Gandhi: Pan Islamism, Imperialism, And Nationalism In India 0195622995, 9780195622997

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NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE

THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY

GANDHI Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism in India

By the same author

Mahtama Gandhi-A Biography The Nehrus Gokhale, The Indian Moderates and the British Raj The Moderate Era in Indian Politics Gandhi and His Critics

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/gandhipanislamisOOOOnand

Mahatma Gandhi 1924

GANDHI PAN-ISLAMISM, IMPERIALISM AND NATIONALISM IN INDIA

B. R. NANDA

BOMBAY

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS DELHI OXFORD NEW YORK

1989

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 GDP New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petalingjaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Melbourne Auckland and associates in Berlin Ibadan

©B.R. Nanda 1989

ISBN 0 19 562299 5

Filmset by South End Typographies, Pondicherry printed by Eastern Graphics, Pragati Ind. Estate, Bombay 400 011 and published by S.K. Mookerjee, Oxford University Press, Oxford House, Apollo Bunder, Bombay 400 039

To Baba

Preface

Some years ago, while exploring in some depth Gandhi’s attitude to the partition oflndia in the last critical decade preceding the transfer of power, it was borne in on me that to really understand his motives and methods, I would have to go back to an earlier period; earlier than even his return to India in 1915. His success in uniting Hindus and Muslims—and for that matter Indian Christians and Parsis—in the common struggle against racial discrimination in South Africa encouraged him in the belief that in Satyagraha he possessed a means of bridging the gulf which existed between the two major com¬ munities in the mother country. His support to the Khilafat movement in 1920 did not, therefore, stem from a momentary impulse, or a tactical calculation. He had his own reasons, which have often been missed by his admirers as well as his critics, for intervening in a crisis which was not of his making, but which had brought millions of Indian Muslims to the verge of desperation. The resultant Congress-Khilafat alliance proved to be an unprecedented demonstration of Hindu—Muslim unity, the like of which had never been seen before, nor was to be seen again in this subcontinent. The alliance gladdened the hearts ol Indian nationalists as much as it bewildered the ruling power. However, when there was a reaction in the wake of the with¬ drawal of civil disobedience and the abolition ol the institution of the Khilafat by Turkey, Gandhi became the target of criticism from all quarters. The British charged him with opportunism; Hindus blamed him for having unwittingly sharpened the reli¬ gious consciousness of the Muslim community; Muslims gave him no thanks for his pains. To the historian, seeking to unravel the history ol this period, the important question is not only why Gandhi chose to support the pleas of Indian Muslims on behalf ol the Ottoman Khilafat, but how the fate of Turkey and its Sultan-Galiph came to so completely obsess the minds and sway the hearts of a whole generation of Indian Muslims. It was not only the semi-literate

viii

Preface

village maulvis, schoolteachers, artisans and small shopkeepers who w ere swept oil'their feet. Graduates of British universities, such as M. A. Ansari, Mohamed Ali, Syed Mahmud and Syud Hossain; seasoned barristers and ardent nationalists, such as Jinnah and Mazharul Haq; and confirmed loyalists of the British Raj, such as Ameer Ali and the Aga Khan, were agitated about the misfortunes ofTurkey. The Khilafat movement for the first time brought Indian Muslims en masse into the mainstream of Indian nationalism, but the experience was much too short-lived and, thanks to Kemal Ataturk, had an unhappy ending. Accordingly, Muslim politics reverted to the grooves along which they had moved since the foundation ot the Muslim League and, indeed, since the days of Syed Ahmad Khan. The study of Pan-Islamism in India, ol which the Khilafat movement was the culmination, thus merges into a study of Muslim politics and ot the forces within and outside the Muslim com muni tv which moulded them. I have tried in these pages to identify these forces: the medieval heritage, the impact of British rule, the effect of the Mutiny, the role of Syed Ahmad Khan and of western education, the rise of the Indian National Congress and the reactions of the Muslim political elite to it, the growth of Pan-Islamism. the First World War, the emergence of Gandhi, and his confrontation with the British, the Congress-Khilafat alliance in the non-cooperation movement and its immediate and long-term consequences. It has been my premise throughout that if I was to understand and interpret this period, it could only be within a historical framework of continual interaction between Muslim perceptions, hopes and fears on the one hand, and the nationalist (predominantly Hindu) aspirations for sellgovernment and British imperial interests and policies on the other. I hope this book will contribute to a fuller and more objective appraisal of not only an important period in modern Indian history, but also of the pivotal role played in it by Gandhi. I have drawn upon a wide range of published and unpublished materials. My thanks are due for their courtesy and assistance to staff of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the National Archives of India, the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya and the India Office Library. The bibliography at the end of the

Preface

IX

book includes collections ol unpublished records and papers, to the owners and donors of which I acknowledge my debt of gratitude. I have deliberately kept the references in the notes to a minimum and have, as a rule, cited them only for direct quotations. The Navajivan Press, Ahmedabad, have been kind enough to give permission to quote from Gandhi’s writings and speeches. Most of the work in this book was done when I had the honour of being the National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. I am grateful to Dr S. R. Mehrotra and my son, Naren, who read the manuscript with great care and made most valuable suggestions. To my wife I am indebted for her unfailing support and encouragement during the many years when this book was being written. B. R. Nanda

Contents

Preface

vii

1

Prologue

1

2

The Burden of the Past

7

3

Syed Ahmad Khan

25

4

The Marriage of Convenience

58

5

The Alliance Under Strain

80

6

Hindu-Muslim Entente

91

7

Pan-Islamism in India

104

8

The Mi Brothers

121

9

Gandhi on the Periphery of Politics

146

10 11 12

Enter Gandhi

175

Leader of the Khilafat

198

Leader of the Congress

227

13

Swaraj Within a Year

252

14

Riding the Khilafat Tiger

282

15

The British Response

297

16

The Mappila Rebellion

311

17

Towards Confrontation

322

18

Anti-Climax

344

19

The End of a Dream

362

20 21

The Balance-Sheet ol the Khilafat

372

Epilogue: V erdict on Non-Cooperation

398

Bibliography

413

Index

425

List of Illustrations Frontispiece Mahatma Gandhi 1924

Between pages 20 & 21 Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Maulana Abdul Bari Maulana Shaukat Ali Maulana Mohamed Ali

Between pages 52 & 53 Bal Gangadhar Tilak Lala Lajpat Rai C.R. Das Pandit Motilal Nehru

Between pages 148 & 149 Lord Hardinge Edwin Montagu Viscount Chelmsford Lord Reading George David Lloyd

Between pages 180 & 181 Gandhiji in Kathiawari Dress, 1915 Jawaharlal Nehru Mohammad Ali Jinnah

Between pages 276 & 277 Sir Syed Ahmed Khan Dr. M.A. Ansari Hakim Ajmal Khan Mrs Annie Besant

Between pages 308 & 309 Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Gandhiji's Trial at Ahmedabad, March 1922 Amritsar Congress 1919 Ahmedabad Congress 1921

Chapter 1

PROLOGUE The date was 28 December 1915. The place was Bombay. The Indian National Congress was holding its thirtieth annual ses¬ sion with Sir S. P. Sinha, the brilliant lawyer and former member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, in the chair. The speaker G. A. Natesan, the well-known editor of the Indian Review of Madras eloquently declaimed: Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, The brave and victorious general, Mr Gandhi... has just returned to his motherland after winning a brave feat of arms with weapons unique and almost unparalleled in the history of the world.... There happen to be present on this very platform two of Mr Gandhi’s distinguished colleagues ... Imam Sahib Abdul Kadir Babaji... and Sorab Rustomji, the son of that famous passive resister.... The problem of Indian nationality for the solution of which this Congress has been started and for which it has been wqrking with a single-eyed devotion, seems to be very satisfactorily solved in South Africa with such brave leaders as Mr Gandhi. ...1 He was supporting the tenth resolution on the agenda, dealing with the grievances of Indian emigrants to British colonies. This resolution had been a hardy annual, having been unani¬ mously passed by the Congress for more than a decade. But this year the resolution had been moved by M. K. Gandhi hirhself. Two of his colleagues in that struggle, a Muslim and a Parsi, sat next to him on the dais, symbolizing the unity of the Indian community in its heroic struggle against the racist regime in South Africa. Natesan’s tribute to Gandhi’s leadership might have seemed, a hyperbole to some at least of the two thousand delegates and five thousand visitors who thronged the splendid pavilion in Bombay’s Marine Lines where the Congress was meeting. But Natesan,-a veteran Moderate politician, was not given to emotion and was known to choose his words carefully.

2

Gandhi—Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism

Like Gopal Krishna Gokhale (whose death the Congress had mourned earlier in the day), Natesan had long been a close and sympathetic observer of the South African scene, and admired the fortitude, tenacity and skill with which Gandhi had led his compatriots in their struggle against racial discrimination. As Gandhi had evolved his technique of‘Passive Resistance’ (or Satyagraha, as it came to be known later) in South Africa, his political vision as well as his self-confidence had grown. In 1907 he had expressed his doubts about the possibility of ending British rule: ‘Should the British be thrown out of India? Can it be done even if we want to do so? To these two questions, we can reply that we stand to lose by ending British rule, and that even if we wanted to, India is not in a position to end it.’2 Fourteen months later, he was claiming magical qualities for his method of Satyagraha in changing the Indo-British equation. ‘If British rule becomes tyrannical,’ Gandhi wrote, ‘it will come to an end as soon as the British Government attempts to resist Satyagraha.’3 Gandhi increasingly began to see his campaign in South Africa as a prelude to a larger struggle which might have to be waged one day in the homeland. In November 1907 he had written to Rash Behari Ghosh, the president-elect of the Surat session of the Indian National Congress, that the Indians in the Transvaal regarded themselves ‘as the representatives in this country, of our Motherland, and it is impossible for us, as patriotic Indians, to keep silence under an insult that is levied against our race and our national honour.’4 Gandhi took particular pride in the fact that though Indians in Natal and the Transvaal included Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Parsis, and hailed from different provinces, they were united in resisting the injustice inflicted on them by the colonial regime.5 Two years later Hind Swaraj, which came to be regarded as Gandhi’s confession of faith, was published. It was considered seditious and was proscribed by the British authorities in India. In this pamphlet he had stressed the imperative need for harmony among the Indian people and especially between its two major communities. He had warned both Hindus and Muslims against the machinations of‘selfish and false religious teachers’, who deliberately fostered suspicion and hatred, as

Prologue

3

well as against the tactics of the British rulers who took advantage of dissensions amongst Indians.6 Gandhi’s own views on religion had evolved during his long sojourn in South Africa. He discovered an underlying unity in the teachings of all religions. There were numerous passages in the Quran which he thought should be acceptable to Hindus, just as there were passages in the Gita to which Muslims or Christians could take no exception.7 Gandhi had no doubt that the quarrels between Hindus and Muslims harmed both. The best course for them was to avoid a conflict and simply refuse to be provoked into retaliation. After all, it took two to make a quarrel. ‘An arm striking in the air without resistance,’ Gandhi wrote, ‘will be disjointed.’ It was foolish and futile to blame the British for fomenting dissensions. It was for the two com¬ munities to forge a sense of unity which was proof against the machinations of the ‘third party’. A clay pot [Gandhi argued] would break through impact, if not with one stone, then with another. The way to save the pot is not to keep it away from the danger point, but to bake it so that no stone would break it. We have then to make our hearts of perfectly baked clay. Then we shall be steeled against all danger.8

Of one thing there was no doubt. The majority of Muslims as well as Hindus and Parsis residing in Natal and Transvaal accepted Gandhi’s leadership in the struggle against racial discrimination by the South African regime. Some of his staunchest colleagues in the satyagraha struggles were Muslims; among them were Essop Mian and Cachalia, businessmen who headed the Transvaal British Indian Association; Imam Abdul Kadir Bawazeer, a cultured priest; and Dawood Mohamed, one of the richest and most respected traders in that part ol the world. They went to jail; some of them faced bankruptcy and economic ruin because of the vindictiveness of European busi¬ nessmen rather than give in to racist discrimination. Gandhi was held in high esteem by his Muslim colleagues; he had occasionally the rare honour—for a non-Muslim—of being invited to address the faithful in a mosque.9 On his part he was extremely considerate and even cautious in handling his Muslim adherents. He started to serialize a Gujarati translation of the Life of Prophet Mohamed by Washington Irving in his paper, the

4

Gandhi

Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism

—

Indian Opinion, but when the first chapters, dealing with the conditions in Arabia before the advent of the Prophet, created an uproar, he immediately discontinued publication. Gandhi was aware of the gulf between Hindus and Muslims; he was continually thinking of ways to bridge it. He did not see why festivals such as Diwali, Id and Vijaya Dashmi (Dussehra) could not be jointly celebrated by Indians belonging to different communities and religions. The Indian Opinion of 16 November 1907 reported that ‘a gathering of Hindus was arranged in the building of Mr Abdool Latif in Grey Street in Durban to celebrate Diwali’. In October 1909 Gandhi was a guest at the common celebration of Dussehra (Vijaya Dashmi) by the Indian students of all communities in London.10 It is significant that in November 1907 all the delegates from the Transvaal British Indian Association to the forthcoming session of the Indian National Congress at Surat were Muslims; a fact which Gandhi drove home in a letter to G. K. Gokhale, his friend and political mentor in India. 'Dear Professor Gokhale,’ Gandhi wrote, 'May I draw your attention to the fact that the struggle we are undergoing here has resulted in making us feel that we are Indians first, and Hindus, Mahomedans, Tamils, Parsees, etc., afterwards. You will notice, too, that all our delegates are Mahomedans. I am personally glad of the fact. And it may also happen that there will be many Mahomedans, having South African connections, attending the Congress. May I ask you to interest yourself in them and make them feel perfectly at home? A Hindu-Mahomedan compact may even become a special feature of this [Surat] Congress.’11 During his visit to England in 1909, Gandhi called upon Ameer Ali, the president of the London Branch of the Muslim League, and urged him to support the Indian struggle in South Africa. He congratulated Ameer Ali on his nomination to the Privy Council, and sought his help in securing facilities for Muslim passive resisters in the Transvaal prisons for the observance of the Ramzan fast.12 Curiously enough, unlike most Hindu leaders in India at that time, Gandhi was not unduly disconcerted by the alliance between the Tory politicians, Anglo-Indian officials and Muslim League politicians, which had led in 1909 to the incorporation of separate electorates and weighted representation for Indian Muslims in provincial

»

Prologue

5

legislatures under the Minto-Morley reforms. He took the view that since the Hindus were in a majority and regarded them¬ selves as better provided in respect of education, they ‘should cheerfully concede to their Muslim brethren the utmost thev can ,13 5

11

J

During the first four years after his return from South Africa, even though Gandhi steered clear of political controversies, his recipe for India’s political ills remained unchanged. The diary entry of his secretary, Mahadev Desai, for 3 March 1918 men¬ tions a ‘confidential’ conversation which revealed the ‘hidden workings’ of Gandhi’s mind. Gandhi told Desai that ever since he had read the history of the East India Company, his mind had rebelled against British rule, and he wanted the British to leave India bag and baggage. However, deep inside him there was a feeling that through Satyagraha he could transform the British relationship with India so as to transmute hatred into love and friendship. The same thing was true ofHindu-Muslim relations. Gandhi felt that even though there was much talk of Hindu-Muslim unity, that unity was more an aspiration than a fact. Something within him, however, assured him that Hindus and Muslims would unite as brothers, that Hinduism with its essentially liberal and broad-minded streak, could ‘captivate Muslims by the power of its compassion, which is its very essence .... We [Hindus] can win over the Muslims this very day, if we are sufficiently imbued with that spirit of brotherly love. But it is difficult to predict just now the time when Hindus will rise to that height’.14 In March 1918 Gandhi could hardly have foreseen how near the opportunity for the use of Satyagraha was. Nor could he appreciate how intricate the web of Indo-British and HinduMuslim relations had become through the century and a half of British rule in India.

NOTES 1. Report on The Thirtieth Indian National Congress, 1915, Bombay, published by the Jt. Hon. Secy, Bombay Presidency Association (Bombay, 1916), pp. 65-6. 2. Indian Opinion, 1 June 1907. 3. Ibid., 1 Aug. 1908. 4. Gandhi to Rash Behari Ghosh, President-elect, Indian National Congress, 4 Nov. 1907, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. vn, pp. 332-3.

Gandhi

6

Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism

—

5. Ibid. 6. C.W.M.G., vol. x, p. 31. 7.

Ibid., p. 31.

8. Ibid. 9. For example on 13 Dec. 1908, Gandhi spoke to the Hamidia Islamic Society in the Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg, C.W.M.G., vol. x, pp. 109. 10. C.W.M.G., vol. ix, pp. 498-9. 11. C.W.M.G., vol.

vn,

p. 376.

12. C.W.M.G., vol. ix, p. 419. 13. Letter to Habib Motan, June 1909, C. W.M.G., vol. tx, p. 265. Also see C.W.M.G., vol. X, p. 32. 14. Mahadev Desai, Day to Day with Gandhi, vol. I, pp. 56-7.

Chapter 2

The Burden of the Past

The successive waves of Muslim invaders from the north-west, from Muhamad Bin Qasim to Mohamed Ghori, and finally to Babar, posed a challenge to Hinduism the like of which it had never laced before. From the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, for nearly five hundred years, large parts of the Indian subcontinent were ruled by Muslim dynasties of foreign origin—Arab, Turk, Afghan and finally, the Mughal. The Muslim invaders of India, unlike the earlier invaders, such as the Huns and the Scythians, proved immune to the process of religious and cultural assimilation. As a Turkish writer puts it, Allah and Mohammed could not be accommodated in the Hindu Pantheon, nor were Muslims absorbed in Hindu society as a separate caste.1 It is not easy to get a realistic view of the state and society in India during the years of Muslim dominance. British historians of medieval India, writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, retailed the highly coloured contemporary accounts without making allowance for the fanatical zeal, the florid Persian and the medieval style of the Muslim court chroniclers.2 Indian scholars writing on Muslim rulers had their own blinkers. Hindu scholars, anxious to bolster up the nationalist case, were intent on finding evidence of a cultural rapprochement between the two communities and tended to play down the points of friction. As M. Mujeeb, an eminent historian of modern India, points out in his Indian Muslims, most Muslim historians tried to glorify Muslim rule in India through 'an adroit marshalling of selected facts’;3 it ‘became an evasion of the truth’, even though the object may have been ‘to foster goodwill and self-confidence’. Muslim rulers may not have been paragons of religious toler¬ ance and political wisdom. However, they could not but recog¬ nize the political realities in a country where the vast majority of the people were non-Muslim, and even the small but growing

8

Gandhi—Pan-lslamism, Imperialism and Nationalism

native Muslim population consisted mostly of converts. The ruling elites in medieval India were small in number, and not infrequently were riddled with tribal and factional dissensions. In theory the Muslim State in India, as elsewhere, was subject to the Sharia, the sacred law, which comprehended both Islamic doctrine and legal opinion. But no Muslim ruler in India could afford to set up a theocracy. The State was Islamic in the sense that the ruler was a Muslim and the ruling elite was mainly composed of Muslims. However, neither the organization of the State nor its civil and military codes were deduced from the Quran, as interpreted by the theologians. To quote Mujeeb again, ‘the Muslim State is a well-known historical and con¬ temporary phenomenon, the Islamic State is a fiction created by the Indian Muslim mind ... no Muslim ruler would have dared to risk an assessment of his administrative and political actions [only] on the basis of Islamic doctrine.’4 It was im¬ possible to exclude non-Muslims from the administration. There were just not enough Muslims to run the machinery of the State or to man the army. This may explain the curious phenomenon of the presence of Hindu soldiers and even a Hindu general in the army of Mahmud of Ghazni.5 From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries the armies of the Sultanate drew a large “proportion of their foot-soldiers from Hindu warrior-castes. Thus there was ‘in Indian conditions an unresolvable con¬ tradiction between militant piety and the exercise of State power by Muslims’.6 Well might the orthodox ulema proclaim the doctrine of solidarity among the faithful and jihad against the unbelievers, but it was not a practical policy for a ruler anxious to stabilize his dynasty.

II The State in medieval India was not religious. Nor was it secular. It was controlled by an elite of foreign origin, com¬ manding superior military power. This elite was usually riven by class and social conflicts. Its attitude towards non-Muslims varied. Very few of its members thought of religious tolerance as a value of state policy, but the contact of the State with the people was peripheral. Sometimes religion was merely a cloak

t

The Burden of the Past

9

to cover vested interests of the king or his clan. The ulema usually so interpreted Islamic doctrine as to give wide latitude to the Sultans, whose subjects had in any case little say in the affairs of the State. The highest appointments naturally went to rela¬ tives ol the king, but he had often to go out of his clan to find the manpower to collect the revenue and to man the army. Muhamad Bin Qasim, the first Muslim conqueror of Sind, had to appoint Brahmins to collect jazia, the poll tax, from non-Muslims.7 The revenue and finance departments under the Mughals in northern India were almost wholly run by members of two enterprising Hindu castes, the Kayasthas and the Khatris. The Hindus, not totally excluded from the service of the State were, however, largely confined to the lower ranks, the higher echelons being the virtual monopoly of Muslims, especially those who could plume themselves on their foreign origin. Under the Mughals the ranks in the ‘Mansabdari’ system were a fair index of the status and emoluments of those in the imperial service; the ‘Mansabdars’ were not only public servants, but also the richest8 class in the empire and a closed aristocracy. The Mughal ruling class, in particular its highest members, the umara (nobility), about five hundred individuals, disposed of well over half of the revenue of the empire and at least a quarter of its output.9 It is significant that even during Akbar’s reign there were no more than 8 Hindus among the 34 Mansabdars enjoying the rank of 1000 and above, and that almost all the Hindu Mansabdars were Rajputs.10 The proj^ortion of Hindu Mansabdars slightly rose in the reigns of Jehangir and Shahjahan. An account of the leading Mughal nobles in the Masir-ul-Umara, an eighteenth century work, estimates that out of 735 eminent nobles, 159 were Hindus. Aurangzeb may not have liked his dependence on Rajput Mansabdars, but he could not dispense with them. His attitude to them in the award of ranks and promotions was, however, less liberal than that of Akbar, but even under Akbar the Rajputs had formed a small proportion of this privileged group, and could secure, by and large, only the lower grades of the Imperial Service.11 It is noteworthy that in the Muslim nobility there was a heavy preponderance of those claiming foreign origin; those of ‘native origin’ did not number more than ten per cent. Entry into the imperial service was easier for a native of Afghanistan, a

10

Gandhi—Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism

Turani from Central Asia, and an Iranian from Persia than for a Shaikhzada—an Indian Muslim. Foreign credentials were also a passport to quicker promotion. Inevitably, there was a great deal of mutual jealousy and rivalry in the Mughal court in which pedigree could make or mar one’s prospects. The ruling elite under the Mughals was thus composed largely of the descendants of immigrants, who had sought their fortunes in the wake of an invading army or had come to India later in a spirit of adventure. As they settled down in India they were gradually acclimatized to their new environment; indi¬ genous influences brought about slow but perceptible changes in their life-style and thought. These influences were also re¬ flected in architecture, painting, music and literature. Meanwhile the structure of the administration and politics was changing in response to the realities of the Indian situation. The central fact of this situation was that a small minority, whose ancestors had come to India, ruled a population most of which was alien to it in race and religion. It was neither prudent nor practicable to ignore the sentiments of the vast mass of the Hindu population, and especially of its martial clans, such as the Rajputs. Akbar made a conscious effort to redress the balance between the privileged Muslim minority and the teeming Hindu population. We must not, however, overrate either Akbar’s aims or his achievements. He did not establish a secular State. He could hardly have done so in the sixteenth century: the identification between Muslim orthodoxy and Muslim power in India was such that they were likely to stand or fall together. Nevertheless, it was to Akbar’s credit that he refused to be a partisan of the ulema, of whose judgment he came to form a poor opinion. He recognized the diverse composition of the millions inhabiting his vast empire. He realized that he was a Muslim, but he was also an Indian and a ruler, and people of all creeds and classes were entitled to the protection of the State. He removed some of the disabilities under which the Hindus laboured. He permitted freedom of worship and discussion. If he did not extend his secularist policies further and completely ignore religious prejudice, it was because he understood the political realities of the time. The position of Hindus in the imperial political system did not change radically under Akbar; he was seeking to conciliate not all Hindus, but only the Rajputs.

*

The Burden of the Past

11

His "syncretism’ succeeded in securing the support of heterodox Muslims and Rajputs for his throne. But he underestimated the ability of the ulema to reassert themselves. The reaction began in the reign of his son, Jehangir, in the form of an orthodox movement led by Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi. Indian Islam was turned from the syncretic path, and such innovations as pro¬ hibition of cow slaughter came to an end. Orthodoxy was again in the ascendant in the reign of Shah Jahan. The liberal policy of Akbar found an ardent champion in Prince Dara Shikoh, the heir apparent, whose main work Majme-al-Bahrayu (Mingling of the Two Oceans) traced the parallels between Islamic Sufism and Hindu Vedantism. He translated the Upanishads into Persian. The orthodox trends exemplified in Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi were, however, well-established; even if Dara Shikoh had won in the war of succession he could not have enforced his religious ideas to the extent that Akbar had been able to do. There was to be no ‘confluence of the two oceans’, not even a real bridge over the divide. Aurangzeb’s reign was redeemed by some elements of religious tolerance; if he destroyed some Hindu temples, he continued revenue grants to some others. Among his trusted generals, there were Rajputs like Jai Singh and Jaswant Singh. Nevertheless, by re-imposing jazia, by subjecting Hindus to various disabilities, and by his defence of the Sharia and his avowed desire to establish an Islamic State, Aurangzeb reversed the process of rapprochement between the two communities.12 Islamic Sufism might have served as a bridge had it derived its inspiration from Hindu mysticism and not from Iran and other Muslim countries.13 It would, however, be unfair to lay all the blame at Aurangzeb’s door. The melancholy fact remains that even in the radiant days of Akbar, long before Aurangzeb set the clock back, Hinduism and Islam, as religions and the social systems they engendered, failed to develop links of intimate interaction; at best they reached a state of tolerahce and co-existence.

Ill There was one bright patch in this gloomy picture. A small elite in and around the Mughal court, consisting of nobles, dignitaries

12

Gandhi—Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism

and officials, developed a composite culture, cutting across races and creeds. In their dress, food and etiquette this privileged minority exhibited a remarkable homogeneity. When we look at the portraits of Rajput chiefs of the time, only the caste mark on the forehead seems to distinguish them from their Mughal contemporaries. And to this day Rajput cuisine includes ‘Mughlai’ dishes like ‘Jahangiri kabab’ and ‘Shahjahani pilau’. The same language—Persian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Urdu in the eighteenth century’—was spoken by the Afghan, the Iranian and the Rajput nobility. In architecture, painting and music there was a creative synthesis between the foreign and the local styles.14 The Mughal methods of warfare and structure of administration were adopted all over the country, not only by the Rajput chiefs but even by the Marathas who rebelled against Aurangzeb and his successors. Fascinating as this evolution of a composite culture in the ruling elite was, it had definite limits. This elite was drawn from a narrow stratum of society; almost all the Hindus in it were drawn from two castes, the Rajputs and the Kavasthas; their acceptance of the court etiquette did not mean that they had dispensed with the traditional cultural elements. This was es¬ pecially true of Rajput princes who. after receiving a mansab or jagir from the Emperor with due ceremonial in the imperial court, hastened homewards to hold the centuries-old Aajtilak’ ceremony. Curiously enough, even the marriage of Rajput princesses to members of the Mughal royal family did not really promote the process of integration between the two communities. These marriages were often little more than political bargains sought by hard-pressed Rajput princes to salvage their fortunes. Indeed, such was the public prejudice against these marriages that the Rajput brides in the Mughal harem were ostracized by their own relatives. The social chasm between the two communities was thus not bridged. This may have been partially due to the exclusiveness of the Hindu caste system. What Al-Beruni wrote about the Hindus of the eleventh century was more or less true of the later medieval period: ‘The Hindus believe that there is no country’ like theirs, no science like theirs. They are haughty. They call [foreigners] mlechcha, i.e., impure, and forbid having any con¬ nection with ... by intermarriage or any other kind of relationship,

The Burden of the Past

13

or by sitting, eating and drinking with them, because thereby, they think, they would be polluted.’ How this deadly weapon of ostracism continued to work even in the late nineteenth century is related in the autobiography of Bhagat Lakshman Singh. He was excommunicated in Rawal¬ pindi, his home-town, for eating a little wheat cake out of the hand of a Muslim class-mate: The news spread in the town that I had turned a Muhammadan. There was a siapa (mourning by beating of breasts) in the family and I was regarded as good as dead ... I was regarded as an untouchable.15 It was several months before the unfortunate boy was allowed to enter the kitchen in his own home. He was lucky to be let off without the penance of a three weeks’ fast and a bath in the Ganges as the price of rehabilitation. It is important to remember that this prejudice did not merely operate against Muslims; it also operated against other castes in the Hindu fold. The Hindu caste system was, however, not the only or even a major factor in the lack of cultural integration between Hindus and Muslims. The Muslim e*ite suffered from a remarkable disinclination to imbibe even a modicum of the cultural heritage of pre-Muslim India. This was in sharp contrast to what happened in Indonesia and several countries of West Asia. In Indonesia, several Hindu traditions and rituals survived among Muslims, and a version of the Ramayana has been staged through the centuries. The Muslims of Arabia and West Asia have cherished some of the heroes of the pre-Muslim era: the ideally just king was Nausherwan, the ideally generous man was Hatim; the ideal philosophers were Plato and Aristotle. But for the Muslim elite in the Indian sub-continent history began with Prophet Muhammed and the Arab conquest of India, and most, if not all, of the prior Hindu-Buddhist experience was irrelevant.16 Educated Muslims did not think of Yudhishtra as a model king, Arjuna as a model warrior or Kalidasa as an ideal poet. A few Muslim noblemen, such as Malik Mohammed Jaisi and Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, wrote Hindi poetry, but it is doubtful if they found an appreciative audience in the Muslim elite. As Abid Hussain points out, Indian Muslims have accepted the great figures of ancient Persia and ancient Greece, but not the heroes of ancient India as their intellectual progenitors; the

14

Gandhi—Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism

Ramayana and Mahabharata could not become part of their literary heritage as the Shahnama and Sikandamama did. While there was thus little fusion of the two cultures, there was no overt and sustained antagonism either. B.C. Pal, the nationalist leader of Bengal writing about life in Sylhet, his native district, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, recalled that ‘the intercourse between Hindus and the Muham¬ madans was almost as free and friendly as among the different Hindu castes themselves.’17 Pal’s Muslim neighbour, a zamindar, was invited to all the social functions in Pal’s family except the pujas. Visits were exchanged on the occasion of marriages and deaths; certain festivals such as the Id and the Basant were jointly celebrated by the two communities. The composite culture evolved during the period of Mughal rule was centred upon the imperial court and the provincial satraps. The Hindu masses remained impervious to foreign influence: their daily life continued in the old grooves; their eyes were riveted not on the centres of political power at Agra, Delhi and Lucknow, but on Mathura, Nasik and Varanasi, the fountain-heads of Hindu religious and cultural tradition. If the Hindu masses were beyond the orbit of the composite, aristocratic culture, the Muslim masses were also not much affected by it. Theoretically, all Muslims were brothers; in fact they were fragmented by consciousness of race, caste, class and economic status. There was an underlying current of tension between the Shia and the Sunni, the Iranian and the Afghan, the Arab and the Turk, and above all between the Indian and the foreigner, the patrician ashraf and the plebian ajlaf. Many of the Muslims were converts from lower Hindu castes and were slow to discard the beliefs, prejudices and superstitions of their ancestors. In a detailed study of Dacca district in 1840, a British official noted that poor Muslims were as caste-ridden as the Hindus: intercaste dining and intercaste marriages were equally un¬ common among them. They worshipped the Goddess Kali and enthusiastically participated in Hindu festivals, such as the Durga Puja.18 The Census Report of 1901 noted that ‘lower and uneducated class’ Muslims fixed dates for weddings after con¬ sulting astrologers, and prayed to Hindu deities to cure sickness in their families, and would not commence construction of their

The Burden of the Past

15

houses on certain ‘inauspicious’ days of the week. In an account of religious practices in northern India made at the turn of the century, William Crook wrote that even the upper class Muslim convert whose ancestors were Rajputs, ‘keeps the top-knot and cooks in the old fashion’.19 In his The Indian Muslims, Mujeeb cites numerous examples of Hindu habits of thought and behaviour surviving among Muslims long after their formal conversion to Islam.20 In the princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan, the Meos took Hindu names or merely tagged on the word ‘khan’ to a Hindu name. They celebrated Hindu festivals such as Diwali, Dussehra and Janamashtami (the birthday of Lord Krishna). Before digging a well, they built a platform dedicated to Hanuman. Similar vestiges of Hindu beliefs and customs survived in Muslim communities in other parts of India. In the Chittagong district of Bengal, Pir Badar was venerated as the guardian saint by Hindu as well as Muslim sailors. Some converts from Rajput tribes in Gujarat claimed to be Sunnis, but they inter¬ married with Hindus and worshipped Swaminarayan. The Husaini Brahmans called themselves followers of the Atharva Veda and derived their name from Imam Husain, grandson of the Prophet. Of the Muslims living in the rural areas of the Central Provinces, Berar and districts of Thana, Ahmadnagar and Bijapur in Maharashtra, it has been said that they were more than three-fourths Hindu. The Muslims of Mysore and Bangalore were much closer culturally to the Muslims of Hyderabad than to the Moplahs of Kerala. In southern India, Islam having come directly from Arabia through traders, the Muslims remained largely unaffected by their environment in matters of doctrine; but in their food, dress, manners and even in their laws of inheritance they borrowed freely from the Hindu majority in the midst of which they lived. This assortment of beliefs and customs prevalent at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century among the poor Muslims, especially in the rural areas, had not changed much since the days of the later Mughal or early British rule. The Hindu elements were probably stronger in the earlier period. This is because the process of cultural assimilation, feeble as it had been even under the Mughals, received a deadly blow in the nineteenth century from Muslim religious reformers.

Ib

Gandhi—Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism

They c alled on Indian Muslims to purge themselves of beliefs and customs which they shared with the Hindus: consultation of astrologers, vegetarianism, visits to tombs of saints, common celebration of festivals. Tfius ‘social reform’ amqpg Indian Muslims, as Peter Hardy puts it, amounted to a ‘rejection of medieval Islam in India in favour of early Islam in Arabia’.21 At the same time there was "a parallel\movement led by militant Hindu reformers,-such as those of the Arya Samaj, who seemed to be bent on purging Hinduism of the very elements which formed a cultural bond between the two communities. The policy of the British rulers towards the various com¬ munities in India was influenced by their own commercial and political interests. There is no doubt that the cleavages in Indian society made the task of the British diplomats and generals easier. In his book A Year in the Punjab Frontier published in 1850, Herbert Edwardes showed how he had accomplished the conquest of the valley of Bannu on the northwest frontier without firing a shot, simply by pitting the different races and creeds against each other. Exploiting the mutual suspicions and rivalries of the Indian princes, the East India Company deftly employed diplomacy and arms to become theparamount power in the subcontinent. The British conquest was spread over a long period, and no two campaigns presented identical problems in political and military terms. There was thus no reason for partiality on the part of the British towards Hindus or Muslims. There is no basis for the assumption that any one community consistently supported or resisted the British. That Muslims took the lead in the revolt of 1857, and were singled out for British vengeance is a myth. In truth the Muslim and Hindu attitudes to the events of 1857 varied from province to province; it was one of antagonism in the U.P. and Bihar, where some of those who had held high office or owned large estates under the Mughals, had been dispossessed. In these provinces millions of Muslim artisans had lost their livelihood when their patrons fell on evil days; their resentment was fanned by the orthodox Muslitn clergy, who denounced the British as an alien and atheistic race. In western India British rule appreared to Muslims in a different light; many of them were traders who prospered under the Company’s rule. In Bengal, Muslims do not seem to have been

The Burden oj the Past

17

stirred by the Mutiny. The Punjabi Muslims not only remained loyal to the British,22 but helped them in crushing the rebellion elsewhere. In those parts of India where Muslim participation in the mutiny was clear enough, such as in Delhi, the U.P. and Bihar, it was natural for local British commanders and observers to be conscious of a. strong Muslim tinge in the rebellion. G.O. Trevelyan gave an example of the rough and ready justice meted out to Muslim rebels in Delhi, where ‘every member of a class of religious enthusiasts named ghazees was hung, as it were, ex-officio; and it is to be feared that a vindictive and irresponsible [British] judge plumed himself upon having a good eye for a Ghazee, sent to the gallows more than one individual whose guilt consisted only in looking as if he belonged to a sect, which probably was hostile to our religion'.23 The great Urdu poet Ghalib wrote to a friend: ‘Every English tommy is Almighty God. Now every man going from his house to the bazar is panic-stricken. The market place has become a slaughter house, and the house looks like a prison. The very particles of dust in Delhi thirst for the blood of Muslims.'24 Many barbarities were committed by the triumphant British troops after they raised the siege of Delhi and Lucknow. The E-nglish press in Calcutta fulminated against ‘Muslim fanaticism'. But the theory that Muslims were primarily res¬ ponsible for the Mutiny was never accepted by GovernorGeneral Canning, who was convinced that Muslims came fn only after the revolt had developed. There is no evidence to show that the Government of India, or its agents in the prov inces, planned or even desired vengeance to be wreaked on Muslims or on any particular community. This was due not merely to considerations of humanity, but to political expediency. In a letter to his superiors in London, Lord Canning rejected25 the idea of razing the Jama Masjid in Delhi to the ground: ...I will do nothing which shall stamp this rebellion as being in the estimation of the British Government and people a religious one ... The men who fought against us at Delhi were of both creeds, probably in equal numbers. If we destroy or desecrate Mussalman mosques or Brahmin temples we do exactly what is wanting to band the two antagonist races against ourselves ... As we must rule 150 million of people by a handful (more or less small) of Englishmen, let us do it in

18

Gandhi—Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism

the manner best calculated to leave them divided (as in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with the greatest possible awe of our power and with the least suspicion o( our motives. There may have been some discrimination against Muslims in some areas, when the passions roused by the Mutiny were at their height, but it did not last. Many pensioners lost their pensions, but these included Hindus as well as Muslims. The official records of the North-Western Provinces (part of present Uttar Pradesh) relating to pensioners, jagirdars and landholders show that in the disposal of confiscated property, Muslims were at no greater disadvantage than Hindus. If some Muslim landholders were killed or impoverished, others emerged with their fortunes made. Where Hindu involvement in the revolt was greater, as in Meerut district, the number of Hindu estates confiscated was greater; out of the 399 confiscated holdings in that district, 305 belonged to non-Muslims. In Rohilkhand, 315 confiscations related to Muslims and only 6 to Hindus. In Jhansi, all the 28 and in Jubbalpur all the 40 holdings listed as confiscated belonged to Hindus. Confiscated property was given to Hindu or Muslim loyalists or sold to the highest bidder: from these auction sales Muslims as well as Hindus benefited. In Aligarh, the Sayyids, the Pathans and the Shaikhs were the gainers, the Mughals the losers. In Agra, the Hindu Thakurs sutfered. There was probably a 'shift in landholding within the Muslim community itself, with those having a Mughal past losing to those wifh a British future'.26 Loyalists such as Mahmud Ali Khan ofChhatari, Inayat Allah Khan of Aligarh and Imdad Ali of Mathura district were typical of the new men, who had turned the British Raj to their profit and were to collaborate with it. The upheaval of 1857—8 was not an unmixed disaster for the NAV. Province. Almost all the families who lost their estates consisted of landlords in rural areas, or petty princes and their hangers-on in the cities. These so-called 'noble’ families had by the middle of the nineteenth century become (in the words of Professor Mujeeb) ‘incurably degenerate. If they had continued to set standards of ethics and morality, the recovery of the Indian Muslims under British rule would have become extremely difficult.’ Professor Mujeeb goes on to argue that it was a

The Burden of the Past

19

misfortune of the Muslim community that a small upper class, ‘selfish and parasitical’, which survived the upheaval of 1857-8 in north India by accident, or by acts of loyalty to the British, was destined to become the ‘residuary legatees of all cultural values’. This class was to divert the attention of the government 2nd the people towards its own needs and grievances, and thus give a wrong direction to political and social thought of the Muslim community for the better part of a century.27

IV The idea that the Hindus were the real instigators of the rebellion, and the Muslims were innocent dupes was propagated by Syed Ahmad Khan and came to be widely believed by the educated classes among the Muslims. Another myth which obtained wide currency was that of Muslim backwardness in education and civil employment. It was popularized by Sir William Wilson Hunter, a senior Bengal civilian, who was commissioned, or at least encouraged by the Government of India, to write a book ‘on the burning question of the day: Are Indian Mussalmans bound by their religion to rebel against the Queen?’ The British anxiety about the state of mind of the Muslim community arose from the growing popularity of ideas preached by some Muslim religious leaders. Of these the best known was Shah Waliullah (1703-62), the Delhi theologian, who became one of the evangelists of Islamic revivalism when Muslim power was disintegrating under the hammer-blows of the Marathas, the Jats, the Sikhs and the British. Like Muhammad ibn alWahhab, his Arab contemporary, Waliullah, was fired with a sense of mission t