It was in this context of intense distrust and discord that we had earlier seen the letter from Ziauddin Ahmad—later vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University—to Abdullah Suhrawardy who was at India House in London, asking Muslims to refrain from participating in activities of Shyamji, Vinayak and other revolutionaries. The spirit of British loyalty and seeking distinctiveness from the Hindus and the Congress that Sir Syed had induced in the community was to remain for a long time with most leaders, barring a few exceptions. As Sir Percival Joseph Griffiths, a prominent businessman who also worked for Indian Civil Service largely in eastern India, noted: ‘Whatever may have been other effects of the foundation of the Muslim League, it set the seal upon the Muslim belief that their interests must be regarded as completely separate from those of the Hindus and that no fusion of the two communities was possible.’ 14
In its annual session held at Amritsar in December 1908, the Muslim League expressed vehement opposition to all the ‘mischievous efforts’ to unsettle the settled fact of the Partition of Bengal. 15 In the Imperial Council in 1910, when Bhupendra Nath Bose raised the question of reversing the Partition of Bengal, members Shams-ul-Huda of Bengal and Mazhar-ul-Huq of Bihar strongly opposed the move. They warned that if the government meddled with this ‘beneficent measure, it would be committing an act of supreme folly and would create unrest and discontent where none existed now’. 16 That the views of prominent leaders of the community remained unchanged is evident from Muhammad Ali’s speech as Congress president in 1923, in which he referred to the government’s policy of reversing the Partition of Bengal as an important cause for the alienation of the Muslims from the British government. 17
Throughout 1907 and 1908, heated debates were held regarding separate electorates and the weightage that was proposed by the Muslim deputation and consented to by Viceroy Lord Minto. The Muslim leadership argued that owing to the vast social, cultural and religious differences between the two communities, they feared that a Hindu majority would not be able to deal with them suitably or represent them fairly. It was also pointed out that Muslims should get a greater representation in the different councils than was warranted by their numerical strength in the country’s population. The logic offered for this was rather perverse. The deputation had stated that Muslims had ruled India for 700 years before the British arrival and hence they had a natural claim to greater ‘political importance’, which should be reflected in the councils. They also maintained that the community had played a vital role in defending the country and this enhanced its importance further.
The Morley–Minto Reforms of 1909 not only awarded separate Muslim electorates, but also the number of their members in the council was much more than the numerical strength of their population. The seeds of discord and of being two separate nations had thus been sown several decades before the freedom movement took birth. Gopalkrishna Gokhale lamented:
It was a commonplace of Indian politics that there can be no future for India as a nation unless a durable spirit of cooperation was developed and established between the two great communities . . . the union of all communities is no doubt the goal towards which we have to strive, but it cannot be denied that it does not exist in the country today and it is no use proceeding as though it existed, when in reality it does not 18 . . . over the greater part of India, the two communities had inherited a tradition of antagonism which though it might ordinarily lie dormant, broke forth into activity at the smallest provocation. It was this tradition that had to be overcome. 19
The eagerness of the Hindu leaders and the Congress to elicit Muslim support and forge a united front, disregarding the embers of discord and behaving like they never existed in the first place, made the Muslim leadership put a premium on their support. In the annual session of 1908, the Muslim League demanded an extension of the principles of communal representation to local bodies, appointment of both a Hindu and a Muslim to the Privy Council and a due share for Muslims in all state services.
At a joint session of the Congress and the Muslim League held at Lucknow in December 1916, the two parties agreed to allow the over-representation for the Muslims in the legislatures and councils. In return, the Muslim leaders agreed to join the Congress movement demanding Indian autonomy. Famously known as the Lucknow Pact, it was headed by Tilak from the Congress side and by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League. It demanded that four-fifths of the provincial and central legislatures be elected on a broad franchise and half the executive council members were to be Indians elected by the councils themselves. Most of these proposals were embodied in the Government of India Act, 1919. After its initial opposition, the Congress agreed to the proposal of separate electorates for Muslims in provincial council elections and for weightage beyond their population in all provinces except Punjab and Bengal, where Hindu and Sikh minorities were taken into consideration. It was heralded as a beacon of Hindu–Muslim unity. It paved a natural way for the Khilafat movement, briefly bringing together the two communities.
One of the most tragic offshoots of the Khilafat movement was the blood-curdling atrocities committed by the Moplahs (Mapillas) of the Malabar in August 1921. A band of fanatic Muslims, they were given to frequent violent outbreaks which were sometimes driven by economic factors and at others by religious reasons. Being tenants-at-will of Hindu landlords, or jenmi s, they bore deep resentment against their masters who charged high rents for the lands they tilled. Spurred by the religious call of the Khilafat movement and the speeches of the Ali brothers, the Moplahs decided to strike decisively. Agrarian grievances of the Moplahs as an excuse for this pogrom does not convey the whole truth; the violence had theological sanction. The Manchester Guardian highlighted that despite agrarian grievances
. . . one certain element is a desperate religious fanaticism . . . India broods the horror of the cold-blooded massacres by the Moplahs, still daily showing how Hindus fare in the hands of fanatical Mohammedans. The public, obscurely but rightly, connect the holocaust of Hindu lives and property with Khilafat preachers and realize that the rule even of the arrogant British is better than no rule. 20
Though the Khilafat was a movement against the British, several past grievances got fused into the volatility of the situation. Weapons were organized and preparations made to declare the coming of the Islamic kingdom. One Khilafat leader, Ali Musaliar, was proclaimed the raja, Khilafat flags were raised, and Ernad and Walluvanad were declared Khilafat kingdoms. Unfortunately, it was the hapless Hindu community of Malabar, not the government, that bore the brunt of the outrage. Mass murders of Hindu families, brutal rapes of women in front of their family members, murders of pregnant women, desecration of temples, cow slaughter, forcible conversions, pillage, arson and loot reigned till the British troops took control. The tragic memorial of the women of Malabar to Lady Reading reads:
It is possible that your Ladyship is not fully appraised of all the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the fiendish rebels; of the many wells and tanks filled up with the mutilated, but often only half-dead, bodies of our nearest and dearest ones who refused to abandon the faith of our fathers; of pregnant women cut to pieces and left on the roadsides and in the jungles, with the unborn babe protruding from the mangled corpse; of our innocent and helpless children torn from our arms and done to death before our eyes and of our husbands and fathers tortured, flayed and burnt alive; of our hapless sisters forcibly carried away from the midst of kith and kin and subjected to every shame and outrage which the vile and brutal imagination of these inhuman hell-hounds could conceive of; of thousands of our homesteads reduced to cinder-mounds out of sheer savagery and a wanton spirit of destruction; of our places of worship desecrated and destroyed and of the images of deity shamefully insulted by putting the entrails of slaughtered cows where flower garlands use to lie, or else smashed to pieces . . . we remember how driven out [of] our native hamlets, we wandered, starving and naked, in the jungles and forests. 21
Sankaran Nair points ou
t to several other tortures like skinning Hindus alive and making them dig their own graves before their slaughter. 22
The Congress leaders disbelieved the stories from Malabar initially and Gandhi himself spoke of the ‘brave God-fearing Moplahs’ whom he described as patriots who were ‘fighting for what they consider as religion, and in a manner which they consider as religious’. 23 He went on to add: ‘Hindus must find the causes of Moplah fanaticism. They will find that they are not without blame. They have hitherto not cared for the Moplah. It is no use now becoming angry with the Moplahs or Mussalmans in general.’ 24 Ironically, his allies, the Khilafatists, passed resolutions congratulating the Moplahs for their heroism. Rationalizing Gandhi’s strange stand, Sankaran Nair notes:
There are two possible answers. The first, and the most probable, is that the politician within him [Gandhi] had for the time being enthralled the saint—his aim was to keep the Hindu-Mahommedan entente alive; the second, that the saint had mastered the man: religious anarchy with all its horrors being infinitely to be preferred to law and order under Satanic British Rule. 25
Criticizing Gandhi’s stand, Ambedkar wrote:
Any person could have said that this was too heavy a price for Hindu-Moslem unity. But Mr Gandhi was so much obsessed by the necessity of establishing Hindu-Moslem unity that he was prepared to make light of the doings of the Moplas and the Khilafats who were congratulating them . . . Speaking of the Muslim silence over the Mopla atrocities Mr Gandhi told the Hindus: The Hindus must have the courage and the faith to feel that they can protect their religion in spite of such fanatical eruptions. A verbal disapproval by the Mussalmans of Mopla madness is no test of Mussalman friendship. The Mussalmans must naturally feel the shame and humiliation of the Mopla conduct about forcible conversions and looting, and they must work away so silently and effectively that such a thing might become impossible even among the most fanatical among them. 26
Gradually, as the horrors of Malabar became more pronounced on the national scene and punctured holes in the avowed unity that Gandhi had been propounding, the Congress Working Committee passed a lame resolution, mildly admonishing the Moplahs.
Whilst however condemning violence on the part of the Moplas, the Working Committee desires it to be known that the evidence in its possession shows that the provocation beyond endurance was given to the Moplas . . . the Working Committee regrets to find that there have been instances of so-called forcible conversion by some fanatics among Moplas, but warns the public against believing, in the Government and inspired versions. 27
The efforts to minimize the scale and the impact of the carnage, just so that the farcical show of unity could be maintained nationally, were disgraceful. While a small incident in Chauri Chaura forced Gandhi to call off a well-oiled Civil Disobedience movement, one wonders how a blot that was much more heinous did not cause any ripples. The Muslim League too justified the Moplah outrage as a religious war against the British, in which the Hindus got caught in the crossfire as they were seen to be aiding the colonial masters. The Khilafat conference in its session at Cocanada held in 1923 expressed its solidarity with the Moplah ‘martyrs’. Shaukat Ali moved a resolution calling it a duty of every Muslim towards the brave Moplahs to provide for the maintenance of one Moplah orphan and that he and his brother would take the initiative for this. This was after the government intervened and crushed the uprising with a heavy hand, leaving several Moplahs dead.
Vinayak strongly condemned the barbarity of the Moplahs and the pusillanimity with which the Congress reacted to this, just to save their movement. He wrote several essays and articles warning people about the dangers and realities of the Khilafat and pan-Islamism movement—many of which were published after his release from jail. He wondered why there was no open debate or discussion with the Hindus of the country on whether they wanted to align with such a movement, and more importantly, if they were educated enough about its pros and cons. 28 He lamented that most Hindus were not even aware of the history of political Islam or its theology. No wonder some of them had made generous invitations to the Khalifa to shift to India where he would be crowned as an unofficial religio-political head of all Indian Muslims. What kind of a suicidal and ignorant step was this? Vinayak questioned.
He also educated Indians about the differences in the approach towards the caliphate between Shia and Sunni Muslims. The Shias considered the Khalifa as someone from the Holy Prophet’s bloodline. The Sunnis had no such compunctions; it was sufficient that the Khalifa belonged to the Quraish community, just as the Prophet. The former believed that the person who occupied this position was one of great piety and blessed with spiritual powers, while the latter believed that removing a Khalifa, no matter how incompetent or corrupt he might be, was impossible. Given the theological differences between the two sects, it was almost impossible for them to have a common Khalifa or worship in the same mosque. That all the Muslims of the world would unite and select their Khalifa was not an option that the religious denominations granted them and the Muslim theologists and leaders of India knew this very well, argued Vinayak. Yet, to assert a false sense of unity and supremacy, they had beguiled the Hindus and the Congress that such a thing was possible and they needed to rally around the idea. What locus standi did an Indian Muslim, who was not free in his own country, have that his wish or voice would be accepted by the British and more by the larger Muslim world, wondered Vinayak. This despite a Muhammad Ali claiming from the rooftops that he was a Muslim first and an Indian later. 29
The calamity Vinayak warned his compatriots about was of a possible invasion of India from an external power or the sanction of that power for the creation of islands of autonomous Muslim centres within India. He apprehended a possibility wherein the new Amir of Afghanistan, who had come to power after a bloody assassination of his predecessor, had been plotting an invasion of India for long. Unwittingly, the Congress and the Hindus were playing into these designs even as reports of Islamist religious soldiers, being trained for this purpose in Siberia were gathering steam, claimed Vinayak. The Moplah riots were just a trailer of what calamity was set to befall India, he warned.
At Ratnagiri prison, Vinayak decided to formulate an intellectual response to these very troubling socio-political realities of the times, postulating the fundamentals of Hindu identity and unification, despite the trying conditions of prison life and his failing health. Unlike his other works that were composed in Marathi, this book was in English. Evidently, the readership that he had in mind went beyond the Marathi-speaking populace; it was aimed at the country at large. Given the obvious strictures that he was under, Vinayak wrote the book under the nom de plume ‘A Maratha’. It was smuggled out of prison and later published by Narayanrao.
Right from his childhood, Vinayak had bemoaned the lack of unity and organization in Hindu society, ridden as it was with innumerable caste differences and other complexities. Finding an answer to ‘Who is a Hindu?’ seemed germane to him at this point of time. From the confines of jail, he had been watching with alarm Gandhi taking the Hindu community for a ride during the Khilafat agitation. The relative increase in the Muslim population that the census had established, 30 and the uncertain status of untouchables and tribal groups as Hindus for enumeration purposes made the definition of a Hindu all the more critical.
Yet again, Vinayak employed the agency of history as he had during his work on the 1857 War of Independence to create a sense of identity, pride and belonging. About the constant insinuations about the book being an ode of hatred, especially towards the Muslims, historian Janaki Bakhle opines:
Savarkar is widely reviled in Indian history as an apostle of hate; through a reading of Hindutva I argue that he might better be understood as a spurned lover . . . Hindutva in its time was also a reminder to a Hindu community that even if Gandhi had left the political milieu, there was no need to worry. A political Hindu and a true nationalist was back and ready to lead India, even from behind prison walls. Hindutva wa
s a pugilistic punch thrown against Gandhi in the competitive political ring for national leadership. 31
The concept of a Hindu identity had been an ongoing nationalistic project for long. Most often it was pushed to the forefront of politics during invasion, immigration or colonial occupation. Different groups throughout Indian history have—like several others across the world—tried to look to their past and to religious texts to locate a teleological narrative. Such a narrative produces a sense of identity that can be claimed, and also legitimized in the wake of external influences. Right from the ancient saints such as Adi Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhwa, to the medieval Bhakti and Sufi poets, to modern reformers such as Dayanand Saraswati, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Vivekananda, Tilak, Aurobindo Ghose, and even Mahatma Gandhi—there has always been a call for revival of what was known as Indian values and cultural identity.
However, it was Vinayak who extended the word ‘Hindutva’ beyond religious adherence to mean a term of ethnic nationalism. The short book that he produced proved to be highly influential, not only during the time he wrote it, but in contemporary Indian political discourse as well. Some found (and still find) the concepts elucidated as a much-needed reinforcement of Indian ideals and identity, while others criticized (and still do) it for fanning political separatism. Nonetheless, it remains an important document in the discussions around Indian identity, both as a cultural and political entity. Elucidating the importance of this book, Janaki Bakhle writes:
Hindutva is one of the few texts written by an Indian nationalist that links the present Hindu moment of Indian history to the pre-independence anticolonial period. Not even Gandhi’s own texts from the 1920s, much as they are read by academics, can claim such a time span of influence. However, Hindutva’s influence has not been without controversy. Five decades after it was written, it became the bible of militant and exclusionary Hindu nationalism, taking as its chief enemy the minority Muslim community of India. The book would also come to encapsulate and exemplify Savarkar’s entire oeuvre of writing and would dramatically influence the course of modern Indian history. 32
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