The indus saga, p.40
The Indus Saga, page 40
Yet the Khilafat Movement was not entirely without consequence. It had made some substantial contributions, not least being the aura of romance that had been added to mass political mobilization as a means of political resistance. The movement had established the Muslim potential to generate mass rallies. Arrest for a political cause began to be looked upon with respect and admiration. Political causes began to find adherents who had dreams in their eyes. Political detainees gained respect and social recognition among all the sections of the populace not serving in the civil and police bureaucracy. The Ali brothers (Shaukat Ali and Muhammad Ali),12 became the gallant forebears of an unending line of brave detenus, suffering imprisonment for their espousal of human rights.
No less significant was the impetus imparted by the Khilafat Movement to Muslim political journalism and activist poetry. A tradition of a vibrant and live press, undeterred in the face of frequent penalties, closures, and forfeitures was established in this period and was to become the guiding force in the days of the Independence movement. Zafar Ali Khan (1873-1956), whose periodical, Zamindar, was frequently banned, was himself often interned in his village near Wazirabad in the Punjab or imprisoned. He wrote:
DUNYA MAIN THIKANAY DO HI TO HAIN
AZAZ MANASH INSANON KAY
YA TAKHT JAGAH AZADI KEE
YA TAKHTA MAQAAM AZADI KA.
There are only two places in this world
Where freedom can be experienced,
You are free if you sit on the throne,
And you are free upon the gallows.
Maulana Hasrat Mohani (1878-1951) was another intellectual activist who inspired the Muslims against the imperial yoke. He was truly a man of many parts. The Chairman of the first Indian Communist Party Conference in Kanpur, a founder member of the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Hind, he was later elected to the Indian Legislative Assembly as a Muslim League candidate. In 1928, Mohani founded the daily Mustaqil. A writer, a poet and an activist, Mohani spent several years in jail. During one such period of rigorous imprisonment he expressed his feelings in verse thus:
HAI MASHQ-E-SUKHAN JAREE, CHAKEE KI MUSHAQAT BHEE
IK TURFA TAMAASHA HAI, HASRAT KEE TABEE-AT BHEE
He composes verse as he performs forced labour.
Hasrat is a man of contradictory virtues.
Of even greater significance was the self-confidence which the Khilafat Movement instilled in the Muslims of the subcontinent. For once, they felt neither the need for the protective patronage of the British government, which they had confronted, nor a compulsion to pursue Congress dictates. They felt, in fact, that Gandhi had been forced by the vast sweep of the movement to have his own strength counted on the side of the agitators. The Khilafat Movement was thus a vital factor in resurrecting the confidence of the minority Muslim community.
It was this rising tide of mass politics in the Muslim populace which Jinnah was to eventually lead to Pakistan. The pattern set in the Khilafat Movement, the inhibitions destroyed, the chains broken, the energies released, would all become the political assets of the demand for Pakistan almost two decades later at Lahore in March 1940.
Moreover, an embryonic Muslim bourgeoisie had also emerged and was keen to make its own compacts with the feudals of the Muslim majority areas. It was not prepared to let its Hindu counterparts make further inroads into these provinces. Both the Hindu and the Muslim bourgeoisie were hoping eventually to take over from the British commercial, banking and industrial interests. In this atmosphere of contention, it was natural for the weaker Muslim bourgeoisie to begin to seek its own enclave and exclusive market. This was reflected in the Delhi Proposals of 20 March 1927 and subsequently in the Fourteen Points of 1929, wherein the Muslims specifically demanded the separation of Sindh from Bombay, and the extension of all administrative reforms to the provinces of NWFP and Balochistan, all Muslim majority areas, even at the price of accepting a modified form of joint electorates. By this time, the Muslim bourgeoisie, therefore, had also begun to take the initiative.
V. In another direction
The Muslims seemed, however, always to be taking one step forward and two steps back. By and large, they were as yet confused about their objectives. Should they move ahead, obtain modern education, equip themselves with scientific knowledge? Or should they shun all that was Western and modern? The orthodoxy had led the Khilafat and Hijrat Movements. It also resisted Western influence. The desperation of the Hijrat Movement indicated the confusion that impelled the orthodoxy.
In April 1920, a fatwa was issued that in case someone felt that he could not discharge his religious duties freely under a non-Muslim government, he should migrate to a Muslim country.13 Some twenty thousand persons sold all their belongings, houses, lands, at throw-away prices and began migrating to the closest Muslim state: Afghanistan. The Afghan government made no provision for these self-propelled refugees. Many died of exhaustion, fatigue, cold or hunger. Those who survived returned broken-hearted and penniless.
On 6 September 1920, a conference of the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Hind passed a resolution in its conference in Calcutta, seeking complete non-cooperation with the ‘enemies of Islam’ who had ‘shown religious animosity towards Islam in uprooting the Caliph of the Muslims by depriving the Caliphate of its power’. People were thereafter asked to surrender all titles and honorary offices, to refuse to attend official functions and to withdraw students from educational institutions run or aided by the government.
Although the otherwise witty poet Akbar Allahbadi had died in 1921, many of his verses ridiculing the West and modernism became the tools of the orthodoxy, and served to underscore the depths of alienation and confusion:
BAQOUL-E-DARWIN HAZRAT-E-INSAN THAY BOOZNA
HAM KO BAVAR AA GYA EUROPE KEE INSAN DEKH KAR
According to Darwin, Man is descended from the ape.
We believed him only when we saw the Europeans.
BAY PARDA MUJH KO NAZAR AA-EEN CHAND BEEBIAN
AKBAR ZAMEEN MAIN GHAIRAT-E-QAOMI SAY GARR GAYA
POOCHHA JO UNN SAY AAP KAR PARDA WOH KYA HU-A
KEHNAY LAGEEN KEH AQL PAY MARDON KAY PARR GYA
When I saw some women going about without veils
I was affixed to the ground with shame.
When I asked them what happened to the veil,
They replied that it had blinded the commonsense of menfolk.
Although this series of progressive and retrogressive events was creating, in the Muslim community, a sense of distinctness (later to be called nationhood) compounding this confusion was the fact that the Muslims in the subcontinent were still without a single inspiring and undisputed leader. And Indus (Pakistan) was as yet itself a region divided within as much as without.
The only economic vitality and enterprise that any section of the Muslims of the Indus had shown in this period was the growth of trading communities such as the Khojas, Bohras and Memons of the coastal areas of Karachi and Bombay into businessmen, lawyers, merchants and industrialists, along with their Hindu compatriots. They would become the catalysts of the ‘Pakistan movement.’
At the same time in the upper reaches of the Indus, a rich new Muslim feudal aristocracy rose with the opening of new lands to irrigation and the plough. Vast landed estates (jagirs) were allotted in the Punjab districts of Campbellpur, Mianwali, Shahpur, Jhang, Multan and Muzaffargarh. The colonization of new lands in the districts of Montgomery (Sahiwal) and Lyallpur (Faisalabad) was based on the allotment of smaller holdings.
Characteristically, the two Indus regions, the south coast and the Punjab, were to bring forth Muslim leaders of two different types. The Punjab threw up Fazle Hussain. The southern coast of Indus produced Jinnah.
VI. A costly misjudgment
The Congress, on its part, with leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru, had been able by the 1920s to reach out and capture the imagination of the predominantly Hindu bourgeoisie. It had thus become a mass party. The Muslim League had, as yet, no such mass following. Gandhi’s ascetic mode of living and his manifestly humble bearing (that would later earn him the derisive Churchillian title of the ‘naked faqir’ at London’s Round Table Conference) had also won for him and the Congress the widespread support of predominantly Hindu rural India. A few well-timed but determined satyagrahas and prison terms had focused upon Gandhi the attention of a vast following. A further opening was provided to the Congress by the appointment of the Simon Commission in 1928. The Congress organized a boycott of the Simon Commission. It took this opportunity to mobilize people on the ground that the Commission contained no Indian member.
There was a popular and widespread response to the Congress call. Upon the apparent success of this endeavour, many elements in the Congress began to consider the Muslim League as an insignificant and tiresome pest which would, in due course, realize what was best for it and fall in line with the Congress in the wake of the latter’s undisputed strength. The Nehru Report of 1928 was a clear manifestation of its Congress orientation. It had already been written in the minds of these Congress leaders before the Motilal Committee put it on paper. It provided no accommodation for the Muslim League or the Muslim community. The Congress considered both leaderless and rudderless. The Congress itself, on the other hand, seemed to have found a stable anchor in the now internationally renowned Gandhi. At this time the Muslim League was also rent asunder by fractious infighting.14 The Congress leaders thought nothing of it.
The Congress had miscalculated. To the Congress leadership, Mohammad Ali Jinnah seemed to have no prospects of becoming a leader of the masses. In bearing, in his mode of living and in a hundred other ways, he was the very opposite of Gandhi. He dressed in immaculately tailored Savile Row suits. His command of the English language, spoken in his impressive and authoritarian voice, was the envy of Englishmen. He seemed overawed neither by the Viceroy nor the King. A successful and lucrative practice at the bar of the Privy Council in London had won him the respect of most of his British counterparts. And all this ostensibly spelt an exclusive arrogance which, the Congress believed, could never endear him to the Muslim masses. One Congress leader had gone to the extent of calling him a ‘spoilt child.’15
The Congress leadership expected that the Gandhi chaddar and the Nehru cap would, inevitably, snatch the advantage from Savile Row and Bond Street Suits. This was to be a costly misjudgment.
1. ‘Aligarh would be the Muslim answer to modernity; a universal Muslim response to the changing times (although not all its students were Muslims). It gave the Muslims a sense of direction and confidence. To say that you had been to Aligarh was to declare your credentials. It also provided a focus for Muslims all over the subcontinent. From Quetta at one end of India to Dacca at the other, Muslims came to study here; this forged a sense of brotherhood, of nationhood.’ Akbar S. Ahmed, Living Islam, 118.
2. Historic Documents of the Muslim Freedom Movement, compiled by Jamiluddin Ahmed, 19.
3. Historic Documents, 27-8.
4. Ibid., 28.
5. According to James Morris, India provided an army of one and a half million men to the killing fields of the War. Compared to this only, 857,000 youth from the ‘white’ colonies of the empire participated in the hostilities. Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, 199. Spear points out that India gave a hundred million pounds outright to Britain and contributed between twenty to thirty million pounds annually towards war expenses. India undertook its own defence so that for a time there were only 15,000 British troops in the country. Spear, A History of India, 183. Only 15,000 holding more than 300 million under their yoke!
6. A religious edict pronounced by a person learned in Islamic doctrines.
7. Mujeeb, 435.
8. Abdul Hamid, Muslim Separatism in India, 151-2.
9. Akbar S. Ahmed, ‘Jinnah and the Quest for Muslim Identity’ in History Today (vol. 44 [9] September 1994) 34-5.
10. Hamid, 152.
11. Opposing thereby the Muslim demand for Pakistan. To this day, many of the religious parties have not been able to live down their role in the past.
12. The latter was interned without trial for two terms totalling five years.
13. See Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, Ulema in Politics (2nd ed.) (1974), 265.
14. On the question of separate electorates for the Muslims, the All India Muslim League had split into two factions: the Jinnah League and the Shafi League, the latter led by Mian Muhammad Shafi and supported by the great poet, Iqbal.
15. Sir Tej Bahadar Sapru. See Historic Documents, 96.
30
The Sons of the Indus Fight
I. Concessions and loss of nerve
On their part, the British were pursuing a twin but divergent policy. They had sensed the growing frustration of the Indian bourgeoisie at an early stage and had begun to counter it at the turn of the century. They sought to pacify the Indian bourgeoisie by concessions but were preparing to suppress its unrest by force.
On the one hand, the government had already taken the first steps to ‘Indianize’ the civil services, a class the British had found to have been exceptionally loyal to the foreign masters during the uprising of 1857. The Indian Councils Acts of 1892 and 1909 (the latter also called the Minto-Morley Reforms) had been the first concessions to the more educated natives.
On the other hand, the colonial power had begun to succumb to the pressure of the bourgeoisie movements for more economic freedom. The Partition of Bengal (1905) was done to appease the Muslims. (The Bengal Lancers had remained an important and largely Muslim regiment, though now drawn from all over the old Awadh state and even the Punjab.) It was undone under the pressure of the Hindu agitation hitting, through the call for swadeshi,1 where it hurt most.
Then there were the terrorist movements. The Poona Society for Hindu Religion became active. The shooting of the magistrate who had committed one of them for trial was attributed, somehow, to the Savarkar brothers. The British had lost their nerve when the Partition of Bengal was annulled (1911). They lost their nerve again at Jallianwala Bagh in April 1919. The coercion and official violence proved far more traumatic than their insubstantial concessions, held out by such measures as the Government of India Act (the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms) of 1919.
II. The indebted peasant and ‘Punjabization’
There were substantial reasons for the growth of the underground resistance movements in the Indus region. Although little is written about them by official historians, those sub-surface movements played a major role in breaking the will of the imperialists to continue their direct rule in the subcontinent.
Large parts of Indus were at once the most prosperous in the subcontinent and under the greatest burden of debt. In the Punjab, for instance, moneylending was the most important business after agriculture. According to one estimate of the early 1920s, there was an average burden of Rs 463 per indebted proprietor.2 This was a very substantial sum of money, considering the value of the rupee in those days. The burden was to multiply manifold during the ensuing economic depression.
The Raj had, however, opened up at least one other source of income to the impoverished Punjab peasant: recruitment in the subordinate ranks of the Royal Indian Army. This had begun in the preceding century. Michael O’Dwyer, who was the governor of Punjab at the time of the fateful Jallianwala Bagh massacre, had recounted that the argument ‘of those great military authorities, Lord Robert and Lord Kitchener was, however, irrefutable that if India could only afford a small army of seventy-five thousand British (now reduced to under 60,000) and one hundred and sixty thousand Indian troops for the protection of a subcontinent of over 300 millions of people, it would be unwise to take any but the best Indian material and this was to be found mainly in the Punjab.’3
There was thus a Punjabization of the Indian Army. Punjab began to be referred to as the ‘sword arm of India’. By 1862, the Punjab alone was contributing twenty-eight out of the 131 units of infantry in the Indian Army. The proportion of Punjabi troops went up greatly by the turn of the century. The British had to try to rescue the Punjab peasant-soldier from the grave consequences of debt. In 1900, the Land Alienation Act was passed, impeding the acquisition of lands of debtors by the non-agricultural caste of moneylenders. The purpose was also to slow down the process of disintegration of landholdings. More relief measures were contrived, but they were not enough. Other revenue-oriented measures nullified the effect of these social reforms and also aroused instant reactions. When the water rate (abiana) was increased in 1907, there was an uprising in the Punjab. The Bill was withdrawn.
Before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the number of Punjabi units in the Indian Army had risen to 57 out of 121. That meant almost half of the Indian Army was recruited in one area. This reliance upon the Punjabi soldiers compelled the government to take steps to ameliorate their lot at home.
At the outbreak of the First World War, the imperial government undertook a widespread recruitment drive in the Punjab and adjoining regions. The indebted peasants enlisted in the army in greater numbers. This would be a crucial turning-point in their outlook. During the First World War, the Punjabi peasant-soldier travelled to several parts of the world. He saw lands and technological advances that he had never conceived of. He thus came out of his shell. His vision was broadened as he was also exposed to the outside world beyond his cloistered village, to the winds blowing in a new social order in Tsarist Russia. He was completely immersed in new thoughts and concepts when he returned to his bullock-cart, plough, and indebtedness after the War was over. His income was secured somewhat by his regular pension. The much-travelled ‘cosmopolitan’ rose to a new social status, and acquired a new influence in society with the stories and tales he had to tell. Folk songs of the time reflected his growing social status and importance: Vasna fauji de naal, paanway boot sanaylatmaaray (I will live with a soldier even if he kicks me with his boot on).
