Spirals of Contention

Why India was Partitioned in 1947

Satish Saberwal

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138347908
• eBook ISBN: 9781136517440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This study examines the social and psychological processes that led to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. It recognizes the long-term continuities in the idiom of conflict (as well as cooperation), and shows that, by 1900, the conflicts and animosities were gathering a self-aggravating momentum. The book moves back and forth between evidence and general, or theoretical, understanding.

Separateness between Hindus and Muslims grew reciprocally, with hardening religious identities and the growing frequency of incidents of conflict. These skirmishes had several dimensions: symbolic (desecrating places of worship), societal (conversions), and physical (violence against women). As mutual trust declined, a quarter century of negotiations under diverse auspices failed to yield an agreement, and even the framework of the Partition in 1947 was imposed by the colonial rulers.

A theoretically informed study, this book takes a comparative stance along several axes. Recognizing long-term continuities in the idiom of conflict (as well as of cooperation), it will be of interest to students of conflicts, Partitions, history, sociology, and South Asian studies.

1

medieval legacy

He whose vision cannot cover History’s three thousand years, Must in outer darkness hover, Live within the day’s frontiers.

Goethe¹

Civilizations are complex human creations, evolving historically in course of encounters with diverse realities – ecological, social, political, and so forth. Distinctive ways of thinking and of doing things develop in a civilization, ways that gather weight, and exercise moulding influence, in its historical experience; I shall call these ways its “cultural styles”. Illustratively, I think of China’s great bureaucratic tradition, of the varied institution-building in western Europe since the thirteenth century (Saberwal 1995: Chap. 4), and of the idea and practice of umma in Islam, which will concern us later. Given the array of concerns that bear on a civilization’s evolution, any that survive and flourish can do so only by learning to nourish multiple, contrary purposes – and concomitant cultural styles and orientations. China, say in the twelfth century, is a rich example. The repertoire of its Confucian literati, the mainstay of its formidable bureaucracy, included: a gentle, Taoist contemplation of nature; exceptionally resourceful technological capabilities; bureaucratic traditions which could underwrite some of the largest empires in human experience, able also to organize resistance to potential horse-borne conquerors from the vast northern steppe – all this and much more was part of the Chinese tradition (Gernet 1982).

Diverse cultural styles for coping with the world have found nourishment in the Islamic tradition too.² An expansive, open, outgoing style has been central to Islam’s repertoire: large numbers of bearers of the Judaic, Christian, Pahlavi, and other traditions swelled its ranks in its early decades, bringing their older ideas, expectations, and practices with them, making these part of Islam. Arab and Persian merchants had long travelled to the edges of the Indian Ocean, and after the seventh century, they carried the Prophet’s message too – to the east African coast on one side, and India’s west coast and southeast Asia on the other – relating to local communities everywhere. Following the early Arab conquest of Sind in 712CE, “The Arabs, who took wives from amongst the women of Sind, were absorbed by the population in a few generations. Sind reverted to the rule of the various Hindu clans…. The Arab conquest of Sind was a passing episode: yet another instance of the cellular structure of Indian society successfully absorbing strangers with a different religion (Ray 2003: 129).”

Sufi mystics reached out to peoples and to the indigenous religious traditions wherever they went; and numerous Muslim rulers – the Abbasids in the Fertile Crescent, the Umayyad dynasties in southern Spain, the Ottoman Turkish empire, the Mughals in India – drew strength from the social, cultural, and religious diversity of their peoples, and promoted extensive commerce in ideas as well as goods.

Hidden here was a key moment in the intellectual history of mankind. The Roman imperial ruling class had made Greek its lingua franca but, as the long twilight of empire ended in the mid-fifth century, the motivation to master the Greek language faded and, by the mid-sixth century, Romans could rarely read texts in Greek. Their familiarity with the riches of the Greek tradition, and that of Europeans at large for five centuries after, would henceforth be limited to whatever little had been rendered into Latin by the sixth century. Continuing older connections, between the eighth and the ninth centuries, Arab thinkers had absorbed large parts of that Greek tradition, then available in the Byzantium, translated these into Arabic, and carried these with them to the emerging Arab kingdoms in Spain (Hodgson 1974: Vol. 1, Chap. 5). From the eleventh century onwards, European scholars discovered, in the Arabs’ libraries in Spain, something of the vast, unsuspected parts of the Greek corpus, which fitted in with the texts they already had. Challenged by this sudden infusion of ancient Greek and recent Arab thought, scholarship in western Europe took a quantal leap.

Alongside this open, outgoing style, Islam has carried a stern, scripturalist style too. Shaped by religious scholars, the ulama, between the eighth and the tenth centuries under the Abbasids in the Islamic heartlands around the Fertile Crescent, this style turned on the shariat, the Islamic Law, codified by the scholars on the basis of the Koran, and the hadis, the Prophet’s sayings and deeds, all of which they believed had been divinely inspired. The shariat was a social code for living a worthy life, a life of individual responsibility to God’s will, as revealed in the Prophet’s words and deeds, and addressing the mores that prevailed at the time of its codification. The interpreters of the shariat – the ulama – wished to stay aloof from royal courts, which embodied organized power, for they believed that those who lived by Islam, following its law, the shariat, needed no external power to govern them. In practice, though, the ulama have been appreciative of the advantages that accrue from royal patronage for Islamic religious establishments – and, indeed, for advancing the frontiers of Islam.³

One open and outgoing, the other scripturalist and conservative: these two styles, in mutual opposition or in convergence, in more or less stable arrangements, have always been present among Muslims. During its long and eventful history, several other styles also came to be associated with Islam; of these I shall mention only one, which followed from its spread into central Asia. As the medieval horsemen in the central Asian and Mongolian steppes, with their mobility and flexible social organization, gained skills at combat as mounted archers, they were able to generate, recurrently, remarkable war leaders (Unger 1987: 72–74). Among their best known leaders was the thirteenth century Mongol, Changhez Khan, whose religious inclination was, if anything, to Buddhism. Other central Asian war leaders, several clusters of Turks, who were more or less recent converts to Islam, were at their devastating worst when they conquered Islam’s own heartlands, like Iran; these recent converts expressed “a particularly assertive identity” during their initial incursions into northern India (Pollock 1993:286). In later centuries different Turkish groups founded several empires, among them the Safavid in Iran, the Ottoman in Turkey, and the Mughal in India.

When a small, mobile body of conquerors, astride their swift war horses, targeted a territory with a large sedentary population, dramatic violence offered a quick route to decisive victory.⁴ This style of conquest was not limited to the Saltanat; it marked medieval warfare involving horse-borne central Asians of the medieval centuries everywhere. In the late nineteenth century Hindu- and Hindi-nationalist imagination, however, as Shahid Amin notes, “the foreigner-Turk conquerors of north India [were conflated] with the entire population of Muslims in India” (2002: 26).⁵ The Central Asian prowess for raising warhorses rested, in any case, on their vast pasturages, something that the more densely populated agricultural civilizations did not have. Within the technological limits of the early second millennium, a large contingent of warhorses brought decisive advantage in warfare. (This advantage vanished ultimately before artillery.) The Indian experience in this regard was comparable with that of peoples in West Asia and in China, when these were conquered by Central Asian Turks or by Mongols between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries (Unger 1987: 70–77, 154–70). Nineteenth century Hindu ideologues misread the event, not realizing the importance of the central Asian horses; and they built up the stereotypes of the weak, effeminate Hindu facing “the Muslim” as the oppressive Other (Datta 2006 has a critique).

There were differences between the regions, however, in the aftermath of conquests. The Mongols could hold the bulk of China for less than a century – and withdrew rather abruptly amidst the Ming uprising in the 1360s. Before the Turks conquered West Asia in the eleventh century, they had already accepted Islam (Hodgson 1974: Vol. II, 40ff); and the leaders of the Mongols, who followed them in the thirteenth, did likewise by the end of the century. Events in South Asia took a notably different course. The conquerors faced polities which could not match their horse-borne power; but the local society was unusually resilient. Relying on the caste order, it could hold its internal ordering despite repeated conquests. That society had, in centuries past, offered earlier conquering groups from the north, including Arabs and Turks, the possibility of settling in the host society as a ruling jati (Pollock 1993: 285). For this possibility the new conquerors had no use. On the other side, large parts of the host society did not take to the new faith wholesale.

The patterns of relationships between Muslims and Hindus in nineteenth century colonial India were remarkably varied. This variety has had varied sources. There was the unparalleled diversity within indigenous society, in its ecological settings, and in the prevailing ways of making a living. There were the diverse origins of immigrant Muslims – descendants of Arab merchants in Gujarat and Kerala, of the eighth century Arab conquerors in Sind, of Afghan and Turki conquerors of north India in the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, of those coming away from the turmoil in central and west Asia following Turki and Mongol conquests, and others in search of opportunity and adventure. And there was the variety of ways in which indigenes took to Islam in India. In the several regions, the diverse patterns of relationships had evolved over a thousand years and more. I wish to explore something of the range of these patterns, what went into shaping them, and the consequences that flowed from them. The events we shall consider have principally been small in scale, localized, spasmodic. With processes so complex, analysis cannot aspire to certainties; it can hope at best to suggest the more probable of connexions, and the more consequential of the prevailing patterns.

The Context in India

In the subcontinental theatre of power, the establishment of the Saltanat in north India introduced a new, expansive force, but its rulers faced a dilemma. The early thirteenth century Mongol conquerors had “torn apart the fabric of Muslim power in Central Asia” (Alam 1989: 44), closing off the only possible line of retreat for the Saltanat rulers, so they had no option but to come to terms with their situation in India as best they could. Within India, they had to contend with opposing pressures: from the ulama, Islamic clerics, to advance the cause of Islam; and from the indigenous society, where a variety of political contendors continued to be more or less active, sometimes organized as caste brotherhoods. The Saltanat rulers lacked the wherewithal for imposing Islam upon their subjects; yet their religious bonds were crucial in holding together the variety of immigrant groups on whom their power ultimately rested (Mujeeb 1967: 264; Aquil 2006: 76): for the tiny ruling class, shared faith was the vital cement. “The rulers needed [the Muslim religious leaders] to legitimate their actions and were therefore constantly extending concessions to them” (Alam 1989: 54).

Divergent interests and visions continued to be at play through the centuries: Akbar had an empire to build; Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi had a creed to spread. The rulers’ prime concerns were to ensure their revenues, and internal peace for further expansion: if the clerics had their way beyond a point, the indigenous reactions could be violent, threatening the conditions needed for steady revenues. The rulers tended by and large to be pragmatic, trying to maintain a certain distance from the men of religion, and seeking to promote co-existence between the several religious categories. In Muzaffar Alam’s reading, they did this in two principal ways:

A. Tolerance for indigenous customary law and religious practices regardless of Islamic religious law. Conciliatory towards Hindus, “… [Saltanat rulers] emphasised that their conflict was only with those who challenged their paramount political power and control over revenue. With the rest of the local population they had no quarrel” (Alam 1989: 44).

[The fourteenth century courtier] Barani lamented that even at Delhi, the capital of the sultanate, Hindus went in procession, beating gongs and cymbals, and passed beneath the walls of the palace to immerse the idols in the river and the sultan, as the historian presented, was powerless to interfere with them (Alam 1989: 52, citing Barani, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi).

The general policy was not to interfere in Hindu beliefs and rituals, not even in such practices as sati. Akbar gave this policy of “tolerance and non-sectarianism” formal ideological cover, sulh-i kul (peace with all) (ibid.: 52f). We shall return to matters of practice later.

B. Indigenous intermediaries. Even during the Saltanat, the later rulers, especially Sikandar Lodi, encouraged Hindus to learn Persian and enter state service, particularly in the revenue departments. Mohammad Habib has suggested that the Kayastha jati may have originated among “those Hindus who, regardless of caste, began learning Persian in the thirteenth century, gradually acquired the culture of both the communities and ultimately made themselves indispensable in revenue and accounts” (1958: 231). Indigenous participation in government expanded under Akbar, and the tradition established by him of absorbing Hindus “in the higher ranks of the nobility and of ruling through Hindu hereditary landed elites continued until the very end of the Mughal empire” (Alam 1989:52; similarly I. A. Khan 1978:458). This openness of the ruling class suited the indigenes’ willingness to partake of the framework of power.

Muzaffar Alam has documented the importance that Mughal rulers, and even their predecessors, attached to working with a political ideology, akhlaq, that called for the welfare of all subjects, of all faiths (2004: Chap. 2). This ideology had built on Greek and pre-Islamic Iranian thought; and it stressed the necessity for rulers to abide by ethical norms, distantiated from religious injunctions, and urged them to provide justice to all their subjects, Muslims and others. Manuals outlining the akhlaq ideology circulated extensively in the Mughal ruling class. In medieval Islamic circles by the twelfth century, the rival schools of thought, like the Mutazilite philosophers, had been marginalized. Consequently, the authors of these Greek-inspired akhlaq texts thought it prudent to stay “within the circle of what was considered to be acceptable Islamic practice”. These texts:

inevitably begin with a proper sequence of references to the Creator and the Prophet, and seek initial legitimacy by inserting their authors into a system of erudite references that makes their texts immediately recognizable to fellow Muslims…. The formal similarities between these treatises of political ethics and other treatises of a purely religious nature (which were, paradoxically, intended, among other things, to be refutations of the Hellenic tradition) may also have lent them some weight of legitimacy. (Alam 2004: 191.)

Granting the significance of this literature, how well it shaped the Mughal administrative practice on the ground remains rather uncertain; to this issue we shall return later in the chapter.

The men of religion among the immigrants, coming during the Saltanat and later, were not bound in a unitary religious organization. There were the specialists who led in prayers in mosques; there were the scholars in Islamic law, the shariat, who would administer law for, and be general advisers to, the ruler; there were the Sufis, engaging rather more in personal quests for fresh, transcendental, experience. Sufis had their orders, silsilas, yet the great Sufi masters were strong individuals who kept their own counsel. These various groups were predominantly Sunni; but there were significant Shia elements too, owing, first, to several waves of missionary activity, in Sind, Gujarat, and Rajasthan, by Ismaili Shias (Khan 1997), and, second, to immigration from Iran (where the Shia sect had overwhelmed the Sunnis in the sixteenth century: Hodgson 1974, Vol. 3: 23–24). Gujarat did have great merchant communities who were Shia; but bids for sovereign power in India have rarely found Shia leadership, excepting the late eighteenth century regime in Awadh – which made the city of Lucknow an important Shia centre.

In the long run, the Sufis could take on a variety of roles, responding to the changing opportunities and challenges. Richard M. Eaton (1978) has tracked the Sufis’ trajectory in Bijapur, in latter day northern Karnataka, between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. As warriors, they accompanied, and splintered off, the Saltanat expeditions to the south, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, prior to the founding of the Bahmani kin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Medieval Legacy
• 2. Facing the Future 1
• 3. Facing the Future 2
• 4. Nineteenth Century Anxieties
• 5. Parallel Processes
• 6. Drifting Apart
• Concluding Review
• Bibliography
• Index