At what point in their history of more than a thousand years did Indian Muslims become a minority? The question is clearly rhetorical, because Indian Muslims have never been in a majority.
The last British census, taken in 1941, showed that Muslims constituted 24.3 per cent of the population. Five years later, in 1946, provoked by fears that they and their faith would be destroyed by majority-Hindu aggression after the British left, Indian Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim League, a party that promised a new Muslim nation on the map of the Indian subcontinent, to be called Pakistan. In August 1947, Pakistan, a concept that had not been considered a serious option even in 1940, became a fact.
Its geography was fantastic: its western and eastern halves were separated by more than a thousand miles of hostile India, and by sharp differences in ethnicity and culture, for the east was Bengali while the west was Punjabi, Pakhtoon, Baloch and Sindhi. Its professed ideology, Islam, was unprecedented as a glue for nationalism, since no nation state had yet been created on the basis of Islam. The great theologianâpolitician, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888â1958), president of the Indian National Congress between 1940 and 1946, repeatedly pointed this out to fellow Muslims, but to shrinking audiences. In a remarkably prescient interview, given to Shorish Kashmiri for the Lahore-based Urdu magazine Chattan, published in April 1946, Azad argued that the division of territory on the basis of religion âfinds no sanction in Islam or the QuranâŠWho among the scholars of Islam has divided the dominion of God on this basis?âŠDo they realize that if Islam had approved this principle then it would not have permitted its followers to go to non-Muslim lands and many ancestors of the supporters of Pakistan would not have even entered the fold of Islam?â Islam was a value system for the transformation of the human soul, not an instrument of political power.
Nor would a common faith eliminate ethnic tensions. âThe environment of Bengal is such that it disfavours leadership from outside and rises in revolt when it senses danger to its rights and interestsâŠI feel that it will not be possible for East Pakistan to stay with West Pakistan for any considerable period of time. There is nothing common between the two regions except that they call themselves Muslims. But the fact of being Muslim has never created durable political unity anywhere in the world. The Arab world is before us; they subscribe to a common religion, a common civilization and culture, and speak a common language. In fact, they acknowledge even territorial unity. But there is no political unity among them.â Exactly twenty-five years after Azad made this prediction, in 1971, Pakistan broke into two, and Bengali-speaking East Pakistan reinvented itself as Bangladesh after brutal civil strife and an IndiaâPakistan war.
The partitions of India divided Indian Muslims, who constituted one-third of the worldâs Muslim population before 1947, into three nations by 1971. By the turn of the century, Pakistan had reduced non-Muslims to 2 per cent of its population. Ten per cent of Bangladesh, a more secular formation, was Hindu. When the first census of the twenty-first century was taken, in 2001, Muslims were 13.4 per cent of secular India.
Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, from the Khyber Pass to the borders of Burma, claim a unique history spanning more than a thousand years in which their political power has been remarkably disproportionate to their demographic limitations. Muslim dynasties were by far the most powerful element within the complex mosaic of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious feudal structure before the slow aggregation of British rule from the middle of the eighteenth century. An Arab invader, Muhammad bin Qasim, established the first Muslim dynasty, in 712, in Sind (now in Pakistan), but it faltered and stagnated. Muslim rule in a substantive sense is more correctly dated to 1192, when Muhammad Ghori, at the head of a Turco-Afghan army, defeated the Rajput king Prithviraj at Tarain, about 150 km from Delhi, near Thaneswar, to establish a dominant centre of Muslim power in the heartland.
Ghori soon returned to Afghanistan, but his successors, Turco-Afghan generals, set up a Delhi Sultanate that became independent of Afghanistan in 1206. By this time, with astonishing rapidity, they held an empire that stretched from Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the east. Delhi, or its alter ego Agra, remained a Muslim capital for over six centuries. The Khiljis (1288â1320), Tughlaqs (1320â1413), Sayyids (1414â51), Lodis (1451â1526), Suris (1540â56) and Mughals (1526â40 and 1556â1857) won or lost power in wars that were as bitter as any other, but the fact that succession never went out of the Islamic fold created a comfort zone that seeped down to even those Muslims who had little to gain from that moveable feast called monarchy. There were powerful Muslim domains even during British rule, the most important being the state of Hyderabad, founded by a Mughal governor who bore the title of nizam ul mulk and who broke away from an already brittle Delhi around 1725; the dynasty survived till 1948, with the seventh and last nizam, Mir Osman, becoming famous as a miser with the most valuable diamond hoard in the world. He ate off a tin plate, smoked cigarette stubs left behind by guests, and was hugely reluctant to serve champagne to so eminent a visitor as the viceroy, Lord Wavell, but used the 280-carat Jacob diamond as a paperweight. There were only three million Muslims in a population of twenty-three million in his state, but did Muslims consider themselves a minority as long as their ruler was a Muslim? No.
Minority and majority are, therefore, more a measure of empowerment than a function of numbers. For Muslims under shahanshahs, nawabs and nizams, power translated into positive discrimination in employment, within the bureaucracy, judiciary and military; and it ensured that their aman i awwal (liberty of religion) was beyond threat.
This changed in 1803, when victorious British troops marched into Delhi. The Mughal emperor, the blind and impotent Shah Alam II, became a British vassal, and centuries of Muslim confidence began to crumble into a melee of reactions ranging from anger, frustration, bombast, lament and self-pity to insurrection and intellectual enquiry.
Indian Muslims entered an age of insecurity for which they sought a range of answers. One question fluctuated at many levels: what would be the geography of what might be called Muslim space in the post-Mughal dispensation? The concept did not begin as a hostile idea, but it certainly had the contours of protectionism, buoyed by an underlying, if unspoken, assumption that Muslims would not be able to hold their own. Political power had made their âminorityâ numbers irrelevant; without power, they would be squeezed into irrelevance or subjugation. They sought, therefore, reservations or positive discrimination of all kinds, in the polity, in preferential treatment for their language, in jobs, and eventually in geographical space. Pakistan emerged as the twentieth centuryâs answer to a nineteenth-century defeat. So far, it has merely replaced insecurity with uncertainty.
The last two Muslim empires, Mughal and Ottoman, succumbed to British power in the long nineteenth century, which came to an end in 1918 with the end of the First World War. In south Asia, Pakistan evolved as a kind of successor-state to the Mughal Empire, a comfort zone for Muslims. Turkey survived the collapse of the Ottomans by a remarkable renovation: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who saved his nation from British plans for dismemberment, abandoned Ottoman ideas and values, and turned Turkey into an independent, integrated, modern country. The victors of the First World War, principally Britain and France, picked up the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire and spun them off into either colonies or neo-colonies.
In 1918, a startling historical coincidence occurred. Every Muslim state in the world, whether in Asia or Africa, came under European rule. Muslim trauma was accentuated by the fact that for the first time since Prophet Muhammad marched into Mecca in 630, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina were under the suzerainty of a Christian power. Jerusalem, the third holy city, had been lost before, during the Crusades, but never Mecca, where the Prophet was born, or Medina, where he established the first Muslim state.
Persian nationalists might argue that their country was technically independent, since their shah was never actually removed by a European power, but the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 effectively ended Persian pretensions to sovereignty. The country was divided into Russian and British âzones of influenceâ in which Russia took the north and Britain gained control of the south and its ports. Similarly, pedants might suggest that Muslim Central Asian khanates like Bukhara, Kokand and Azerbaijan became independent of Moscow in 1917 after the collapse of the Tsars during the First World War, but their pretensions were quickly snuffed out by Vladimir Lenin, who sent in tanks and bombers to reassert the boundaries of the tsarist empire. The great library of Bukhara was destroyed in this Bolshevik invasion. Lenin may have been blind to irony when, in November 1919, he described Afghanistan â in a letter to King Amanullah, after control of foreign affairs was restored to Kabul following the brief Third Afghan War in 1919 â as the only independent Muslim country in the world.
By 1919, more Muslims lived under British rule than in any other political space. The Ganga and the Nile were linked by Empire; experience in one area was absorbed into institutional memory, enabling London to formulate policy in another. As Britain organized and reorganized her Arab possessions after 1918, she applied lessons learnt, in war and peace, from the conquest and domination of India. Britain had realized â through the crises and conquests of the nineteenth century â that her interests did not always need the heavy hand of colonization. They might be equally well served by the lighter touch of neo-colonization.
Neo-colonization is the grant of independence on condition that you do not exercise it. (The British weekly newspaper, the Economist, provided, in its issue of 20 June 2009, an excellent working definition of neo-colonization in its obituary of Omar Bongo, president, for forty-two years, of former French colony Gabon: âTheir bargain [between Bongo and France] too was a neat one. He allowed the French to take his oil and wood; they subsidized and protected him. At various times through his long political career, when opposition elements got brash, or multi-party democracy, which he allowed after 1993, became too lively, the French military base in Libreville would turn out the paratroopers for him.â)
Each one of these events â the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the creation of Arab neo-colonies, the reaction of Afghanistan to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 leading to the Third Afghan War â would play some part in the extraordinary drama of the Indian challenge to the British, and influence the domestic politics that gradually separated Indian Muslims from the unique and unifying national movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. The most creative phase of Gandhiâs career was not towards the end, but in the beginning, between 1919 and 1922, when he fused Muslim and Hindu sentiment to mould a non-violent revolution. It was popularly called the Khilafat, or Caliphate, Movement. Indian Muslims, who constituted one-third of the worldâs Muslim population, mobilized under Gandhi to destroy the British Empire because the British had seized Mecca and Medina from the legitimate caliph of Islam.
The Ottoman sultan was also caliph of the Muslim world, in his capacity as heir to a political tradition that began just after the death of Prophet Muhammad in 632. The caliph merged, in his person, temporal and spiritual responsibilities. He was sultan of his realm, as well as a symbol of Islam in his capacity as custodian of the two holy mosques, Kaaba in Mecca and the Prophetâs mosque in Medina. The bonds of Islam did not make the Arab an equal of the Turk in the Ottoman Empire, but religion and contiguity did create a harmony of cultural and economic interests that was less abrasive than European colonization, which was perceived as more foreign, intrusive and hostile.
The Ottomans became caliphs much after they became sultans. Their origins lay in the rise of Osman I1 in 1300 in southern Turkey. They expanded into Europe; Serbia fell in 1389, Bulgaria in 1394. They crushed a pan-European force at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, and in 1453 became masters of Eurasia when they conquered the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, till then considered impregnable. The sultan became caliph only in 1517, when Selim I defeated the Mamelukes in Cairo, and extended his possessions to Mecca and Medina. Selim believed that it was his mission to conquer both east and west.
The Ottoman rise was matched by the retreat of Arabs in Europe. The resurrection of Christian Spain and Portugal had phenomenal global consequences. The two Catholic powers opened up maritime routes to the west and east, established a chain of possessions in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and launched the age of imperialism that would make Europe master of most of the world.
The Portuguese reached India in 1498, when Vasco da Gama weighed anchor at the southern trading city of Calicut. They established bases in Cochin in 1503, Goa in 1510 and reached Malacca in South East Asia by 1511. With the advantage of hindsight it is possible to visualize a Portuguese Indian empire: the disarray of central authority in the fifteenth century was not very dissimilar to conditions that the British exploited in the eighteenth. The Portuguese entertained thoughts of moving inland and north, either in alliance with the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, or at its expense.
The year 1526 turned out to be an auspicious one for both the Ottomans and Mughals. Suleiman the Magnificent defeated the Hungarians at Mohacs; in the east, Baburâs triumph at Panipat, near Delhi, established a new, and by far the most successful, Muslim dynasty. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Mughal consolidation had precluded the possibility of a Portuguese empire. Portugal was limited to three trading posts on the western coast â Goa, Daman and Diu â and trading rights in the east, at Hooghly in Bengal. It remained content with a string of some fifty well-defended fortresses along the sea routes of the Indian Ocean that protected a lucrative trade, and were often able to command a premium on ships flying other flags. Sporadic Portuguese attacks on Indian pilgrim ships on their way to Jeddah caused continual tension with the Mughals, for haj security was a fundamental responsibility of the Mughal state.
The Ottoman ebb was managed more skilfully than the Mughal, but its Ă©lan began to seep out in a slow dribble after the failure to take Vienna in 1683. The fall of Vienna would have, as has been often said, brought Austria into the Ottoman domain, and made it the most powerful force in Europe. Defeat, conversely, punctured its confidence; retreat from the walls of Vienna became the first stage of the long retreat from Europe.
The Mughal collapse, between 1715 and 1725, was more sudden and spectacular. The causes were similar: in essence, an inability to modernize the economy or political and military institutions. There is no satisfactory explanation as to why the Ottomans did not increase the range and mobility of their field guns by adopting the latest advances in metallurgical technology; or why they did not increase the size of their ships to bigger European standards after the naval defeat at Lepanto. Both the Mughals and Ottomans also failed to democratize the educational system with the help of new technologies like printing. There was nothing un-Islamic about printing. But the calligraphers in the bureaucracy who kept records, and the clergy in the seminary, formed a powerful conservative coalition that resisted instruments of modernity.
Queen Elizabeth granted a royal charter to what came to be known as the East India Company on the last day of the sixteenth century. The first British ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, an Oxonian who had been knighted for exploring the Amazon, received an audience from Emperor Jahangir in Agra in 1615. Jahangir, used to pearls from the Portuguese, sniffed at Sir Thomasâs pedestrian presents and asked, instead, for an English horse.2 The embarrassed, but patient, Englishman was finally granted a firman to trade in 1618. The East India Company was only one of many British enterprises â among them Levant, Muscovy, Royal African, Massachusetts Bay and South Sea â engaged in international commerce; but it was by far the most successful. By 1750, its network extended from Basra to Sumatra.
The most important of its possessions was Calcutta, founded in 1690, on the Hooghly river in Bengal. Maya Jasanoff explains why: âFrom their capital at Murshidabad, the nawabs of Bengal presided over the richest province of the Mughal Empire. Cotton cloth, raw silk, saltpeter, sugar, indigo, and opium â the products of the region seemed inexhaustible, and all the European merchant companies set up factories to trade in them. Travelling downriver from Murshidabad was like travelling across a mixed-up map of Europe: there were the Portuguese at Hughli, the Dutch at Chinsura, the Danes at Serampore, the French at Chandernagore, and, of course, the British at Calcutta.â3 The nawabs of Bengal were among the richest Indian princes until ruined by conspiracy and defeat.
The British began their Bengal trade in 1633, from Balasore and Hooghly, a riverside settlement named after the river. In 1660, they established âfactoriesâ at Kasimbazar and Patna. Since corruption and threats were endemic, they set up a fortification and began to raise local troops. In 1701, Emperor Aurangzeb sent a recently converted Hindu, Murshid Kuli Khan, as his financial representative to Bengal. In 1704, Kuli Khan established himself at Mokshabad, which he renamed Murshidabad in his own honour, and which he turned into the capital when he was appointed governor in 1713. His line was awarded the title of ânawabâ in 1736. It would be a short line.
The penultimate nawab, Alivardi Khan, was a perceptive man who was fully conscious of the growing strength of the Europeans, and the malpractices used to bolster that strength. He called the British âHatmenâ, literally, men who wore hats rather than turbans. He compared them to bees: Indian rulers could share the honey, but if you disturbed the hive they would sting you to death. He was apprehensive that after his death, âHatmenâ would possess all the...
