Chakravorty1

Anargha Chakravorty
Roll no. 1710110432
Instructor: Aashique Ahmad Iqbal
HIS 208
Assignment #2
Apirl 22nd, 2018

Question: What factors contributed to the emergence of Muslim nationalism in India?

On 31st December, 1600, a group of merchants who had incorporated themselves into the East

India Company were given monopoly privileges on all trade with the East Indies. The

company’s ship first arrived in India, at the port of Surat, in the year 1608. Sir Thomas Roe,

reached to the imperial durbar of Emperor Jahngir, as the emissary of King James I in 1615,

so as to gain for the British the right to establish a factory at Surat. Few at that time could

have anticipated that this establishment of a British factory would eventually act as a stepping

stone for the establishment of India as a colony of British.

The Indian subcontinent as a British colony had undergone many conformations in its socio-

political, cultural as well as socio-economic structure and one of the best example of this lies

in the study of the emergence of Muslim nationalism in India.

British rule of India had stripped Muslims elites of their traditional status of ruling class and

reduced them to the status of a religious minority who were also pressured by the increasing

challenges given to them by the colonial administration as well as the rising Hindu revivalism

of 19th century resulted in culmination of fear in them. These social pressures strengthened in

the collective imagination the perception of a minority at a disadvantage and it helped the

English-educated Muslim elites to become gradually aware of their right to constitute in

nationhood and the need to organise politically in order to defend their interest. In this article

I aim to analyse the emergence of Muslim nationalism, and for that purpose I will primarily

draw historical evidence from academic works such as T. Metcalf and B. Metcalf’s A concise
 Chakravorty2

history of modern India, Francis Robin’s Islam and Muslim history in South Asia, and M.

Pernau’s Ashraf into the Middle class.

To begin with we first need to analyse the economic relations of the colonial India and the

British empire. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that India was by far the biggest cash cow for the

English empire ‘We could lose all our (white settlements) dominions and still survive, but if

we lost India, our Sun would sink into its setting’- Lord Curzon.

It is also evident from the fact that by 1913, India had become the chief export market for

British goods, including textiles, iron, steel goods, machinery and other products 1, moreover

each year the funds generated in India were transported to England so as to liquidate the old

company shares which in turned functioned to pay off debt on secure and profitable capital

investments. Apart from industrial fund mobilisation and export market of raw materials such

as cotton, raw and jute, India also served as an agricultural nation for the British empire. This

is evident from the success story of the Punjab ‘canal colonies’, which was a large scale agro-

economic developmental process that assured continuous supply of water on newly cultivated

soils that in turn made possible a vast expansion in output of wheat, sugarcane and maize 2.

However, the value of India to Britain extended beyond these direct economic advantages.

India, at the turn of the century served as the centre of many aspects of British imperial

system and one of the most important of them was as a source of indentured labour. As the

trans-Atlantic slave trade was illegalized in the year 1807 and the eventual abolishment of

slavery in the 1830s, a substitute for the black labour in the cane fields were needed. This was

when many Indians went to Jamaica, and Trinidad, British Guinea, Mauritius, Fiji and

Malaya, whereas others went to Burma, Ceylon and along the east-African coast of Kenya,

Zanzibar and Uganda. Although it was banned between 1911 to 1920, as notable people

including Viceroy Lord Hardinge, Madan Mohan Malviya, raised their voices against this
1
B. Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, (Cambridge, 2001), p 125.
2
B. Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, (Cambridge, 2001), p 126
 Chakravorty3

system, it nevertheless catalysed a feeling of nationalism among Indians, as they saw in this

overseas migration, a heightened image of imperial exploitation and also a vision of ‘Greater

India’, a nation that transcends borders and in doing so recalled the images of ancient glory.

Indians increasingly became self-aware of their rights, they started realising the need for an

indigenous institution which could represent them and so in 1885 some seventy English-

educated Indians came together in Bombay to form the Indian National Congress3.

The organisers of Congress made many desperate efforts to draw Muslims into their

meetings. Badr Al-Din Tyabji, a Bombay lawyer and the leader of the Shi’a Bohras, was

invited to preside over the Madras Congress of 1887, this was major symbol-political move

made in order to show the demonstrate the secular ideals of the party. However, most Muslim

leaders like Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Sayyid Amir’ Ali, a brilliant lawyer and a religious

thinker of Calcutta, believed that congress can not be the spokesperson for interests of

distinct ‘communities’. ‘India is like a bride which has got two beautiful and lustrous eyes-

Hindus and Musalmans’.4 And with the dawn of the last decade of the 19 th century, the

religious boundaries between Hindus and Muslims became increasingly apparent, as the

Hindu revival movement was at its pinnacle during this timeline. Even the gentle teachings of

Vivekananda mixed patriotism with a cult of manly virtue and evocations of Hindu glory. In

1893, the great nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, took up the celebration of the birth of the

Ganesha, and turned into a grand public event that included several days of procession,

music, food and was organised through subscriptions by neighbourhood, caste or occupation5.

Though, the real motivation for organising such a grand event was to build a national spirit

beyond the circles of educated elites as well as to demonstrate the colonial government, the

power of united Indian mass, but due to the complex colonial sociology of that time, this

3
B. Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, (Cambridge, 2001), p 136.
4
B. Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, (Cambridge, 2001), p 136.
5
B. Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, (Cambridge, 2001), p 151.
 Chakravorty4

event became one of the major contributors in creating a communal dissonance. For instance,

in the early years, the organisers of the festival called out on Hindus to protect cows and to

boycott the Muharram celebrations to commemorate the 7 th century martyrdom of Iman

Hussain and his followers, in which Hindus had formally often participated.6

It is very important to note that the idea of cow protection (an idea propagated by Hindu

socioreligious reform movements like that of the Arya Samaj) played a critical role in causing

communal tensions and the consequent rise of Muslim nationalism in India. The cow for

Hindus was a powerful symbol which embodied the images of maternity and fertility and

often the western-educated Indians argued that cattle slaughtering contributed to the physical

and moral weakness of the nation as it eliminates a continuing source of dairy products. Thus,

cow protectors filled suits against butchers, who were again primarily Muslims, and tried to

intercept cattle en route to cattle fairs, butcher shops, or destined for sacrifice in the annual

Muslim festival of ‘Idu’ l- Azha celebration7. This increasing hostility between the Hindu-

Muslim community soon caused communal riots, which left more than 100 people dead in

Western India, North-West Provinces, and Oudh, Bihar, and even in Rangoon in Burma. This

lead to a feeling of alienation among the Muslim population of India and the fact that many

of the high-ranking Congress members supported the cow protection, furthered the belief

among Muslims that their interest could be best served by organisations that focused

exclusively on Muslim interests.

However, to suggest that it was only in the formative decades of the 19 th century that

Muslims began to emphasize what differentiated them from the rest of the Indian society is to

the ignore the long history of Muslim revivalist movement and its separatist tendencies. 8

Notable scholar C.A. Bayly has brought one substantial new dimension to our understanding

6
B. Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, (Cambridge, 2001), p 151.
7
B. Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, (Cambridge, 2001), p 152.
8
F. Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia, (New Delhi, 2000), p 216
 Chakravorty5

of the whole context of Muslim responses to the emergence of nationalist movement in the

northern India. Bayly in his book- Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazzars, has shown how the

commercialisation of royal power in the 17th and 18th centuries have helped to bring about the

development of a rooted Islamic service gentry and a unified Hindu merchant class. These

were distinct social formations, expressing themselves in different cultural idioms and

operating in sharply differentiated economic contexts- the one was to become increasingly

sustainer of an Islamic high culture and the other of a Hindu high culture.

Through the institution of rural qasbah, the Islamic service gentry perpetuated its sense of

identity and its economic domination. Similarly, the largely Hindu merchant class, flourished

in the market towns which were often known as ganjs. In the 18th century these two distinct

types of towns grew and prospered along parallel tracks. But from the early 19 th century

onwards their fortune began to diverge as the impact of British rule brought economic decline

to qasbah, while the commercialisation of agriculture and the growth of long distance and

local trade brought continuing prosperity to the Hindu ganj.9 This was the one of the

prominent reason for the Muslim community of India losing its grip on economic as well as

political power, eventually slowing down their cultural progress towards westernisation. The

situation was further worsened by the revolt of 1857 as the Britishers blamed the Muslim

community for supporting the uprisings, as the mutiny soldiers had claimed Bahadhur Shah

Zafar II as their leader.

In response to all this, Saiyid Ahmad Khan shifted his focus from working for Hindu-Muslim-

Urdu speaking elites to working primarily for those of Urdu speaking Muslims. He also

started the Aligarh movement (born out of the Aligarh college which was set up by the funds

received from the Britishers), which initially concerned itself with the development of the

Muslims as a community as a three-fold social reform within Islam, gain western education

9
F. Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia, (New Delhi, 2000), p 214
 Chakravorty6

and friendship with the Britishers. However, after the formation of INC in 1885, Aligarh

movement lost its objective of Muslim revival and increasingly turned political and catalysed

the formation of several modern organisations of separate Muslim activity 10 which in turn

opposed the ideals of nationalism propagated by the Indian National Congress. One of the

significant reason for this resistance towards Congress was- Muslims believed that Congress

never developed secular ethos; its symbols; its idioms; its inspiration was all Hindu; it was

frequently associated with aggressive Hindu revivalism 11. Muslim representatives believed

that the INC simultaneously portrays itself as Hindu and religious neutral and thus, cannot be

trusted in the long run. Therefore, Sayed Ahmad Khan turned down the Indian nationalism

idea and believed that Muslims as a separate community needed a representing organisation

of its own. Nazir Ahmed, the ideological successor of Sayed Ahmed Khan, played a

significant role in spreading the ideals of the Aligarh movement 12 as he firmly believed that

neither Hindus nor the Congress was the representative of India. He saw congress struggle

only as a longing for increment of positions in state administration that will eventually lead to

majority of Hindus in state functioning and thus fearing the communal domination of Hindus

over Muslims, they (members of Aligarh movement) opposed the INC’s demands of wider

representation of Indians in the government jobs through an open competition. ‘given the

choice, they (Muslims) would be guided by their communal rather than their national

identity’- Nazir Ahmed

Therefore, with the rise of militant and extreme nationalism as well as communalism and the

fear alienation of their community, led the Muslims with conclusion of creating a separate

organization which will be recognized politically By British government as a ‘nation within a

10
F. Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia, (New Delhi, 2000), p 218
11
B. Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, (Cambridge, 2001), p 212.
12
Delhi, M. Pernau’s, Ashraf into Middle Class, (New 2013), p 390
 Chakravorty7

nation’ and can stand the opposition of Congress and Hindus. Hence, in response to mass

agitation led by the congress, Muslim leaders formed the All India Muslim league in 1906.

After long time and after a series of conflicting ideological as well as political movements,

finally in 1915 and 1916 the INC and AIML met jointly in Bombay and then in Lucknow,

passed the Lucknow pact which fulfilled their demand of the elected majorities on all

councils, a wider franchise and separate electorate for Muslims in addition to what was called

weightage in the minority province came into operation in the Montagu-Chelmsford

constitution of 1919. This association further led to the initiation of Khilafat movement,

which was a joint step taken by the congress and the all India Khilafat organization from

1920 to 1922 where Gandhi played the role of a mediator. Although it couldn’t last long

because of the Hindu revivalism movement within the congress. Also, at this time the

influence of Hindu Mahasabha on the congress was at its pinnacle, so eventually congress

denied to agree to any formula for the distribution of power between itself and the Muslim

league, which accepted the principle of separate electorates. This refusal to share power is

most eloquently expressed by Jawaharlal Nehru when he said- “The tremendous and

fundamental fact of India is her essential unity through ages’.13

Once again during the 1937 elections in the United provinces, congress refused to form a

coalition government unless Muslim league leaders agree to join congress and disband the

Muslim league. Extremely displeased by the congress’ Idea of ‘one nation-one party’, Jinnah

embraced the Iqbal’s idea to form a separate Muslim polity.

During the 1940s, Congress resigned in the form protest against the British government,

which had declared India at war with Germany without their acknowledgement. Muslim

league won the elections this time but demanded for a different nation in order to stop the

Hindu Muslim communal riots in Northern India. Finally, the last viceroy of India, Lord
13
F. Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia, (New Delhi, 2000), p 225
 Chakravorty8

Mountbatten, permitted the formation of Pakistan. Thus, fulfilling the goal of Muslim

Nationalism.

In conclusion, I would like to say that there was no single major factor that led to the rise of

Muslim nationalism in India. The historic collapse of the economy of the qasbah, didn’t

allow the Muslims to get modernized, putting them behind the Hindus who flourished in their

own socio-political region of ganjs. This led to Muslims develop a feeling of a need to

protect their rights and interests through loyalty towards British, an elitist approach. Also,

various ill-will political moves of British government- Lord Curzon’s decision of partitioning

Bengal and then again re-uniting it in 1906, coupled by the rise of Hindu revivalism and the

growing influence of radical Hindu political parties such as Hindu Mahasabha on the

congress and congress’ own ideals of ‘one nation, one party’, all jointly combined to fuel the

rise of Muslim nationalism in India.

Bibliography: -

 S. Hay(ed), The Sources of Indian Tradition, Volume Two: Modern India