Rise of Communal Majoritarianism in British India – Some Historical Insights
By Prof. Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
In 1940, Golwalkar, the ideologue of Hindutva wrote these ominous words:
“The non-Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and languages, 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 nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizens' rights.”
“To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging 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 civilization 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 civilization. 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 phenomenon.
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 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.
India, a Nation of Nations
3000 BC to Recent Centuries
Geography has molded the history of the Indian subcontinent which consists of the modern nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal 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 injection 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 subcontinent. 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 numbers to the Indus Valley, pushed the native Dravidians south and superimposed their language and culture on the indigenous cultures. The urban Indus Valley civilization disappeared and was replaced by small agricultural principalities 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 “untouchables”) were condemned in perpetuity as outcastes.
In the sixth century BC, Buddhism appeared in this stratified society. Gautama Buddha challenged the Brahmin claims to superior birth. He taught that a person became a Brahmin through virtue and moral action, not by birth. He emphasized the middle path and advocated 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 Pakistan 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 Afghanistan.
Emperor Asoka, who ruled India during the fourth century BCE, championed the propagation of Buddhism Through his efforts most of northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan became Buddhist. His emissaries as well as travelers carried the message of Buddha to Sri Lanka, East Asia and China.
After Asoka (3 rd century BC) Buddhism spread all over Asia. In India, it displaced Brahmanism.
Over the next millennia Buddhism disappeared 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 as an incarnation of the god Vishnu. The local rulers found Brahmanism to their liking as Buddhism 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 particular 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 Islam
After the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, a small group from the Jewish diaspora fled to the southwestern coast of India. At about the same time, in 54 CE, St. Thomas landed 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 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 still stands in Methala, Kerala and is one of the oldest mosques in the world, older than the oldest 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 Persian 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 southern Pakistan (711 CE). The territories of Pakistan 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. Rajput kingdoms rose in the Gangetic plains, often warring with each other and at other times cooperating 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 dynasty, 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 differences 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 profitable 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 dynasties rose one after the other ruling over much of northern India. The sultans were not interested in propagating their faith and were focused primarily on collecting taxes to ward off the unrelenting threat of invasions from the Mongols and the Tartars and to cope with persistent resistance from the Rajputs. The task of propagating 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 Organization 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)
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