The indus saga, p.33
The Indus Saga, page 33
It is plunder no irony that twenty million people in India, spread over 70,000 square miles, were in the cruel grip of the Famine of 1897 just as a euphoric England was celebrating the glory of Queen Victoria, Empress of India, in her Diamond Jubilee year.16
The plunder of Bengal had, alone, given the most decisive impetus to the industrial revoluton in England. It is no coincidence that a series of inventions had begun to flower after the Bengal plunder began to arrive in London soon after the Battle of Plassey. Prosperity brings in its wake scientific advancement. Inventions themselves are dormant, waiting, as it were, for a sufficient accumulation of demand and purchasing power to set them working. This triggering force is that of money in motion, money in circulation, money chasing new commodities. The plunder of Bengal provided this necessary element back in Britain.17 Bengal’s wealth had brought the age of scientific advancement to England ahead of continental Europe, although up to that time scientific advancement in the European continent had been at a greater pace than the advances in England. Bengal, indeed, made England the home of the industrial revolution.
VI. A splintered polity
There were, thus, several factors that aided British supremacy. Seapower and technology were only two of these. Bengal’s plunder was perhaps the single most important resource base that further enhanced Britain’s technological and naval capabilities. For the rest, a selection of facts alone is necessary. No account can, however, omit mention of the British denial of an Indian colony to the French in the south.
The French had surrendered at Trichonopoly in 1749 with the arrival of Clive in India. Their general, the renowned Dupleix, saddened and defeated, soon returned to France. Three years after Plassey, the French were decisively defeated at Wandiwash (in 1760), when the Seven Year War spilled over into India and the French general, de Bussey, was taken prisoner.
Not that the French had been far behind Britain. In fact, the energies released and generated in Europe by the extensive impact of the French Revolution had first been felt in the Napoleonic expansions (which included contacts with Tipu of Mysore). But the industrial revolution had given Britain the crucial head-start and the British bourgeoisie had already overtaken all its rival powers in the race for world markets. Napoleon’s global dreams died with him in the isolation of St Helena in 1823.
With the French pushed out of the subcontinent, the British had only to confront a splintered and divided polity. Notice in this behalf must be taken of the peerless Tipu Sultan, victim as much of a more organized and resourceful foe as of treachery within his own ranks, living the life of a lion and dying a death of unmatched valour and martyrdom; of the decrepit state of the Mughal empire and the predatory raids of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali; of the massacres in Babar’s capital city committed by Afghan troops under the Persian monarch and the Afghan King; of the meteoric rise of the marauding Marathas and their own Waterloo at Panipat in 1761, and later their final defeat at the hands of the British in 1818; of the irrepressible Rohillas, matched by the triumverate of the emperor, Awadh, and the Company, retaliating to humiliate the emperor Shah Alam, that unworthy and unfortunate occupant of the throne of the Great Akbar. The Mughal empire had disintegrated into a matrix of kingdoms and confederacies. These had then splintered into countless states, princedoms, and chieftainships. The Marathas, the Afghans, the Rajputs, the Jats, the Sikhs, all added confusion to the scene, just as their ever-changing alliances and pacts made confusion worst confounded. The political landscape of Indus and India was in utter chaos. Europe was marching upon them; and Britain was unquestionably ahead of all other European powers and Indian adversaries.
VII. Lottery culture and windfalls
The purpose of this discussion is not to simply trace chronologically the history of India. The object is to attempt to deduce and analyse the root causes of Britain’s success in mastering an entire continent of some 250 million through the efforts and campaigns of a fraction of that number of their own men, and the effect of British rule upon the Indus person. There is one other aspect, therefore, that needs special mention.
The development of the canal system, the opening up of much of the Indus region through railways and roads under the Raj, and particularly the policy of ‘colonization’ of lands that accompanied these advances, left another lasting imprint upon the psyche of the Indus person.
Before the modern canal system, much of the Indus region was shrubland, called baar. Even today, such names as the Neelibaar and the Gondalbaar, signify the areas lying away from the riverbanks, between the rivers Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum. Many other areas were desert. Although there was a rich and primordial tradition of agriculture from the times of Mohenjodaro, which had given impetus to the the development of the family, most of the agriculture was confined to the belas or kutchas, areas contiguous to the river banks. Seasonal floods provided the necessary water for crops like wheat, cotton and sugarcane. The scale of cultivation was necessarily limited.
The British, in seeking to open up more lands to the cultivation of cotton and wheat, in particular, found that even the soil under the baars or shrubland was fertile. The deserts also displayed great potential. Only water was required. An enormous network of barrages and canals was planned. Millions of acres came under cultivation. But these had to be actually ploughed and harvested by people. These ‘new’ lands were ‘colonized’ and allotted to the local landless or to settlers brought from other lands.
The allotment of lands was a windfall for the populace of Indus. Thousands of peasant families were moved from distant villages to the new lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In some areas, such as Sargodha and Jhang, large tracts were gifted. In others, such as Sahiwal and Faisalabad, smaller parcels were given out. Overnight, the fortunes of families changed; landless peasants became land-owners; and robber-barons became landlords. If the District Collector, or even his assistant, was pleased with some aspirant, the largesse of the state suddenly descended upon the beneficiary. The Sahib’s milkman became a landowner; the Sahib’s supplier of local brew, a landlord. Those who had collaborated in the wars against the Punjab and Delhi were, of course, not to be forgotten. They got the lion’s share and became the new, economically powerful ruling class. The brother of a beneficiary, even though more deserving, may have been left behind by the social high-jumper, but soon the latter’s origin and manner of climbing were forgotten. Collaboration and submission had their rewards.
This was not a ruling class born out of a struggle, or a ruling class that had won its place through wars or sacrifice as in Europe and America. On the contrary, the new ruling class had obtained its position of pre-eminence by doing just the opposite. Yet it ruled; and it dominated and had all the good things in life.
Nothing succeeds like success. The end justified the means. This unfortunate value system was being imbibed by the Indus (Pakistani) society at a time when public schools in Britain were teaching their young the contrary. The ‘success ethic’ became the principal social norm of Indus society. It laid the basis of the ‘get-rich-overnight-and-irrespective-of-merit’ syndrome. This syndrome, and the ‘success ethic’, were to be consolidated with more lotteries in later times, greatly eroding the moral fabric of society and opening it up to the more contemporary ‘heroin-kalashnikov culture’ as we shall see.
It all started with the ‘colonization’ policies in the Indus region after the canals and railroads had been constructed. The construction of those was, however, crucial to the imperial exploitation of Indus and India. Henceforth, England would develop with Indian wealth, and would use her own developed methods to suppress and subjugate more Indians, both Hindus and Muslims.
1. James Morris, Pax Britannica, 136.
2. Ibid., 137.
3. Hibbert, The Great Mutiny, 123.
4. The Indian Mutiny, 97.
5. Harris, 99.
6. Wolpert, 245.
7. More than a little racism was endemic in English society. ‘In 1688 the London Gazette offered “a guinea reward” for a “black boy, an Indian, about 13 years old, run away the 8th inst. From Putney with a collar about his neck with this inscription “The Lady Bromfield’s black, in Lincoln Inn Fields’.“ Another advertisement in 1737 was searching for an “East India Tawney Black” while another in 1743 tried to find a “Run-away Bengal Boy”. In 1772 Thormas Hornsey, “a black, a native of the Coast of Malabar” had runaway from his master. The runaway in question was said to have “long hair”, was “well-made, likely featured” and spoke English well. The notice warned that anyone who harboured him would be prosecuted, while two guineas were offered as a reward for returning him.’ Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes, 14.
8. Morris, 137.
9. In 1946, during his first week in Egypt, James Morris ‘boarded the Cairo train at Port Said with an English Colonel of particular gentleness of manner and sweetness of disposition. As we walked along the corridor to find a seat we found our way blocked by an Egyptian, offering refreshments to people inside a compartment. Without a pause, apparently without a second thought, the Colonel kicked him, quite hard and effectively, out of our way. I was new to the imperial scenes, and I have never forgotten this astonishing change in my companion’s character, nor the absolute blank indifference with which the Egyptian accepted the kick, and moved.’ Ibid., fn 1, 137.
10. Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India II, 677.
11. Ibid., 737.
12. From Marx’s letter in the New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1853 in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 494. (Emphasis added.)
13. Tara Chand, The History of the Freedom Movement in India, vol. II, 328.
14. Cambridge Economic History, vol. II, 749.
15. Nehru, Discovery, 323.
16. See Mahajan, India Since 1526, 394.
17. Bengal was won in 1757. The flying shuttle appeared in 1760, as coal began to replace wood in the smelting process, generating greater quantities of energy. The rapidity of the subsequent breakthroughs in technology is unmatched: 1764, Hargreaves’s Spinning Jenny; 1768, Watt’s Steam Engine; 1776, Crompton’s Mule; 1785, Cartwright’s Power Loom.
PART THREE
The Two Nations
AD 1757 to AD 1947
Introduction
In the two preceding parts of this volume, we have endeavoured to carry out a measured exercise to identify and discover the ‘Indus person’ (the Pakistani citizen of today), by establishing his territorial and permanent ‘nationality’, and by highlighting what he is not. The essential purpose of those parts of the book, therefore, was to assure the Indus person of his own distinct identity on the one hand, and to show how this was different, socially, politically and culturally, from all other extraterritorial peoples, including the peoples of Gangetic and peninsular India, of the Arab world and of Europe.
Yet Indus was not inhabited by Muslims alone. Pakistan largely is. The important feature of the Pakistani nation, the Indus region of today, is not merely that it is a nation, broadly speaking, of the Indo-Aryans settled around the riparian areas of the Indus and its tributaries. They were Hindus and Muslims. The point remains that Pakistan is primarily and predominantly a state inhabited by Muslims. That fact alone does not, of course, make it an ‘Islamic state’. But the point being made is that not all the inhabitants of Indus and north-western India sought a separate state. The Hindus and Sikhs of Indus did not seek this result, even though they formed a substantial part of Indus population.
Had ‘Indus’ itself been the sole basis for the formation of the state of Pakistan, no Hindus or Sikhs would have migrated out of it upon its establishment. There was, surely, some other factor that separated some Indus persons from other Indus inhabitants. What was that?
The geographical boundaries of the state of Pakistan were initially so determined as to comprise within them the areas of such of ‘India’s ’ provinces and states the majority of whose population was Muslim. This aspect was pivotal to the entire movement and struggle for the partition of the Indian subcontinent in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Muslim character and compulsion of the movement was indeed pre-eminent. But was it a religious movement? Was it led by the clergy, or by a liberal, progressive leadership? Did it have to do only with religion, or were there some underlying economic interests, no doubt of the Muslim community itself, that impelled the demand for a separate state for the Muslims of the subcontinent?
Many Pakistani analysts insist that religion alone was the sole necessity and rationale of the entire brief justifying the creation of Pakistan. From this conclusion, they infer the inherent right of the religious parties to determine the mode of government and, indeed, the right to govern. Yet most of those who so insist had themselves opposed the demand for the creation of the state when that demand began to gain popular support among the Muslim masses. This, however, is the very aspect in which the movement that led to the establishment of Pakistan and which provided the raison-d’être of the state itself has often been grossly - often deliberately - misinterpreted. The present-day ideologues of Pakistan, most of whom had themselves been opposed to its demand, by playing upon obscurantism and emotion, prefer to confuse this very aspect so as to establish their own authority as the fountainheads of the ‘ideology of Pakistan’. And they depict the concept of Pakistan as one of an intolerant and fundamentalist Islamic state. This conclusion, in turn, generates a ‘hate-India’ syndrome as, according to this view the dominance of a Hindu India was all that the Muslims sought to avoid in demanding Pakistan. The result is an inevitable conflict between the old and the new, between the orthodox and the modern, between the obscurantist and the realist.
Strictly avoiding dogmatic polemics, the remaining part of this book seeks to examine the differences of socio-economic standing and cultural outlooks between the two major communities of the subcontinent, Hindus and Muslims, that were the competing forces behind its partition in 1947. Naturally, if the differences have at all to be identified, it will be necessary to examine the similarities as well. And this may bring us to some interesting conclusions.
It may appear, indeed, that while there was greater convergence in ritualistic and social practices than we are prepared to accept today, the two communities were, in the final analysis, torn apart, not as much by dogma or religion as by their economic disparity. It all seems to have started with the fortunes, the misfortunes, and the opportunities provided by Bengal in the eighteenth century, the point from which the two communities, coexisting for centuries, adopted different economic routes to development.
Many more questions arise out of the controversies generated by the present-day ideologues. How much of the communal divide was, in essence, based upon the dichotomy between the emerging bourgeois system enthusiastically adopted by the Hindus and the decadent feudal order to which the reluctant Muslim remained committed? To what extent, in other words, were economic disparities the underlying reason for the parting of the ways? Did the founders of the state of Pakistan, particularly the man who led the people to their final victory, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, envisage a ‘Muslim’ or an ‘Islamic’ state? Did he, that is to say, expect the country to be ruled by liberal laws or by the Islamic orthodoxy and religious parties?
I will endeavour not to brush aside any similarities and common attributes and features shared by the adversaries. But my focus will remain upon those features that differentiate the two principal actors in the events leading up to a reversion to the historic divide between Indus and India in the 1947 partition of the subcontinent.
24
The Character of the
Hindu Muslim Divide
I. The ‘communal divide’
That the Hindus and the Muslims of the subcontinent are two distinct communities is not entirely disputed. No fundamentalist zealot on either side of the divide needs to remind us of this reality. The iron grip of the British Raj had held the two communities together under one yoke. The British bureaucracy had successfully forced the two opposites to exist in joint captivity. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, the mere prospect of even a modicum of self-governance at once brought all the differences to the surface. The Muslim League’s demand for separate electorates preceded the Councils Act of 1909, better known as the Minto-Morley Reforms Act.
The socio-religious differences between the Hindus and the Muslims of the subcontinent have often been highlighted. Hindu idolatory is pitched against Muslim iconoclasm. The original Hindu polytheism has been contrasted with Muslim monotheism. Though some Muslim ascetics permitted some forms of devotional dance, nevertheless the devotional and tantric cults of shaivistic Hinduism were alien to Muslim rituals. The Hindu practice of Sati1 and the strait-jacket of caste offend the Muslim conscience, though the Muslim rulers of India did little to eradicate the former and, in fact, profited (in revenue and the maintenance of the peace) by a clever employment of the latter. (Sati was finally prohibited by British legislation in 1829.)
