Rise of Communal Majoritarianism in British India – Some Historical Insights -2
By Prof. Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
The Indian Muslims are indigenous to the land. Arguably, their forefathers were at various times Hindu, Buddhist, Animist or a part of pre-Aryan Indus Valley cultures. They accepted Islam to escape the perpetual servitude that Brahmanism imposed on the lower castes.
There are no significant genetic differences between the Hindus, Muslims and Christians of South India; they carry the dominant Dravidian ASI genes which was common with the people of Indus Valley Civilization. The Hindus and Muslims of north India and Pakistan carry the dominant ANI genes which they share with the people of Central Asia.
The Mogul Empire
In 1526, the Uzbek Prince Babur Shah captured Delhi and laid the foundation of the Mogul empire. Under his grandson, Akbar, the empire expanded to include all of northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
Akbar was one of the most far-sighted monarchs in world history. He married Rajput princesses, abolished discriminatory taxes on the Hindus, prohibited the burning alive of Hindu widows (sati) on their husband’s pyres, and allowed Indians, Hindus and Muslims alike to rise to the highest levels in the Mogul courts.
His army chief of staff was a Hindu Rajput as was his finance minister. He surrounded himself with the most meritorious writers, administrators, musicians, men of science and religion. He established an Ibadat Khana or “house of worship” where he invited representatives from Hindu, Muslim, Christian and other traditions, and encouraged them to engage in discussions to forge a universal brotherhood. Indeed, it may be said that he tried to forge an Indian nation transcending the narrow boundaries of ritualistic religion.
The Mogul empire grew in prosperity with successive monarchs. It reached the zenith of its power under his grandson, Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal as a monument of love to commemorate the death of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal.
Under the Great Moguls (1526-1707) India became the richest country in the world, accounting for 27 percent of world GDP. In the long and checkered history of India, this was a moment of peace for its people. Art, culture, music, literature, industry and agriculture thrived. The legendary wealth of Mogul India attracted the attention of European traders who vied with one another to obtain firmans (court edicts) to trade with the subcontinent.
The empire fell apart after the death of the last great Mogul emperor, Aurangzeb (d 1707). The decay of the vast Mogul empire has been a subject of a great many books. Incompetent monarchs, the Maratha insurgency in the southwest, internal ethical rot, the rise of right-wing religious fervor all played their part. The major provinces declared their autonomy from the emperor. Devastating raids by the Hindu Maratha armies as far away as Bengal in the East, Punjab in the North and Tamil Nadu to the south devastated the land. In 1739, Delhi was occupied by the Persian King Nadir Shah who carried away the jewel-studded Mogul peacock throne as war booty.
Enter the British
The Europeans were active in the Indian Ocean since the sixteenth century. The first to arrive were the Portuguese who destroyed the thriving trade centers around the rim of the Indian ocean stretching from East Africa, Aden, the Persian Gulf, India and Malaysia to eastern China. Goa, on the western shores of India became a Portuguese stronghold. Reflecting the power balance in Europe, the Portuguese were displaced first by the Dutch and then by the French and the British.
A grand contest for global power emerged, extending across the oceans from North America to India, between the British and the French. The disintegration of the Mogul empire allowed the British and French trading companies to vie for influence with the local princes. In this contest, the British proved more resourceful and emerged victorious. By 1750 the French had all but abandoned the Indian subcontinent to British interests.
In 1757, the British won a decisive military victory over the Muslim governor of Bengal. This was a turning point not only in the history of India but in world history. Bengal was the most populous and the richest province in the Mogul empire. The British East India Company set out to loot the province. What was once the richest province in Asia was brought to its knees within a few years and famine set in. The infusion of enormous capital from Bengal fueled the Industrial Revolution in England (1758). England flexed its muscles and embarked on building a world empire.
The American War of I
ndependence (1776-83) drained British resources and provided a window of opportunity for the Indian princes. In India, Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1781-1799) fought bravely to contain the expansion of British power. He corresponded with Napoleon Bonaparte of France and with the rulers of the Ottoman empire, Oman and Afghanistan seeking military alliances. However, it was too little, too late. The Ottomans were allied with the British. Napoleon lost Egypt (1799) and retreated to France. Tipu Sultan fell in battle with the British in 1799. Subsequently, resistance from Indian princes was feeble. By 1806, the British were in Delhi. The Anglo-Sikh wars of 1844-48 expanded the empire to the borders of Afghanistan.
The initial interactions between the British and Indians were as equals. Unlike the Catholic Portuguese of the sixteenth century, the Protestant British were in India to trade and to exploit. The local rajas and nawabs (Rajput and Muslim rulers) mingled easily with the Europeans. Intermarriage was not uncommon. Racism in India was a later development. However, as the empire entrenched itself, the British became aloof and racism set in. This aloofness partly explains why Christianity did not penetrate India the way Islam did with the Sufi Shaikhs. Only 2.5 percent of the population of India in 1947 was Christian.
The Sepoy Uprising of 1857 and Its Aftermath
British rule was exploitative from the outset. The East India Company had arrived in India ostensibly to trade and had shrewdly used the political vacuum created by the disintegration of the Mogul empire to consolidate its power in the subcontinent. The initial loot from Bengal was worth billions of dollars. Heavy taxation had driven the population into penury. Indian handicrafts disappeared as cheap factory-made goods poured in from England. Local rajahs and nawabs were coerced into parting their state treasures. Religious animosity against the firangees (a derogatory Hindi word for Europeans) was not far below the surface. The resentment exploded in the uprising of 1857 which was brutally suppressed.
Expansion of British India Empire into Burma - Origins of the Rohingya Massacres (1937-2017)
The British crown took over direct administration of India in 1858 as an imperial colony. To the east, the Anglo-Burmese wars brought Myanmar into the Indian empire. This vast empire was ruled by a Viceroy whose seat was in Calcutta in eastern India (The capital was shifted to Delhi in 1912). The map below shows the borders of British India in 1910. A large number of Bengalis migrated south along the shores of the Bay of Bengal. After all, it was one country at that time.
In 1937, when Burma (now Myanmar) was separated from British India, these Bengalis found themselves on the wrong side of the border. When Burma achieved its independence in 1948, the new Burmese government refused to recognize the Bengalis as Burmese citizens. Persecution started, later institutionalized, culminating in the massacre and genocide of the Rohingyas in 2012-17.
Communalism and “Hindu” Majoritarianism in British India
Communalism in India was a result of political choices made by the Indian elite between 1880 and 1940 in an overarching paradigm of British imperial divide and rule policy.
By 1870, the British were well entrenched in the subcontinent. An elaborate system of checks and balances consisting of over 500 princely states loyal to the British crown and a capable civil service backed up by a large British-India army provided stability to the empire. The Indians who had put up a modicum of resistance with the uprising of 1857 were subdued and compliant. A self-assured British bureaucracy was now free to try its hand at social engineering.
The first step was taken in this direction by the 1871 census under Viceroy Mayo with the ostensible intent of sorting out the complex demography of the Indian empire, its population, castes and creeds. This first attempt was incomplete because of the immense task of reaching remote areas in the mountains and forests of the vast subcontinent.
These difficulties were overcome with the second Census carried out in 1881 by the then viceroy George Robinson, Marquess of Ripon. This exercise brought out into the open the unabashed British policy of divide and rule. The subcontinent of 1881 was a vast tapestry of scores of castes and creeds. Brahmins, Rajputs, Muslims and Dalits lived side by side in thousands of towns and villages scattered over an area of more than a million square miles. Some towns had a majority Muslim population while in others they were in a minority. And no one seemed to care. Each village had developed its own composite culture through centuries of mutual interaction and co-habitation.
In much of northern India, the British looked upon the Muslims as a community to watch and be wary of. They were perceived to be the former rulers and thus were not to be trusted. Muslims had played a key role in the uprising of 1857 providing leadership to local sepoys. Consequently, the revengeful British had taken their ire on the Muslim populations of northern India, perpetrating large scale atrocities against Indians in cities such as Delhi, Oudh and Kanpur. Now that the Raj had settled down, it was time to consolidate its hold and ensure that the Muslims would not raise their head again.
The British used the census of 1881 as a social engineering tool for imperial consolidation through a schema of divide and rule. For the first time in modern history, hundreds of native non-Muslim castes and tribes were bundled together and were designated as “Hindu”. The grouping included not only the four major castes (the four varanas), the Brahmins, Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (farmers) and shudras (servants) but also a host of hilly tribes as well. The Dalits were grouped as a separate category of outcastes. Given the primitive infrastructure of the time, head counting was not an exact science. Nonetheless, the census showed that the total population of India was 254 million, of whom 51 million were Muslim, 136 million were caste Hindus and 62 million were “Exterior Castes” (this term is not used in modern language. The current designation is Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes or SC/ST). The SC/ST population was to play, fifty years later, a major role in the politics of Gandhi.
This was the opening gambit in a chess game of communal politics in India. Brahmins, Rajputs, Muslims and Marathas who had fought shoulder to shoulder as comrades in the uprising of 1857 now found themselves on opposite sides of the fence as “Hindus” and “Muslims”. They had lived together for centuries as neighbors, within their caste systems, but also without it in the public space. Now, they faced each other across a dividing line of communalism, as two separate religious communities.
The British succeeded in their machination. For the first time in modern history, Indians who identified themselves as “Hindus” realized their numerical superiority over the “Muslims” and reached out for their political rights. The Indian National Congress, formed in 1885, held its first meeting in Bombay, chaired by an Englishman Allan Hume. In attendance were the Indian Hindu elite, while Muslim representation was meager. The principal aim of the conference was to procure a greater share for Indians in government. Freedom was not yet on the horizon.
There were parallel developments in the Muslim community. The Muslims had suffered devastating losses in the uprising of 1857 and were slow to accept Western education and the English language. Reform movements arose among the Muslims to close the education gap. In 1875, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan founded the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, patterned after Oxford University. In later years the college grew into the well-known Aligarh Muslim University which was the intellectual cradle for many of the dominant political and literary personalities of India and Pakistan in the 20th century.
Western education did not mitigate the growth of separate Hindu and Muslim consciousness; it exacerbated it. The Census of 1881, the establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and the increasing assertiveness of Hindu intelligentsia only added to the insecurity of the minority Muslims. To protect their interests, the Muslim elites formed the Muslim League in 1906 and held their first meeting in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh today. (Continued next week)
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