An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Indians of all religious communities had long lived intertwined lives, and even religious practices were rarely exclusionary: thus Muslim musicians played and sang Hindu devotional songs, Hindus thronged Sufi shrines and worshipped Muslim saints there, and Muslim artisans in Benares made the traditional masks for the Hindu Ram-Leela performances. Northern India celebrated what was called a ‘Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb’, a syncretic culture that melded the cultural practices of both faiths. Romila Thapar has recounted how deeply devotional poetry was written by some poets who were born Muslim but worshipped Hindu deities, notably Sayyad Ibrahim, popularly known as Raskhan, whose dohas and bhajans dedicated to Lord Krishna were widely recited in the sixteenth century. The Mughal court, she points out, became the most impressive patron of the translation of many Sanskrit religious texts into Persian, including the epic Mahabharata (translated as the Razmnamah) and the Bhagavad Gita, with Brahmin priests collaborating on the translations with Persian scholars.

  To Gyanendra Pandey, such tales, as well as parables of Hindu generals in Mughal courts, or of Hindu and Muslim ministers in the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh’s entourage, suggests there was ‘fuzziness’ about self-conscious identities and a lack of self-definition on the basis of religion (or even of caste), within both the Hindu and Muslim populations. These stories do not suggest mutually incompatible or hostile ideologies. Acceptance of difference, as Swami Vivekananda famously declared at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, was central to the Indian experience throughout its long civilizational history.

  Nor was religion in the past necessarily the overall basis for collective action, let alone political mobilization: caste, community, jati and biradari played their parts. But by encroaching on the terrain of the various communities, thereby invalidating indigenous social relations, the colonial state loosened the bonds that had held them together for generations across these divides.

  The facts are clear: large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims (religiously defined), only began under colonial rule; many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious due to the colonists’ Orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society. There is a general consensus that it is questionable whether a totalizing Hindu or Muslim identity existed in any meaningful sense in India prior to the nineteenth century.

  I realize this assertion will rouse the sceptics, who will argue that Muslims and Hindus were slaughtering each other since at least 712 CE, when the teenaged Arab warrior Muhammad bin Qasim conquered the Hindu kingdom of Sindh. Indeed, the argument that tensions existed for 1,200 years, since the advent of Islam in north India, is often made both by Pakistanis (to justify separation) and by acolytes of the Hindutva cause, who routinely assert that as many as 60,000 Hindu temples were razed to the ground by Muslim rulers over the centuries, and mosques built on 3,000 of those temples’ foundations.

  That some of this happened is indisputable: one only has to visit Sultan Iltutmish’s celebrated mosque and its surrounding architecture at the Qutb Complex in Delhi to see the elaborate Hindu religious carvings that still adorn the pillars. But the work done separately by historians Cynthia Talbot and Richard M. Eaton in two different parts of India suggest that temple desecration was largely ‘a phenomenon of the advancing frontier’, occasioned by warfare and occurring mainly in the intense frenzy of armed conflict across changing territorial lines. Eaton believes that temple destruction by Turkic and other Muslim rulers throughout India occurred mainly in kingdoms in the process of being conquered; a royal temple symbolized the king’s power in Hindu political thought, and so destroying it signified that king’s utter humiliation. Talbot’s research in Andhra Pradesh at the time of Muslim expansion into the region confirms similar findings. In other words, invaders’ attacks on temples were politically, rather than religiously, motivated. The portrayal of Muslims as Islamist idol-breakers, driven to destroy temples because of religious fanaticism, argue both Eaton and Talbot, is far from the truth. Obviously raiders who came and went like Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori and Nadir Shah were bent on destruction and pillage, but the Muslims who stayed in India attacked temples not to destroy them, but because they valued them and understood their importance.

  Such an argument is bound to prove contentious, especially given numerous examples of iconoclasm on the part of Muslim warriors. But there are far more numerous examples of harmony and co-existence. The best example of Indian religious coexistence in the precolonial era, of identities being so creatively held that they could accommodate easily to each other, comes from today’s state of Kerala, dubbed by the British the Malabar Coast. The openness to the external influences—Arab, Roman, Chinese, British, Islamic, Christian, Brahminical—that went into the making of the Malayali people reflected their trading heritage. More than two millennia ago, Keralites had trade relations not just with other parts of India but with the Arab world, the Phoenicians and the Roman empire, so Malayalis have had, for a long time now, an open and welcoming attitude to the rest of humanity. Jews fleeing Roman persecution found refuge here; there is evidence of their settlement in Cranganore as far back as 68 CE. And 1,500 years later, the Jews settled in Kochi, where they built a magnificent synagogue that still stands. Kerala’s Christians belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine. And when St Thomas, one of Jesus’s twelve apostles, brought Christianity to Kerala, it is said he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. St Thomas made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins, which meant there were Indians whose families had practised Christianity for far longer than the ancestors of any Briton could lay claim to.

  Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it did in northern India, but through traders, travellers and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people. The new faith was peacefully embraced and encouraged, rather than rejected: indeed, as I have mentioned earlier, the Zamorin of Calicut was so impressed by the seafaring skills of this community that he issued a decree in the sixteenth century obliging each fisherman’s family in his kingdom to bring up one son as a Muslim to man his all-Muslim navy, commanded by sailors of Arab descent, the Kunjali Maraicars. The first recorded instance in Kerala of violence involving the Muslim community, religiously defined as opposed to the clashing armies of contending warriors or kings, was in British India, when the ‘Moplah Rebellion’ occurred in 1920.

  Looking at peninsular south India at the time of the Muslim invasions (from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries), Cynthia Talbot observed that since a majority of medieval South India’s population continued to be non-Muslim, even within the regions where Muslims were politically dominant, the two societies always overlapped. A certain degree of cooperation and collaboration was inevitable in these circumstances. The Muslim polities of the peninsula were dependent on Hindu officials and warriors for tax collection and maintenance of order in the countryside. As to the rhetorical portrayal of each other, ‘both denigrating and tolerant representations of the Other coexisted at any given phase’, but they tended to highlight foreignness rather than religion. And foreignness, of course, was an attribute that tended to fade, if not entirely disappear, with time.

  The political consequences of this British denial of the precolonial past and the deliberate imperial construction of a ‘Hindu–Muslim divide’ after 1857 became vividly apparent in the late nineteenth century. When Allan Octavian Hume founded the Indian National Congress he actively welcomed Indians of all faiths to the organization; its first few presidents included Hindus, Christians, Parsis and Muslims. The British did not approve of Hume’s liberal attitude. (Had they been sincere about empowering a cooperative class of English-educated Indians, they could easily have done so, co-opting these liberal lawyers, as they mostly were, into the British governance of India.) Instead, the British watched the rise to prominence of Congress, a secular body transcending religion, with growing disapproval, and pronounced it a Hindu
-dominated organization. They instigated a Muslim nobleman, Nawab Khwaja Salimullah of Dacca, to start a rival organization in 1906 for his co-religionists alone, the Muslim League.

  Meanwhile Lord Curzon’s decision in 1905 to partition Bengal, ostensibly for administrative reasons but in reality to create a Muslim-majority province in the east, aroused fierce opposition from all segments of Bengali society and from Indian nationalists everywhere, who saw it as a transparent attempt to divide the country. The British deliberately ‘sold’ the partition of Bengal to the Muslims as promoting their interests, so that the Nawab of Dacca, who had initially condemned the division of his province as ‘beastly’, was persuaded to change his mind under the influence of Lord Curzon’s visit to him. This followed speeches in which the viceroy promised that the partition ‘would invest the Mohammedans of Eastern Bengal with a unity which they had not enjoyed since the days of the old Mussulman viceroys and kings’. To sweeten the pill further the British government advanced the nawab a private loan of £100,000 at a concessional rate of interest, and soon the nawab and his followers did a U-turn to become staunch supporters of the Partition of Bengal.

  The British made no effort to hide their partiality. Herbert Risley, the architect of the scheme, admitted frankly that ‘one of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.’ The Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, Sir Bampfylde Fuller, said publicly—he later claimed that he had done so in jest—‘that of his two wives (meaning the Muslim and Hindu sections of his province) the Mohammedan was the favourite’. His ‘jest’ was taken rather too seriously by some Muslim elements, who concluded that by these words the British authorities were ready to grant them impunity for anti-Hindu violence, which then proceeded to spread in East Bengal. Assaults, rape and abductions against the Hindu minority followed: ‘thus’, reported Henry Nevinson, ‘a new religious feud was established in Eastern Bengal’. Administrative division, as the protestors saw clearly, served as an assault upon the social unity of Bengali communities.

  Nevinson goes on:

  I have almost invariably found English officers and officials on the side of the Mohammedans where there is any rivalry of race or religion at all. And in Eastern Bengal this national inclination is now encouraged by the Government’s open resolve to retain the Mohammedan support of the Partition by any means in its power. It was against the Hindus only that all the petty persecution of officialdom was directed. It was they who were excluded from Government posts; it was Hindu schools from which Government patronage was withdrawn. When Mohammedans rioted, the punitive police ransacked Hindu houses, and companies of little Gurkhas were quartered on Hindu populations. It was the Hindus who in one place were forbidden to sit on the riverbank. Of course, the plea was that only the Hindus were opposed to the Government’s policy of dividing them from the rest of their race, so that they alone needed suppression.

  Yet the Congress initially chose to take this development in its stride: seeing the League as representing merely the landed aristocracy and upper-class merchants and landlords among the Muslim population, it deemed it not to be a threat. Indeed, the election of the moderate Aga Khan as its first president seemed to confirm this judgement. The Congress declared membership of the League not to be incompatible with membership of the Congress, continued to invite League members to Congress meetings, and on three remarkable occasions, elected Muslim League members to preside over the Congress. (Hakim Ajmal Khan, Maulana Mohammed Ali and Dr M. A. Ansari enjoy the remarkable distinction of having been presidents of both the Congress and the League without having to give up either.)

  In 1916, Motilal Nehru was chosen by the Congress to draft, together with a brilliant young Muslim lawyer called Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the principles that would govern cooperation with the Muslim League. Their work, recognizing the principle that decisions would not be taken affecting the interests and beliefs of a minority community without the agreement of a majority of that community’s representatives, formed the foundation of what was widely hailed as the Lucknow Pact. The Congress’s leading literary light, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, hailed Jinnah as the ‘ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity’ and set about editing a compilation of his speeches and writings.

  Indeed, for all the British encouragement, the Muslims of India as a whole did not think of their futures as anything but entwined with their Hindu compatriots. It is striking that, as late as 1918, in his most substantial book on ‘the Indian question’, the Aga Khan articulated a vision of India as a confluence of four civilizations —‘Western’, ‘Far Eastern’, ‘Brahmanical’ and ‘Mohamedan’—and expressed an ‘Indian patriotism’ that assumed close understanding between Hindus and Muslims (including a common desire for India, rather than Britain, to colonize East Africa!) Similarly, he is dismissive of ‘political Pan-Islamism’, speaking of Islam as a social, cultural and spiritual force that unites believers morally around the world, but stressing that ‘religion has more and more become a spiritual force in the modern world, and less and less a temporal one. In this [era] national and material interests have predominated over religious ties’. These were views widely held by other educated Indian Muslims, and had been expressed in almost identical terms by Justice Syed Mahmud four decades previously.

  Mahatma Gandhi, upon assuming the leadership of the Congress, also sought to make common cause with Muslim opinion by spearheading a Khilafat agitation in support of Indian Muslim demands to restore the Caliphate in Turkey after the collapse during World War I of the Ottoman empire. That movement fizzled out when it was overtaken by domestic developments (including some assaults by Caliphate enthusiasts on Hindus deemed insufficiently supportive of the cause) and was, in any case, made irrelevant by events in Turkey, but it was an earnest display of the Congress’s determined effort to represent all Indians, irrespective of faith, and not to surrender to the British project of religious division.

  The British-conducted censuses had overt political significance, since the census numbers were crucial to the political debates at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were ignored in constituting the British Indian Army, in which Muslims accounted for 50 per cent of the Indians serving in uniform despite being only 20 per cent of the population. (The Dalit leader Dr B. R. Ambedkar suggested this disproportionate representation in the army was deliberately designed ‘to counteract the forces of Hindu agitation’ against the British Raj.) But when it came to politics, the census figures proved most useful to the British in heightening a sense among some Muslims of being an endangered minority. Communal identity and representation became major issues, by design, when separate electorates were being defined based on religious identity for the first time by the Minto–Morley Reforms. Similarly, as we have seen, census numbers engendered a huge upheaval in colonial governance when the British sought to partition the province of Bengal.

  In exactly the same way, when a limited franchise was finally extended to ordinary Indians by the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms to vote for positions of limited authority in British-approved bodies, imperial officials provided political franchise to several of the communal identities the British government had created within Indian society, each one competing against the other to gain favour with the colonialists. Thus there were seats reserved for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and so on. This resulted in the aggravation of communal identities, since what little politics was permitted could quickly devolve into a communal competition for limited resources. Public sentiments could be aroused to exaggerate differences amongst Indians, which redounded to the benefit of the British, who, of course, were above it all. So Englishmen who would have shuddered at the idea of allowing the Jews of Golders Green to vote separately in London elections enthusiastically arranged separate electorates for the Muslims of India, where Muslim voters could only vote for Muslim candidates, Sikhs for Sikhs and Christians for Christians. The practice prompted Will Durant to observe that the British approach ‘intensifies and encourages the racial and
religious divisions which statesmanship would seek to heal’.

  But healing was not the object of government policy, as we have seen from the outset of this chapter: a divided people were easier to subjugate. Lord Olivier, Secretary of State for India in the 1920s, openly admitted to a ‘predominant bias in British officialdom in favour of the Moslem community… Largely as a make-weight against Hindu nationalism’. This was compounded by the British tendency to give the Muslims even more than they had asked for. Thus, when the Muslim League demanded one of two possible privileges in the five Muslim-majority provinces, either statutory majorities, enshrined in law, with joint electorates, or separate electorates for Muslims the British gave them statutory majorities with separate electorates in their Communal Award, letting the Muslim Leaguers have it both ways.

  Ironically, had Indian politics been encouraged to develop as British politics had, along ideological lines, one could have seen the emergence of a conservative party and a socialist one, with some liberals in between; these tendencies were all present among Indian public men. This kind of conventional political contention could have kept India united, with Jinnah and Nehru becoming the Disraeli and Gladstone of their era in an emerging Indian Dominion. But colonial policies drove conservatives and socialists alike to define themselves primarily in relation to the communal question, leading ultimately to the tragic sundering of the country.

  The alterations this brought about to Indian sensibilities were profound. Most scholars of Indian history blame the British for the gradual whittling away of the shared syncretic traditions described earlier. As Alex von Tunzelmann noted in her history Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, when ‘the British started to define “communities” based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged’.