114-115,195 Lahore Resolution, 1940,161,165, 175-176,184,187. See also Pakistan demand Land Alienation Act, 1901,167 Landlords and the colonial state, 48-54,61-72, 78, 81, 83-84, 97,148,153-157, 159-161,163, 165-170,193-194, 196 and the Muslim League, 169-170, 202-203 and party politics, 101,156,173, 194 in the Punjab, 156-157,169-170 religious background of, 53,154 Lansdowne, Viceroy, 80 Lelyveld, David, 147 Liberal Federation, 105 Liberals, Congress, 97,99-100,151 Lieten, Kristoffel, 106,111-112 Low, D.A., 182 Lucknow Pact, 1916,105,153,159 Lytton, Lord, 58, 78 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, 57,76 McGuire, John, 96 McLane, John, 97,102

237 Majeed, Javed, 52, 58, 77 Markovits, Claude, 54, 56,108, 111 Marshall, P.J., 52, 61, 63 Martial law, British, 165,195 Marxist theories of Indian politics, 8-12 of Pakistani politics, 8-9,12-14,145 Mass Contact Committees, 116 Masselos, Jim, 61,96,103 Mehrotra, S.N., llO(table) Mepham, J., 33 Mercantilism, 71, 73-74 Metcalf, Barbara, 64,146 Metcalf, Thomas, 4 9 ,90(n4) Middle class. See Capitalists Migliaro, Luis R., 28 Military and Pakistan's politics, 1-3, 5 -7 ,1314, 83,165,187 recruitment patterns under colonial rule, 152,166-167,169-170 role in India, 1-2,7 theories of intervention in politics, 7 ,1 3 -1 4 ,19(n36) Mill, James, 76 Mill, J.S., 59, 76-78,152 Minault, Gail, 146 Minto, Viceroy, 106,171-172 Minto-Morley Reforms, 1909,82 Misra, B.B., 54, 57 Misra, Udayon, 85 Misuraca, Pasquale, 28 Mittal, S.C., 168 Moderates, Congress, 81 Modernization theory, 5,8-9 and Indian politics, 5 and Pakistani politics, 5 problems with, 8-9 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, 1919, 83,154,157 Moon, Penderal, 71, 86,100,118 Moore, Barrington, 11-12 Moore, R.J., 78, 83, 85,125,161,166 Morera, Esteve, 22,30, 44(n8) Mountbatten, Viceroy, 73 ,92(n31), 187 Mouzelis, Nicos, 13

238 Mughals, 49, 89(nl), 70 and the British, 74 and Hindus, 67 land policies, 49 nature of the state, 67-68 Mukherjee, Aditya, 120 Mukherjee, Mridula, 121 Mukherjee, Ramkrishna, 51, 75 Muslim Conference, 166,174 Muslims in Bengal, 49,158 and British Orientalism, 145-146 and the colonial state, 53,144-145, 147-148, 152-170 and communalism, 149,164, 204 and Company rule, 144-147,163 and the Congress, 104,151,171, 180-182 and Gandhi, 128-129 and nationalism, 148-152,165,170, 176-181,194, 203, 205-206 and nationalist historiography, 150 and the Permanent Settlement, 49, 144-145, 186 and provincial politics, 157-171 in the Punjab, 157-158,165-170 and separate electorates, 8 1 ,153154 separatism. See Muslims, nationalism and U.P. politics, 149,157,172 works of fiction, 150 Nadvi, S.H., 66 Nagpur Program, 1920,115 Nairn, Tom, 69-70 Nandy, Ashis, 15,64, 67-69,123,130 Nationalism and India's social structure, 65 and secularism, 61-66,126-129, 148-149, 204 Nationalist discourse of Hindu intellectuals, 100-101, 126-129,149,193, 204-206 of Muslim intellectuals, 148-152, 158-162,165,177-181,194, 204206

Index National struggles in colonial India, 102,193, 204-206 and the peasants, 107 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 73,113,114, 116, 118,120-121,127, 182,186, 204 Nehru Report, 84,109, 111, 113,136 North-West Frontier, 4 9 ,1 5 8 ,190(n23) O’Donnell, C.J., 58, 76,102 O’Donnell, G., 87 Official class, 5 , 17(nl4), 57-59, 72, 154,157,194-199 Oren, Stephen, 169 Orientalism and Hindu historiography, 62-63 and Hindu intellectuals, 62-63,204 and Islam, 18(n21), 145-146 Orientalists and Aligarh, 147-148 and education in India, 6 1 ,100101,147-148 and Hindu nationalism, 61-63, 100-101,103, 194, 204-205 and historiography, 61-62,194 in India, 57, 62, 69, 76, 102,145, 196 and Muslim nationalism, 146,151, 195 view of Hindus, 62-63,145 view of Muslims, 62-63,145-146, 149 Page, David, 79, 83,157-158,160, 166-167 Pakistan bureaucracy’s role in, 3 creation of, 186-187 military’s role in 1,3, 5-6 politics in, 5-7,12-14,187, 199200, 203 Pakistan demand, 1940,158,160-162, 174,185,189,204. See also Lahore Resolution Pakistan Movement, 12,182,184 Pandey, B.N., 58, 83, 96 Pandey, Gyan, 65, 68 Partition of India, 17(nl5), 86 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 35

Index Passive Revolution, 19(n31), 23 and Gandhi, 112-113 and Indian democracy, 11,95,112 See also Gramsci’s concept of Paulo, Freire, 30-31,43, 67,100,206 Peasants and colonial rule, 132-134,144 and the colonial state, 59-60,75, 109,170,195-196 and the Congress, 115-120,132137,200,205-206 and Gandhi, 115-119,124-125,127 and the League, 169-170,182,194 and the Left, 119-121 and nationalism, 132-137,206 nature of consciousness, 6 8 ,133136 and revolution, 134 Permanent Settlement, 1793,49,52, 144,163,186 Pious clause, 64 Pizzorno, Alessandro, 204 Political bloc, 27 Political society. See Gramsci’s concept of Pouchepadass, Jacques, 117,141 (nl7) Prakash, Gyan, 10,27,46(n30) Princely states, 48, 71-73,84-85,185 Princes and the colonial state, 72-73, 92(n29) and Indian politics, 83,153 Provincial politics, 157-171 in Bengal, 158 disjuncture in, 157,170-171 Muslims and, 157-170 Punjab, 157,165-170 in the United Provinces (U.P.), 158163,172 Punjab and the “British Indian” army, 145 and the colonial state, 69,152,157, 163,165-170 economic development in, 56 education in, 168 Land Alienation Act, 1901,167-168 landlords of, 157,165-170

239 Muslim clergy in, 69,160,167-168, 170 and the Muslim League, 169-171 and Pakistani politics, 6 peasants of, 166-170 the Punjab line, 161-162,166-167 Unionists, 153,171,182. See also Unionist Party Qalb-i-Abid, 170 Quit India Movement, 85,109,116, 120,124 Rahman, Matiur, 172-173 Raj, British. See British Raj Ranger, Terence, 148 Rashid, Jamil, 1,12 Ray, Niharranjan, 61 Ray, Rajat, 87, 89(nl), 96 Red Shirts, 171,208(n8) Reeves, P.D., 155,161 Representation, Indian demand for, 97-98 Revolt of 1857,61,71, 75, 77,145, 147-148,169,172,196 Ricardo, David, 99 Robinson, Francis, 66,128-129,158161,173 Round Table Conferences, 84,109, 161,166,177 Roy, M.N., 52, 67,124 Roy, Rammohun, 65,103 Ryotwari system, 49 Said, Edward, 46(n28), 47, 88,107,145 Samity, Krishak Praja, 164,171 Sanads, 72 Sanjines, Jorge, 15 Sarkar, Sumit, 51,56,103,106,119 Sayeed, Khalid bin, 15,184 Schmitter, Phillipe C., 87 Scott, James, 44(nl7) Seal, Anil, 79,101,106,130-131,166 Self-rule. See Swaraj Sen, Sukomal, 109,114 Separate electorates, 81,104,153 Sepoy Mutiny. See Revolt of 1857

240

Index

Servants of India Society, 106 Shaikh, Farzana, 66, 68, 151,180 Showstack-Sassoon, Anne, 11,23-24, 26-28,36,142 (n30) Sikhs, 3, 64-65,153, 165-166,169 Simla Deputation, 151,159,171-172, 191 (n24) Simmons, Colin, 55 (tables) Simon Commission, 1942,109 Sind, 6,158,183,185 Singh, Iqbal, 99 Singh, Randhir, 128 Sirhindi, Shaikh Ahmad, 146 Sitaramayya, Pattabhi, 96,107 Smith, Adam, 74, 99 Smith, Wilfred C., 53,154 Socialists, 119-122 Social unrest, 59-60, 84-85,102,110, 144-145, 195-196 implications for democracy, 136138, 200 and the national struggles, 132-136, 200

Spivak, Gayatri, 10 State authoritarianism of, 3,9 nature of the colonial. See Colonial state nature of the Indian, 1-4 nature of the Pakistani, 1-3, 6 ,1314 overdeveloped, 1 praetorian, 1 role in the colonial economy, 5456, 96-100,102,108,111 role in the Indian economy, 2 role in the Pakistani economy, 2 See also Gramsci’s concept of Stokes, Eric, 49, 52, 77, 79, 88 Subaltern classes and the colonial state, 50, 59-60, 195-196 and the Congress, 113-120,199-200 and democracy, 136-138, 200 and the League, 200-201 and the national struggles, 132-136, 200

Subalterns, 19(n28). See also Gramsci’s concept of Subaltern scholars, 10-11,14 and Indian democracy, 10-11,14 and Indian nationalism, 135,148149, 205 Suhrawardy, H.S., 165 Swadeshi, 102-103,105-106,114 definition of, 102 Gandhi and, 106 and protectionism, 103,105 Swaraj definition of, 102 “Extremists” and, 104-105 Gandhi and, 106,115,185 Tagore, Rabindranath, 93(n42), 130 Talbot, Ian, 166,168-169 Tata-Birla Plan. See Bombay Plan Taxation during colonial rule, 74 Tax farmers, 49 Terrorism, 84,107 Thapar, Romila, 16(n5), 63 Therborn, Goran, 32 Third International and Indian communists, 120-121 policies of, 120-121 Tidrick, Kathryn, 81-82,130,169 Tilak, B.G.D., 103-105 Tomlinson, B.R., 71,131 Trade unions, 114,195 splits in, 114-115 Two-Nation theory, 161-162,184 Tyabji, Badruddin, 97-98 Ulema, 66 and the colonial state, 160,167-168 and the Pakistan demand, 160 Unionist Party (Unionists), 153,166, 169-171, 182 United Muslim Party, 164 United Provinces (U.P.), 149,158-161, 172 United States, 13-14, 86 Universal suffrage British middle class and, 80

241

Index Untouchables, 4,131. See also Harijans Upadhyaya, Prakash, 126-128 Utilitarians, 76 Vacca, Giuseppe, 12,27, 29,32,34-35, 3 8 ,44(nl5) Victoria, Queen, 71,78 Wahabi revolt, 144 Wali Allah, Shah, 146 Washbrook, David, 51,69,90(n7) Weightage, 73 Weiner, Myron, 80,82,89 Wesotowski, W., 34 Wilson, H.H., 62 Wolf, Eric, 15 Woodruff, Philip, 71

Worker-Peasant Independence Wing, 116 Workers and Peasants Party (WPP), 116,136 World War I and colonial India, 77,82,112 World War II and colonial India, 85 Young Turks class origins of, 162-163 and the League, 158-159,173 Zaidi, A.M., 111, 115 Zaidi, Z.H., 164,170 Zakaria, Rafiq, 148 Zamindar Party, 154-155 Zamindars. See Landlords Ziring, Lawrence, 186-187