Page 9 - Pakistan Link - August 21, 2020

OPINION
Rise of Communal Majoritarianism in British India – Some Historical Insights
n By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
I Concord, CA
n 1940, Golwalkar, the ideologue of Hin-
dutva wrote these ominous words:
“The non-Hindu people of Hindustan
must either adopt Hindu culture and languag-
es, must learn and respect and
hold in reverence the Hindu
religion, must entertain no idea
but of those of glorification of
the Hindu race and culture ...
in a word they must cease to be
foreigners; or may stay in the
country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu na-
tion, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges,
far less any preferential treatment—not even
citizens’ rights.”
“To keep up the purity of its race and cul-
ture, Germany shocked the world by her purg-
ing the country of the Semitic races—the Jews.
Race pride at its highest has been manifested
here, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn
and profit by”.
How did an ancient, accommodative civi-
lization like that of India arrive at a historical
juncture when an ideologue like Golwalkar
could go so far as to cite the German decimation
of the Jews as an example for India to follow?
India is an ancient and complex civiliza-
tion. It is like a layered geological formation
built up by eons of human interactions in the
vast milieu of South Asia. The emergence of
Hindutva, a rightwing ideology is a recent phe-
nomenon.
In this article, we highlight the milestones
on the road to communal majoritarianism in
British India. Of all the turbulent events in the
modern communal history of the subconti-
nent, two events stand out as game changers in
the Hindu-Muslim dialectic: The British India
Census of 1881 and Gandhi’s masterful political
stroke in sidelining Ambedkar and coopting the
Dalit votes in 1931. The Muslim leaders, includ-
ing the Agha Khan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Al-
lama Iqbal and the Ali Brothers were all there on
the historical stage but there was no ideational
counter-thrust to the emergence of communal
majoritarianism.
India, a Nation of Nations
3000 BC to Recent Centuries
Geography has molded the history of the
Indian subcontinent which consists of the mod-
ern nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ne-
pal and Sri Lanka. It is bounded to the North by
the high Himalayas, the thick forests of Assam
to the East and the harsh deserts of Baluchistan
to the West. The Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea
and the Bay of Bengal surround it on three sides
making it an insular peninsula. Invasions from
the North and East were not possible. The few
mountain passes to the northwest were the only
routes for ingress and egress and provided the
historical routes for mass migrations.
Geography is about the only thing that the
people of South Asia agree upon. Any attempt
to unravel the pages of history invites the injec-
tion of politics into the discourse. It is generally
agreed that the Indus Valley Civilization which
thrived in Pakistan and straddled parts of India
and Afghanistan from 3000 BC to 1300 BC was
the first urbanized civilization to grace the sub-
continent. It excelled in city planning, knew the
use of softer metals like gold, copper, lead and
tin and carried on trade with the concomitant
Sumerian Civilization in Iraq.
Circa 1500 BC, cattle herders from Central
Asia, known as Aryans, migrated in large num-
bers to the Indus Valley, pushed the native Dra-
vidians south and superimposed their language
and culture on the indigenous cultures. The ur-
ban Indus Valley civilization disappeared and
was replaced by small agricultural principali-
ties throughout northern India. What emerged
was a complex and heterogeneous set of beliefs,
customs and a caste structure that divided the
society into rigid segments. Over the centuries
each caste further divided into sub-castes or
even castes within sub-castes. The highest caste,
the Brahmins, anointed this hierarchal structure
as a divine order. The Dalits (the so-called “un-
touchables”) were condemned in perpetuity as
After Asoka (3rd century BC) Buddhism spread all over Asia. In India, it displaced Brahmanism
Cheraman Juma Masjid, Kerala, India, first built in 629 CE
Sufi shrine in Multan, Pakistan
outcastes.
In the sixth century BC, Buddhism ap-
peared in this stratified society. Gautama Bud-
dha challenged the Brahmin claims to superior
birth. He taught that a person became a Brah-
min through virtue and moral action, not by
birth. He emphasized the middle path and ad-
vocated that there was one single moral order
for all humankind rather than the Brahmin
ethic of duty based upon one’s own caste.
Alexander invaded Afghanistan and Paki-
stan in 327-325 BCE and the subcontinent was
woven into the fabric of West Asia. Vestiges of
Greek influence may be found to this day in the
racial makeup of people in the Nuristan region
of Pakistan and in the Pashtun areas of Afghani- as an incarnation of the god Vishnu. The local
www.PakistanLink.com
stan.
Emperor Asoka, who ruled India during
the fourth century BCE, championed the prop-
agation of Buddhism Through his efforts most
of northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan be-
came Buddhist. His emissaries as well as travel-
ers carried the message of Buddha to Sri Lanka,
East Asia and China.
After Asoka (3rd century BC) Buddhism
spread all over Asia. In India, it displaced Brah-
manism
Over the next millennia Buddhism dis-
appeared from India even as it spread in East
Asia. Several reasons have been advanced for
this decline. Brahmanism coopted many of the
precepts of Buddhism and included the Buddha
rulers found Brahmanism to their liking as Bud-
dhism forbade violence whereas Brahmanism
was willing to sanction war as an instrument
of imperial power. The powerful Gupta empire
(300-500 CE) in northern India, was in particu-
lar a patron of Brahman culture. For Buddhist
monasteries loss of court patronage meant a
loss of revenue. To control the decline, Buddhist
monks tried adapting to Brahman ways, namely,
accepting Buddha as a God and using Sanskrit
as the liturgical language. This only accelerated
the decline as the common man saw Buddhism
as an extension of Brahmanism.
Arrival of Judaism, Christianity and Is-
lam
After the destruction of the second temple
in 70 CE, a small group from the Jewish dias-
pora fled to the southwestern coast of India. At
about the same time, in 54 CE, St. Thomas land-
ed on the same coast. The Jews found refuge and
Christianity found acceptance. Today, almost 20
percent of the population of the southern state
of Kerala is Christian.
Islam arrived on the coast of Kerala in the
AUGUST 21, 2020 – PAKISTAN LINK – P9
seventh century. There has been a brisk trade
between the southwestern coast of India and
the Arabian Peninsula since ancient times. In
the year 629 CE, King Cheraman of Kerala,
while on a trading mission to the Hejaz, met
with Prophet Muhammed and accepted Islam.
Upon his return, he built the Cheraman Juma
Mosque. Renovated over the years, the mosque
Of all the turbulent events in
the modern communal history
of the subcontinent, two events
stand out as game changers in
the Hindu-Muslim dialectic:
The British India Census of
1881 and Gandhi’s masterful
political stroke in sidelining
Ambedkar and coopting the
Dalit votes in 1931. The Muslim
leaders, including the Agha
Khan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah,
Allama Iqbal and the Ali
Brothers were all there on the
historical stage but there was
no ideational counter-thrust
to the emergence of communal
majoritarianism
still stands in Methala, Kerala and is one of the
oldest mosques in the world, older than the old-
est mosques in Cairo and Baghdad. Islam also
found wide acceptance along the coast. Today,
more than 27 percent of the population of the
state of Kerala is Muslim.
Just as there was a brisk, profitable and
peaceful trade between the shores of southern
India and the Arabian Peninsula, the shores of
northwestern India, Baluchistan and the Per-
sian Gulf were infested with piracy. It was one
of these acts of piracy by subjects of Raja Dahir
of Sind that brought Arab armies into south-
ern Pakistan (711 CE). The territories of Paki-
stan became a part of the vast Arab empire that
straddled Asia, North Africa and Europe and
stretched from the river Indus to the Pyrenees
mountains in Spain and France.
For the next five hundred years there was
an equilibrium between northern India and the
Islamic domains in Persia and Central Asia. Ra-
jput kingdoms rose in the Gangetic plains, often
warring with each other and at other times co-
operating with one another. However, India did
not escape the turmoil in the Eurasian world, far
away from its borders.
In the tenth century, a powerful Shia dy-
nasty, the Fatimids, arose in North Africa. It
quickly overran Egypt, made Cairo its capital
(969 CE) and extended its sway over Syria and
the Hejaz (Mecca and Madina). Ideological dif-
ferences between the Shia Fatimids based in
Cairo and the Sunni Abbasids based in Baghdad
spilled over into economic warfare. The Sunni
sultans of the east were cut off from the profit-
able trade with the Italian city states of Venice
and Genoa. These Sultans, therefore, turned east
and raided India. Thus, the raids from Central
Asia into India was for gold and not for faith.
In 1192 the Afghans captured Delhi and
established the Delhi sultanate. Several dynas-
ties rose one after the other ruling over much of
northern India. The sultans were not interested
in propagating their faith and were focused pri-
marily on collecting taxes to ward off the un-
relenting threat of invasions from the Mongols
and the Tartars and to cope with persistent re-
sistance from the Rajputs. The task of propagat-
ing the faith was left to the Sufi Shaikhs. In 1947,
a quarter of the population of the subcontinent
was Muslim. Today, it is about one third.
(Continued next week)
(The author is Director, World Organiza-
tion for Resource Development and Education,
Washington, DC; Director, American Institute
of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member,
State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and
Chairman, Delixus Group)