A good example of a displaced family is General Musharraf, who lived in New Delhi until the age of four when his mother suddenly had to leave with her three children. She later recalled in an interview with the New Yorker: " We fled for our lives. We took the last train out of Delhi. The train passed through entire neighborhoods that had been set to the torch. Bodies were lying along the rail tracks. There was so much blood. Blood and chaos were everywhere.”

At the heart of Partition was a fundamental dispute over polity, minority rights, and who laid claim to representing the subcontinent's large Muslim minority. The Indian National Congress, the party of Gandhi and Nehru, a party-cum-movement advocating Indian self-rule and demanding that the British quit India, claimed to represent the voices of all Indians. Indeed, the party had a tremendous grassroots following, and it explicitly included India's significant Muslim minority, though many (including Nehru) argued that the Congress had a Hindu-majoritarian wing which compromised its ability to claim complete neutrality on the matter of religion. Mohammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League sought to be the Muslim voice, also demanding independence from colonial authority but arguing that the interests and basic rights of Muslims could not be assured without some clearly articulated political autonomy, for in any dispensation, Muslims could be outvoted by Hindus nearly four to one. The Muslim League also advance the "Two Nations Theory," the concept that Hindus and Muslims belonged to two separate nations which could neer satisfactorily live side by side. Yet the Muslim League was not the sole voice of the subcontinent's Muslims, and its claim to represent Muslim interests was not borne out by voting patterns until the year before Partition. The Muslim League was least appealing to the very territories which it hoped to incorporate for the envisioned Pakistan. In Punjab, a northern Indian state claimed by the Pakistan movement as the central territorial building block, both the Congress and the Muslim League faced a regional power, the Unionist Party, in competition for mass support. The Unionist Party was a coalition of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh landed interests, and was not in favor of Partition, which would tear the province of Punjab apart. Again, in Bengal the Muslim League did not command the allegiances of all the province's Muslims, many of whom cast their lot with Fazlul Haq's Krishak Praja Party in eastern Bengal. In the Northwest Frontier Province, the Khudai Khidmatgars led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan advocated an independent Pukhtunistan (land of the Pashtuns), not accession to either independent India or Pakistan. So the Pakistan demand was itself a contingent outcome, one which resulted from careful politicking prior to 1947 and which was emphatically not the declared demand of all the subcontinent's Muslims. The contentious nature of this history is hard to remember more than fifty years on, but it underscores the limits of the nation as projected by the Pakistan demand even before its legal form came into being.

This pursuit, in India as well as in Pakistan, drew upon teleological narratives of the past and of religious community that had their roots in a nineteenth-century language controversy in northern India. Many scholars have argued that in fact the progressive differentiation of Hindu and Muslim communities was the result of colonial intervention rather than in any inherent sense of difference. Indeed, the historical record here underscores the contention of linguistic anthropologists Susan Gal and Judith Irvine that ideologies have the capability to construct boundaries of languages from what had previously been fluid interactions. See, Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine. "The Boundaries of Languages and Disciplines: How Ideologies Construct Difference." Social Research 62, no. 1 (1995). For an example of this phenomenon in Africa. see Patrick Harries, "Discovering Languages: the historical origins of standard Tsonga in southern Africa," in Language and Social History: studies in South African sociolinguistics, ed. Ranjend Mesthie (Cape Town: David Philip, 1995).

This insight extends as well to the identification of linguistic difference during the sameperiod. Specifically, the presumption that Urdu was the obvious national language of the region's Muslims was the outcome of two intertwined phenomena: the geographical baseof the Muslim League'sprimary support, and the pre-history of what became known as the "Hindi-Urdu controversy."

Up until 1946 the primary support for the Muslim League's Pakistan demand was located in the North-West Provinces, termed the "Muslim minority" provinces. This was the very same territory of the contentious Hindi-Urdu controversy that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. This meant that a salient political issue for Muslims in the region was the "protection" of Urdu, even though Muslims in the vast expanse of British India and the various princely states obviously spoke a wide variety of other languages; but with the political core centered on the North-West Provinces, ideas about who and what constituted Islamic India collapsed the cultural imagination onto the great historical and cultural traditions of that particular land to the exclusion of everywhere else.

But why did Urdu need "protection," and from what or whom? How did language protection acquire a veneer of religion? Scholars have written in depth about this language controversy, which paved the way for a growing consensus that linked language and religion into the slogans "Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan" in opposition to "Urdu-Muslim (Pakistan)."

Given the factual conundrum that neither Hindi nor Urdu, at least in the forms they would assume by the twentieth century, had any particular role in sacred religious texts, this opposition appears all the more perplexing in retrospect. In effect, these two languages would become the bearers of religion first, then nation by proxy.

Mapping the national language's origins constitutes an exercise in intellectual circuitousness given the many ways it has been described. Although written in a modified Arabic script, the legacy of Persian's regional influence through the Muslim rulers of North India, Urdu's grammar is nearly identical to that of Hindi, India's nationallanguage and one written in the Devanagari (Sanskrit) script. The name "Urdu" is itself a short fonn of "Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mu'alla," or "Language of the Exalted (Military) Camp" -attesting to the belief that the language's origins lie in the interaction of Turkish and Persian-speaking military troops with indigenous Indian soldiers in the Mughal employ. This is the standard narrative of Urdu's birth, though even that is under revision.

In fact Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has argued the name ''Urdu'' did not come into existence until the end of the eighteenth century, the very tail end of the historical period which supposedly produced the language. (Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary Culture and History, 60.62.) Faruqi argues instead that the belief that the name "Urdu" referenced the military camp is incorrect, and that it refers to Shahjahanabad instead, and that the actual birth of Urdu as a literary language stemmed from the production of works by Sufis in the Deccan and in Gujarat. But as Faruqi notes as well, what we call Urdu today could-at any point from perhaps the late sixteenth through nineteenth centuries-have been called, variously, HindvI, HindI, DihlavI, GujrI, DakanI, Rekhtah, "Moors" (a British coinage), Hindoostanic, Hindoostanee, and Clearly there was a question of boundaries at work here, or rather a lack thereof. Such a promiscuous history of naming forces us to ask: If Urdu was not Hindi, but at one time it was, then what was Hindi, how could it be distinct from Urdu, and how could each language be the proxy for religious community? This question, as Alok Rai observes, in fact can never be adequately answered:

Even the simplest questions beget further controversy, but no clarification. Thus, consider the following elementary queries: are Hindi and Urdu two names of the same language, or are they two different languages? Does Urdu become Hindi if it is written in the Nagari script? Is Hindi Hindu? Is Urdu Muslim. even though Muslims in distant Malabar have been known to claim it as their mother tongue? The only reasonable, and maddening, answer to all these questions is, well, yes and no. In respect of neither Hindi nor Urdu can one give an unambiguous answer: one has to go into the historical detail to explain how/why it isn't; and then, in the space of a few decades, why it is. (Rai, Hindi Nationalism, 4. Emphasis in original.)

As Rai suggests, the devil is in the details of history. Much of this is perhaps unknowable to the degree of precision we may wish to have, or at least the kind of precision that would map onto our twenty-first century categories of analysis. In facht when Mughal Persian-language texts referred to the "Hindvi," it could mean Telugu, or Marathi, Dakani, or perhaps anything other than Persian.

Here is what we do know: the arrival of the British colonizers, early missionaries as well as later East India Company officials, began a new chapter in the identification of language boundaries in north India. In the very same way that Company men sought to codify Hindu law from Sanskrit texts, on the assumption that there must be a Hindu law and those legal traditions would obviously be located in Hindu texts, the process of writing grammars for the languages they found in India would be inflected by ideologies of language and race, and a belief in the necessity of different races having different languages. And a belief that Hindus and Muslims were different races.

Of course, recognition of some kind of difference manifested in language-be it religious or aesthetic, or even a response to an Iran-centered Persianate regional world was at work prior to British colonization, if the now-mythical story of famed poet Vali's trip to Delhi is any guide. Vali was advised to purge his Hindvi language of the indigenous idiom in favor of a purer Persian-and after he began to do so, his poetry took Delhi by storm. Yet even the beginnings of this purging was not the same as the identification of language as the bearer of religion, for which we must briefly touch upon Fort William College. Already at the starting date of this website we presented an article on related issues see : conqueredtheworld.html.

In 1800 the East India Company founded Fort William College in Calcutta, a school created first to train its officers in the local languages so they could function in their new administrative roles, but which would later embark upon a program of educating Indians for employment as well. The College had professors to teach law,Greek, Latin, English, Persian, and Arabic; the Indian language offerings were firstHindustani and Sanskrit. Hindustani, presented in the Arabic script, was taught by theauthor of the first grammar of Hindustani and an English-Hindustani dictionary, Professor John Gilchrist. When the College hired a Gujarati Brahmin instructor to teachBhakii (in the Nagari script) in 1802, the foundation was laid for Hindi as the language of the Hindus.The instructor as we showed in our earlire article , authored a number of texts that formed the beginnings of modem standard Hindi, with its Sanskritic vocabulary purged of Perso-Arabic influence.  Missionaries employed this new Hindi to translate their own texts to spread the word to Hindus, and as well in writing school textbooks for their expanding missionary education activities among India's vast population.

When the colonial government began to support local primary education in vernacular languages, in their need for school textbooks they drew upon missionaries work. The texts remained, for all their simplicity, Sanskrit-oriented. It was an explicitly Hindu culture which formed the frame of reference. For the ancient spread of Sanskrit and why the British liked it see: sanskrit.html

The only problem remaining was that Indians themselves were not yet aware that their own language was impure, and that it needed remedial attention. As late as 1846, the principal of Benaras College implored his students to use their own language, the language of their culture. To this request he was told

We do not clearly understand what you Europeans mean by the term Hindi, for there are hundreds of dialects all in our opinion equally entitled to the name...If the purity of Hindi is to consist in its exclusion of Musalman words, we shall require to study Persian and Arabic in order to ascertain which of the words we are in the habit of using every day, is Arabic or Persian and which is Hindi. With our present knowledge we can tell that a word is Sanskrit or not Sanskrit, but if not Sanskrit it may be English or Portuguese instead of Hindi for anything we can tell. (King, One Language, Two Scripts, 90)

In 1837 the British passed a resolution replacing the court language, Persian, with local vernaculars. This would lead to its replacement by Bengali in Bengal, Oriya in Orissa, and Hindustani in the Arabic script in the North-West Provinces. It should be noted that the Punjab region was not yet part of the British Empire as it remained under Sikh dominion until 1849.

While Hindustani had official state patronage, a greater consciousness of Hindi as a separate language with its particular script was gradually increasing. Hindi-language publications in Nagari were growing quickly, with far greater numbers than Urdu, and a new cwrent of thought began to bubble up, one that sought parity for Hindi against the patronage already afforded HindustanilUrdu. Benaras and Allahabad, for example, became the centers of a new Hindi publishing movement. Through the creation of this new literary sphere, Hindi began to establish itself as a standard language with a literary canon, laying claim to a pre-Islamic heritage through a purified language, employing explicitly Hindu themes, and a landscape valorizing sites important to Hindus. In other words, Hindi as a language and literature, then, restricted the meaning of Hindu, even as it claimed to inscribe the autobiography of Hindustan as a nation.

As the nineteenth century continued, advocacy for Hindi in the Nagari script continued to gain force, and the demands became political. Hindi advocates petitioned the colonial authorities for the equal privilege to use Nagari-script Hindi in the courts, and as well for the right to a Hindi-language primary education. Pamphleteering for Hindi's right to participate in the official spheres of public life allied the language with the masses-the Hindu masses-and forged a discourse at once about religion and the spread of democracy, through language. Urdu was figured as a foreign imposition, an alien script with alien words that came from alien invaders. As Hindi became a more potent sociopolitical force, Urdu speakers felt themselves under attack. Urdu then became a language in need of "defending," a language represented by its partisan proponents as a core aspect of Muslim life itself.

The Hindi-Urdu Controversy in north India, in conjunction with movements for religious reformation within Hinduism and Islam slightly predating and continuing during the same period, participated in community schismogenesis, a process which at its end points, would result in the complete association of Urdu with Islam and Hindi with Hinduism. (See Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India, The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Prior to this period there was fluidity of these boundaries; writers experimented with using both scripts, with incorporating vocabulary from Sanskritic, Persian, English, even Portuguese sources, all illustrating that the idea of Hindi-Urdu as separate languages, and even that different scripts meant linguistic difference, was well a work-in-process rather than a natural form of existence.

Following this period of reformation and language controversy, however, such fluidity would become almost unimaginable, and today's languages have diverged from one another beyond all recognition. One result of the prominent role this Hindi-Urdu controversy occupied in the imagination of the Muslim League was that protecting the Urdu language came to stand in for protecting Muslim interests; organizations founded to protect Urdu would give way to a next generation successor in the Muslim League. This may have been an important concern for residents of the North-West Provinces, but no one has yet suggested that it rose to a similar level of primacy in the territories which would eventually form Pakistan.

Also the hardening of religious boundaries of Sikhism was, as with the Hindi-Urdu controversy, a late nineteenth-century development. See Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (The University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Indeed, East Bengal had its beloved Bengali; Sindh had Sindhi; the. Northwest Frontier Province had Pashto, and of course Punjab had Punjabi and what was then known as Multani, now called Siraiki. Within Punjab, as a result of an unusual social configuration, the Punjabi language existed in three scripts: Gurmukhi as a sacred language of the Sikh religion, but as well in Arabic script form as a language of Sufi verse and regional romance tales, and in a Devanagari form as well. But by the time of Pakistan's birth, the elision of Urdu-Muslim-Pakistan was complete, and yet highly compromised. A revealing moment in this historical narrative was the fact that the first film produced in Karachi was Hamlin Zabiin ("Our Language"), a 1955 effort to perform the existence of a simulacrum. As film historian Mushtaq Gazdar notes, "Although Urdu was not the mother tongue of most of the people involved...the film very strongly emphasized its importance as the national language. It was made with good intentions, but as the film unfortunately contained several admonitory sequences, it did not go down well with film goers.

Recently the Punjabi language with-a healthy 55.6% of the population of Pakistan according to a recent  census data,80 and 29% even in 1951, i.e., immediately after Partition and prior to the loss of East Pakistan, there is a counterfactual puzzle about why Punjabi has not, like so many other languages in Pakistan, been the center of vigorous politicaldemands. (Government of Pakistan, Population and Housing Census of Pakistan 1998, Vols. 1-5, 127 Longer-term historical processes have shaped the social role of Punjabi in Pakistan. Though one tends to think of Punjabi as the language of the Sikh religion (which it is, in Gurmukhi script), the period of Sikh rule in Punjab was not one notable for official patronage of Punjabi language. Under the Sikhs, Persian had been the language of state, continuing the language policy of their Mughal predecessors. When the British "annexed" Punjab in 1849, they sought to implement a "local vernacular" as an official administrative language, as they had done with other territ under British administration. They chose Urdu rather than Punjabi. It was the administrative exigencies of staffing this new territory-by those trained in "Hindustani" in other parts of the Indian empire-that tipped the balance in favor of Urdu.

It was also clear to British authorities that the Urdu language was not one widely understood at that time in the Punjab, though the language that was spoken there was deemed "only a patois.  Thus the colonial policy privileged Urdu in official matters of state at the expense of Punjabi. Yet this policy did not kill off Punjabi; instead, the language in its Arabic script-form flourished in non-state spheres through religious oral and textual literature of Sufi shrines, oral naratives, and musical performances. Punjabi in its Gurmukhi-script form, of course, flourished via Sikh religious patronage.

This colonial policy likely explains the anomalous sociology of Urdu literary life in the Punjab. There was a well-established mixing of Punjabi and Urdu literary spheres much predating Partition: many of Urdu's best known authors were Punjabis. At least a century of tradition of urban Punjabis sought literary _expression via Urdu (Manto, Krishan Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Iqbal, Faiz, Munir Niazi, and Hafiz Jallandari, just to name a few). They may have spoken Punjabi, but chose Urdu to establish their literary voice. At the same time, it is also important to note that Punjabi and Urdu have very similar grammars, and the two are mutually intelligible at non-literary levels by learning a few regular sound changes and rules of verbal agreement. One could almost say that the entire span of northern South Asia as the Hindi-Urdu-Punjabi region belonging to a ‚Fluid Zone’.

The closeness of Punjabi to Urdu is notable, as it is not the case for Sindhi, Pashto, Siraki, Baluchi-all of which have important linguistic markers of difference such as implosive sounds in the case of Siraiki and Sindhi, or distinct grammars in the case of Pashto and Baluchi, which are members of the Iranian language family.

With Partition and Pakistan's national emphasis on Urdu, the Punjabi language was even more sidelined than it had been under the British. A small group of proponents held a meeting in 1948 to discuss lobbying for Punjabi to be used as a medium of education. This same group established a literary journal, Punjabi, in 1951, though their efforts to promote the language did not bring about any change in official status.

Thus while bound tightly with the belief that a people should have one and only one official language, the Pakistan nation-state has struggled with trying to reconcile the ideology of the national language, Urdu, as South Asia's most Islamic language, with regional claims to other language traditions. Sites of conflict have invariably been those of modem administration: schools, signage, legislative assemblies, and the census.

Of the various tendencies in the language conflicts surveyed briefly here, one trend is invariable: in the face of considerable economic incentives that one might suspect would limit the social benefits of loyalties to languages other than Urdu, the historical record shows that such loyalties have been ineradicable. Exclusionary language ideologies that reduced the Urdu language to an iconic role as the linguistic embodiment of the Pakistan demand had the net effect of branding partisans of other languages regardless of the often deeply Islamic Sufi traditions of their specific literary histories somehow bad Others, bad patriots as well as bad Muslims. This was most dramatic in the case of Bengali, where its Indic origins, Sanskritic vocabulary, and Indic script were targeted for Orwellian "re-education" programs in an attempt to bring an entire language in line with what was believed more suitably Islamic. In this sense, Bengali was a true outlier in comparison with the languages of West Pakistan. Yet Sindhis, Punjabis, and Pashtuns also suffered the accusation of insufficient patriotism, albeit less dramatically so, when they agitated for regional language use. In the cases of the Mohajirs and the southern Punjabi Siraki-speakers, a process of ethnogenesis has taken place, telescoping backwards the speakers of a language into new ethnic categories. It is against the above backdrop then that we now proceed with the political history that led to the partition of S.Asia.

 

The Political Causes of S.Asian Partition

A number of authors have shown how the Indian National Congress (the party of Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi), as the predominant vehicle of `secular nationalism' in India, in fact accommodated the forces of Hindu nationalist revival and Hindutva.3 The history of volunteer movements that operated in the name of Congress in the 1930’s and 1940’s illustrates how this was the case. See Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, and Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot, eds., The BJP and the Compulsion of Politics in India (Delhi, 1998). Sumantra Bose, "`Hindu Nationalism" and the Crisis of the Indian State: A Theoretical Perspective', in Sumantra Bose and Ayesha Jalal, eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India (Delhi, 1997), pp. 104.

Congress's employment of a Hindu idiom was both an inheritance of early twentieth-century extremism and of practical and ideological advantage during civil disobedience in 1930 and 1931. Nationalists used religious rhetoric and activity to create popular representations of the nation, which contained a mixture of ideas and languages engaging with a range of social groups. Congressmen both associated themselves with Hindu communal organisations and were party to a religious rhetoric: an interlinked mesh of political languages for purposes of popular support. But there was nothing inevitable in Muslim estrangement.

The identity of political interests between Congress and League in the mid-1930s suggests that the communal polarisation set in motion in the 1940s might have been obstructed however. In the 1940s the Lahore Resolution and consequent Pakistan demand placed the Congress and Congress supporters in a new and am­biguous position. The Hindu Sabhas and RSS, who supported the idea of India's territorial integrity, championed opposition to Pakistan. Congressmen were hard placed to distance themselves from this sentiment. Although the UP and All-India Congress organisations had officially repudiated Hindu communal organisations in 1938, many Congressmen called for a strong stand against Muslim separatism. The message of the Hindu Sabhas was both ideologically attractive and highly populist. At the same time, the apparent strength of the League's Pakistan propaganda, especially in cities like Lucknow and Kanpur, placed extra pressure on the Congress to establish its own anti-Pakistan identity, pushing it ideologically towards the Hindu Sabhas and RSS. As Hindu-Muslim tension increased in 1946 and 1947, members of the RSS were also keen to exploit the political popularity and organisation of the Congress for their own agendas.

Apart from altering party political allegiances, the Pakistan demand and its response opened up new areas for debate in the province about the place of religion in political life. By 1946 the idea of Hinduism as a peaceful, essentially tolerant and all-embracing force in Indian culture and politics was gradually displaced in some nationalist circles by a more militant communal identity, which saw Hinduism as a vulnerable culture.

The mixture of political languages, which came about through this simultaneous engagement with different sets of symbols, meant that the character of Congress mobilisation at local levels could, in a practical sense, take place in a range of religio-political environments. This created a looseness in interpretations of Congress secularism, since the range of religious environments and contexts exploited also encouraged the participation of political agents with more explicitly communal agendas. The meaning of Congress civil disobedience consequently went beyond the intentions and utterances of provincial and national leaders.

In the activities of Congressmen during festivals, and in connection with campaigns such as cow protection, there were, then, practical as well as ideological dimensions to civil disobedience. The practical considerations also served to transform the nature of ideologies and political languages. In the building of a mass movement, religion helped to provide the necessary framework, space, discipline and mobilisation, and in the process the political meaning of `Hinduism' was redefined as an idea. In varied contexts the Hindu people were represented as being conterminous with the Indian nation.

The techniques used to describe Hinduism and the nation were partly inherited from late nineteenth-century Hindu revivalism. But there were also new, populist elements, combining wide definitions of Hindu spiritualism with ascetic discipline. Hinduism was considered to be a culture as well as a religion. Its philosophy and history, as discussions of the late nineteenth century had claimed, were presented and reconfigured in terms of an `original' national community. In this building of a sense of the Hindu nation, religious diversity was sacrificed for a rhetoric that emphasised the essentially homogeneous and `pure' elements of a cultural tradition. Strangely, this was often achieved by imbuing the Hindu nation with essential values and characteristics that included toleration and absorbency - values more commonly associated with diversity and difference. Consequently the Hindu nation could be all things to all manner of nationalists, but it also provided a set of social and moral mores by which outsiders were demonised. In short, it was an ideal medium for the nationalist, providing a means of national consolidation, a national history and mythology, and a sense of cultural purity.

It was because this complex interpretation of Hinduism was so intrinsically a part of Congress nationalism that Congressmen were often blind to connections made between the use of religion in politics and conflict between different religious communities. In the Congress ministry pe­riod of 1937-9 it was the use of Hindu symbolism, alongside an increase in Hindu-Muslim conflict, that allowed the Muslim League to mobilise support on the basis of a Muslim fear of political absorption. Many Congressmen assumed that Hinduism would help the Congress to embrace different religious communities: as Gandhi put it, there was space enough in Hinduism for Christianity and Islam. 'Bande Mataram', the national flag, the Vidya Mandir scheme and the continued use of religious festivals for political purposes - all showed that the effects of the political languages concerned with the `Hindu' were more deeply entrenched than simply the overlap of personnel between Congress and Hindu Sabhas.

Their use and application were taken for granted even though religious communities had been fighting over similar symbols of political power from early in the century. It was never fully appreciated that the use of religion to stress bald cultural and national difference vis-à-vis the colonial state would also shut out communities disconnected from the most modern, political outpourings of this religious idiom.

The Muslim community was far from homogeneous in the early 1930s, and that the Congress could have mobilised it fairly easily, given the nature of Muslim concerns about Congress nationalism. Representatives of Muslim political opinion, from Shaukat Ali to the Shia Political Conference, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema and the Khaksars, were largely concerned with the threat of political absorption. Congress's use of Hindu rhetoric allowed Muslims to make accusations of `Hindu Mahasabhaite' tendencies, and this, combined with the fear that Congressmen would be unaccountable to the Muslim community, partly explained Muslim detachment from civil disobedience. Importantly, Muslim responses to Congress varied from region to region, and related to patterns of landownership or commercial power. But at the same time it is possible to identify themes that repeatedly provided a source of antagonism, particularly in urban environments. The cloth boycotts demonstrated some of the elements of a wide range of Muslim concerns.

The purity and superiority of khadi was continually related to Hindu ritual purity in the speeches of Congress supporters in towns and districts. Here again we see the operation of an overlapping combination of symbols, some derived from a conscious recognition of the potency of cloth in ritual behaviour in a variety of contexts. Curiously, these symbols might have had significance for Muslim as well as Hindu communities, under threat'. This combination or dialogue of notions was important to the overall Muslim reaction to the idea of a modernised Hindu identity. Moreover, as in the cases of Congress mobilisation through religious fes­tivals, the environment and context of uplift opened the field to political operators with more communal agendas. The enthusiasm surrounding Gandhi's fasts provoked a ranges of responses, from the exclusivism of the RSS to the inclusivism of Gandhi's own following, all meeting at a common point in discussions of Hindu unity.

Hindu nationalist ideologies and languages of politics, then, could cut across an array of different political positions within the Congress. Moreover, it was because political leaders associated with the left (as well as the right) engaged with these languages that they were able to operate as forms of dialogue and heteroglossia. Congressmen on the left were concerned to emphasise the essentially cosmopolitan, catholic and 'tol­erant' essence of Hinduism. But, in so doing, they affected the meaning of secular pronouncements by placing these interpretations in tension with more exclusivist notions about Hindu community. The resultant `Hindu' secularism, because it contained diverse ideological elements, could take on quite a range of meanings. This ambiguity and looseness of meaning allowed pronouncements about religious community (although at first aimed to create a sense of equal regard for all faiths) to be interpreted at certain moments as `communalism'.

The effect of these methods of imagining the nation on individuals and organisations related to the Congress, which ranged from radical social reformers and socialists to conservatives. The Hindu nationalism of the Arya Samaj strongly resembled that of Congressmen in various localities, and was sometimes combined with an ideological attachment to socialism. Saharanpur district, home of the Kangri Gurukul, Mainpuri, Lucknow, Agra and Meerut were districts of the most intensive Congress-Arya Samaj association.

Algu Rai Shastri provided an example of this approach to Indian nationalism. Mahabir Tyagi represented the more conservative Samajist position. Within the Arya Samaj there were an array of interpretations of the relationship between the Hindu community and the Indian nation, from Congress office holders interested in social reform and the moral asceti­cism of the Samaj, to more hard-line racial theorists who nevertheless idolised leaders like Gandhi. Contemporary political observers were not always aware of the ideological distinctions within the Arya Samaj, and as a result Congressmen in some localities were easily associated with the shuddhi movement.

Hindu nationalism had an important effect on the thinking of more radical and more influential Congress leaders in UP. Purushottam Das Tandon and Sampurnanand were both considered to be on the socialist wing of the UPPCC in the mid-1930s. At the same time, both were supporters of movements which in earlier decades had been associated with Hindu revivalism, for example the advocacy of Sanskritised Hindi. Here we see more clearly how overlapping political languages and symbolic idioms tended to push the meanings of political pronouncements beyond the initial intentions of Congress agents. Sampurnanand publicly expounded the consistency between his socialism and a sense of the Hindu nation. Tandon's activities were less ambivalent. He was a patron of the Arya Samaj, involved himself with Hindu communal volunteer organisations and based his refutation of ahimsa on a Tilakite Hindu revivalism.

In 1947 he was responsible for the organisation of the Hind Raksha Dal in cooperation with district Congress Committees, local seva samitis and members of Hindu communal organisations such as the RSS. The significance of this attachment to quasi-religious mobilisation went beyond these two influential leaders within the Congress. Other Congress radicals flirted with Hindu nationalism, especially through the volunteer movements - for example, Balkrishna Sharma and Krishna Dutt Paliwal.

But there was still another level of Hindu mobilisation in which secularists were inadvertently involved in politico-religious expression. It was this unacknowledged level which was perhaps most damaging for the Congress. In 1936, whilst on his pre-election tour, Jawaharlal Nehru was fêted by the Arya Samaj, and compared to members of the Hindu pantheon, just as Gandhi had been. This book argues that such a damaging association could not have been possible without the long-term background of Congress involvement with a range of symbolic activities, derived from notions of religious community. And this engagement, in turn, can only be explained by the ease with which notions of the `Hindu' could accommodate an array of useful mobilisation techniques, bound together in a tense, often paradoxical admixture of symbols and devices. These mixed symbolic messages appeared most clearly at local levels. Yet their existence was tolerated precisely because, at city and provincial levels, leaders such as Sampurnanand and Tandon had legitimised, even applauded, similar forms of hybrid politics.

Muslim political alienation from the Congress in the late 1930s and 1940s, and the popularity of the demand for Pakistan in a Muslim minority province, therefore cannot be explained simply by the immediate circumstances of Congress's refusal to enter into a coalition with the Muslim League in 1937. Neither is it sufficient to consider Muslim alienation as the product of Congress's administrative blunders and its `harbouring' of local Hindu Sabhaites. The Hindu Mahasabha connection was indeed important, but not just because it required Congressmen in some localities to behave in what would be considered to be a 'communal' way. The success of the League's mobilisation depended on its highlighting of Congress's symbolic relationship with Hindu nationalism. It was not the fact that 'Bande Mataram' was sung at meetings, but the content and meaning of the song, and the method in which it was delivered, which was important.

Muslims responded to nationalist motifs deeply embedded in Congress mobilisation methods. Whilst anticipation of political power was a key factor by the late 1930s, communal grievances against the Congress could only have been effective if there was some kind of evidence about `Hindu Raj'. It is impossible therefore to discount the effect of the religious rhetoric used by Congressmen in the early 1930s in this build-up of a multilayered Congress image - an image that was often interpreted by non-Congress groups on the basis of its lowest common denominator.

The tainting of the Congress organisation in this way limited Congress's attempts to manoeuvre between Muslim parties with differing political and religious agendas. The struggle to control and to take advantage of the Shia-Sunni troubles in Lucknow and beyond could be depicted by the League as cynical attempts to divide the Muslim community, limit­ing the ability of the Congress to retain consistent Ahrar and ulema support. Again, Congress had closed off its political options by provoking Muslim communal reaction, highlighting further the apparent inability of a Congress ministry, and a Congress party with local power, to deal with communal conflict. The continued intensity of Hindu-Muslim conflict in the late 1930s and 1940s also helped to reinforce the League accusations that Congress power represented `Hindu Raj'. This propaganda was given credibility by Congress's past associations with religious mobilisation, and the continued involvement of local Congressmen in religious conflicts. For League propagandists Congress's secular pronouncements at an all-India level could not be taken at face value. The character of politics in town and district in UP, this key province that had been at the forefront of support for Jinnah's remodelled League in 1940, had a profound effect on Congress's all-India bargaining position.

Surveys of all-India politics in the lead up to Partition have mostly neglected this process. Muslim responses to the Pakistan demand varied by region and political group. However, the extent of enthusiasm in the largest cities of the province to the `Pakistan Days' is still surprising, when it is considered that the physical reality of `Pakistan' would have seemed ambiguous to most Muslims, especially in the context of such a vague Lahore Resolution.' Given that the main focus of enthusiasm for Pakistan was in the largest of Uttar Pradesh's cities - the very locations of communal conflict in the late 1930s and 1940s - it would not be unreasonable to deduce that the success of Pakistan related to some extent to the demonisation of the Congress as a `Hindu' organisation. Firstly, the acceleration of Hindu-Muslim confrontation in the mid-1940s was linked to the counter-enthusiasm of the Hindu Mahasabha. Links with the Congress still existed, particularly through the agency of Maheshwar Dayal Seth. Secondly, the build-up of Hindu-Muslim tension was related to the growth in volunteer activity, in which volunteer organisa­tions under Congress control were able to maintain ambiguous relationships with Hindu communal bodies. Consequently a larger part of the Pakistan rhetoric at mass meetings in UP was concerned with criticisms of Congress's `Hindu bias' rather than with criticism of the Hindu Mahasabha itself.

On the other hand, the momentum of `communal' conflict appeared to be operating in a very different way by the mid-1940s, when com­pared to previous decades. This upset the conventional way in which connections were made between the provincial and local spheres of pol­tics, since volunteer organisations shifted in their allegiance to provincial level political parties. The activities of militant volunteer organisations, in the context of world conflict, radically transformed the nature and meaning of communal violence. Comfortable assumptions about the likelihood of riots around the time of religious festivals no longer held. Instead, violence was more often provoked by a clash between militarised institutions, only loosely representing `Hindu' or `Muslim' communal agendas. These institutions fluctuated rapidly in their membership and political persuasion. Their often arbitrary activities and very loose connections with mainstream political institutions and parties made the control and remedy of this violence even more problematic than before.

Attempting to trace historical processes in periods of rapid and intense political change, such as UP in the 1930s and 1940s, is hazardous. It has been argued that the continual expectations of political change and reform created the widespread social and political uncertainty that might provoke conflict along the lines of religious community. (C. A. Bayly, `The Pre-history of "Communalism"?: Religious Conflict in India, 1700-1860', Modern Asian Studies 19, 2 ,1985, pp. 177-203.)

Such an argument provides an alternative to histories that identify a linear unfolding of events in the relationship between the 'primordialism' of religious identity and the modernity of nationalism. There was continuity in the impact of Hindu nationalist ideologies on the UP Congress in the 1930s and 1940s that allows connections to be made between the late nineteenth century and Congress nationalism. On the other hand, the effect of Hindu nationalism on and within the Congress did not develop linearly, but ap­peared at moments of political crisis and political need, such as during Gandhi's 'harijan' fasts. The Hindu idiom employed by Congressmen did not make the partition of India inevitable or even probable. Rather, it was a paradigm by which some Indians viewed the nation and was of­ten used as a remedy for societal divisions. The inability fully to identify Hindu nationalism itself as a problem was a decisive factor in Congress failures to counter the most crucial division - Muslim separatism.

Congressmen's ideas about Indian traditions helped them to create a theoretical model for the unified Indian nation. A latent sense of the Hindu nation could exist alongside `secularism' in the creation of a national political culture. Whilst many of the most ardent secularists were least able to acknowledge the effect of Hindu nationalist ideologies and political languages, this was not necessarily a reflection on the quality of their `secularism', which obviously could continue to have a powerful and successful effect on political organisation. Yet Hindu nationalist ideologies and a Hindu idiom did affect and contribute to communal conflict in the 1930s and 1940s. Obviously religion, and the traditions and cultures associated with religion, in themselves were never responsible for communal conflict in India. But the ways those traditions were processed, represented and propagated by Congress nationalists (and then the way those syntheses were interpreted by non-Congressmen) were often communally divisive.

One question is how how institutions of the Hindu right were able to take advantage of the political space created by Congress decline, not just from the point of view of direct electoral support, but by suggesting that its own ideologies were not inconsistent with Indian secularism. In other words, how have the Sangh Parivar and institutions of the Hindu right been able to champion themselves as the harbingers of `true' Indian secularism? With a few small exceptions, the Indian constitution enshrined the principle of a liberal democratic secular state. Although it set up mechanisms and procedures for the reservation of seats for low castes, it rejected separate electorates for religious minorities. Yet the content and meaning of that secularism has always been ambiguous.

It was essentially the product of state transformations intersecting with nationalist discourse in the late colonial period of the 1920s to 1940s. The notion of secularism as `tolerance' - the kind of tolerance found in ideas about pre-modern Indian thought (for many nationalists Hinduthought) - failed to equip the Indian polity with the necessary weapons to counteract fundamentalism and intolerance. There has been a lack of definition of just how the state might adjudicate between religious interests. Added to this is a curious disengagement between Congress notions of the secular and broader processes of secularisation in political culture and civil society.  The political languages described above show how secularisation, meaning the shrinking of social and political space occupied by the religious, was circumscribed in a critical period of the Indian state's definition and transformation. The continued significance of a religious idiom in politics from the 1920s to the millennium across institutions, from the BJP to the Congress, provides us with a further clue to the persistence of Hindu nationalism in the politics of India.

For recent developments of the above topic see: governingindia.html.

 

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