The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  The Congress Party held its first meeting in Bombay in 1885, in the middle of a crucial decade for the mobilization of Indian public opinion, when the British lifted press restrictions and hundreds of new newspapers appeared, most of them in the vernacular languages. A very broad church of radicals, socialists Hindus, Muslims and secularists, Congress did not at first set itself overtly against British rule, but initially pushed for greater representation, and only gradually was transformed into a more radical movement with the ultimate goal of self-rule.

  The story of the Indian freedom movement from 1885 to 1947 has generally been told to the outside world through the powerful and seductive narrative of the Congress. Even Hollywood has turned the myth into a worldwide cinema epic (Nehru and Gandhi are, after all, among the greatest and most interesting figures in modern history). But, as always in history, there were other trajectories that could have taken India, and perhaps could still, on a different path. Representation of the different religious communities would become a particularly thorny issue. In 1906 some Muslim members split from Congress to form the Muslim League (see here). Then, in 1907, Congress split into two halves: Gandhi’s mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s ‘moderate faction’ and the ‘hot or hardline faction’ of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who supported direct action to overthrow the British and went to prison for it. Extremists, nationalists, secularists, Hindus and Muslims: the effort of keeping all on one track in the end proved too much for the Congress leadership. But after the First World War Mohandas Gandhi (another British-educated lawyer) became the dominant figure, with his appeal to Hindu popular discourse and his espousal of the key idea of ahimsa, non-violence. Under Gandhi’s influence, Congress became the first integrated mass organization in the country, bringing together millions of people by specifically working against caste differences, untouchability, poverty and religious and ethnic boundaries. Although predominantly Hindu, it had members from virtually every religion, ethnic group, economic class and linguistic group. By the 1930s Congress could claim to be the true representative of the Indian people, and under Nehru’s presidency formally declared as its goal poorna swaraj – complete independence.

  PARTITION: FREEDOM BUT DIVISION

  By the early 1930s it was obvious to most observers in Britain too that there was no way India could remain British, despite Churchill’s blusterings and the rabid and racist polemics of the likes of Lord Rothermere and the right-wing British press. The issue then at stake was not whether India would be free, but what that India would be. The India beloved of Amir Khusro? The India made patchwork reality by the British? An Indian federation of semi-autonomous states? Or a divided India? In the 1930s the united India that was the Congress dream was threatened by new developments that would have the greatest significance for India, but also impinge upon a much wider world in the modern era.

  Muslims made up nearly a quarter of British India. Their coreligionists, as we have seen, had been the rulers in the north for several centuries. But the British deposition of the last Mughal in 1858 had left them disinherited and fearful of the political power of a Hindu majority who had not always been well treated by their Muslim overlords. A new Islamic consciousness had already shown itself in the 1857 rebellion, and the future of Islam in a post-British India was already being canvassed in the radical madrasahs of Deoband. Back in 1900 the British had chosen to make the official language of India’s most populous region, United Provinces, Hindi rather than Urdu, written in Devanagari, not Arabic, script. With this, many Muslims grew more and more concerned that in a future time they might be dominated by the Hindus who would ‘suppress Muslim culture and religion’. One British official at the time reported to his masters that many Muslims saw their destinies as completely separate and thought that ‘no fusion of the two communities was possible’. The great issue that had preoccupied Akbar had returned to haunt India.

  In response to these events, the Muslim League was founded in Dhaka in 1906, to represent Muslim interests in the forthcoming liberation struggle. Among those who left Congress to join it was yet another British-educated lawyer, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a secular Shia who was destined to play a central role in the history of modern India. Congress had always worked to draw Muslims to its cause, but was often accused of being ‘too Hindu’, though some eminent Muslims remained committed throughout to its secular goals, including the philosopher, poet and educationalist Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who remained all his life a supporter of Hindu–Muslim unity and who was the first minister of education in free India. In the end, events unfolded, as they often do in history, partly by accident rather than design. The idea of Muslim separatism was pushed first of all as a bargaining counter for seats in parliament, then as a negotiation for autonomous Muslim states within a federation; only later still did it become a serious demand for an independent country.

  It is a little-known paradox, though, that the idea of a separate country for Muslims was first mooted by a Hindu nationalist in 1924. At that time Jinnah and the Muslim League were still fighting for an Indian federation, with Muslims guaranteed a third of parliamentary seats. The fateful moment came in 1928, when Congress offered the League only a quarter of the seats. Compromise then would perhaps have changed the course of Indian history. For Jinnah, though, it was a ‘parting of the ways’.

  Whether Partition could or should have been avoided is a moot point that has been agonized over by many Indians and Pakistanis ever since. Indeed, from time to time one still reads articles in Indian newspapers that canvas the possibility of reunification. This is especially strongly argued by those who believe that Partition came about because of British realpolitik. Did the British tacitly approve it because it would help them divide and rule in the post-war, cold war world? Full publication of the papers in the last forty years at least absolves the British of that. Partition was really the result of multiple failures: the failure of Congress and the Muslim League to make concessions, and the failure of the British to act up to their historic responsibilities. The historical parallels are instructive. When the American states debated after 1776, the powerful ones conceded rights and powers to the small in order to achieve the Union. The goal of Congress was a united India, but in the end they were unable to make the concessions that would perhaps have got it. Jinnah, the brilliant but intractable Muslim leader, formerly a convinced nationalist, argued himself into a corner. The British, their power and sense of destiny broken by the Second World War, wearily gave up responsibility for their legacy and agreed to the Partition of India, separating the Muslim majority areas around the fringes of the subcontinent, including Sind and western Punjab, heartland of India’s first civilization.

  The British deadline for Independence was originally set for June 1948, but already Hindus and Muslims had clashed violently and bloodily in the northwest and Bengal. Beset by the growing threat of disorder, the British rushed the date forward to 14/15 August 1947. Fearing the reaction on the ground, the British didn’t reveal the exact line of demarcation until the next day. In the Punjab the Sikhs who were divided by the line immediately took up arms to defend their own community. Meanwhile, Hindus and Muslims, often former neighbours, turned against each other amid rumour and hysteria. The result was terrible bloodshed and the largest migration in history, as 11 million people quit their ancestral villages and fled for their lives across the invisible border drawn up by a foreign power that was no longer present. The exact death toll will never be known; often estimated at one or two million, it may well have run into hundreds of thousands.

  So the Muslim League got their independent country. Pakistan formally became an Islamic republic in the constitution of 1956, though this was not quite what Jinnah had planned: he kept his palatial 1930s bungalow on Malabar Hill in Bombay (it is still owned by his family), fondly imagining that he might spend part of his retirement there, which only shows how badly he misread the outcome. Pakistan began as two parts, the eastern one, East Bengal, having nothing in common except religion with
the lands to the west that comprised Baluchis, Punjabis, Pathans and Sindhis. Separated by 2000 miles, East and West Pakistan were never a plausible state, and the East went its own way in the war of 1971, supported by Indira Gandhi’s government, becoming Bangladesh, the seventh largest country in the world (Pakistan is the sixth). Meanwhile, a large portion of the Muslim population of British India remained in independent India, though the bitter aftermath of Partition has left many of them an increasingly disadvantaged part of the population. India today is the second largest Muslim country in the world, with around 180 million Muslims. Not surprisingly, many have since wondered what all the suffering was for.

  INDEPENDENT INDIA

  Just before midnight on 14 August 1947, Nehru made his long-awaited speech, shot through with pride and regret: ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom …’

  Initially, hard times followed Independence. The fiscal balance sheet of the British had seen India, one of the two greatest world economies in the sixteenth century, slump to 3 per cent of world GDP by the early 1900s. The austerities of the early years were exacerbated by the Congress government’s self-imposed socialist economic model and Gandhian ethic of self-sufficiency. Famine struck as late as the 1960s. The modernizing of India’s ‘great tradition’ made slow progress until the opening up to foreign investment in the early 1990s. Since then there has been a dramatic rise in India’s standard of living and economic power, which is predicted to overtake even the USA by the late 2030s. The twenty-first century, then, will see the old Asian giants returning to their place in history.

  An important issue since Independence has been the battle over India’s identity. The narrative of Indian history shaped by Congress during the freedom movement was created by Western-educated, English-speaking lawyers and emphasized secularism and Hindu–Muslim unity. Since Independence, and especially in the last two decades, this narrative has been contested, often bitterly. In Nehru’s great book The Discovery of India (1947) the heroes are enlightened leaders like Akbar, whose idea of India was pluralist and tolerant – hence the importance attached to the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, whose lion capital became the emblem of India, and whose wheel of dharma replaced Gandhi’s spinning wheel (to the mahatma’s displeasure) on the national flag.

  But, as always, there are other histories. The majority of India’s people are Hindu, and already in the nineteenth century a nascent Hindu nationalist movement saw the British occupation as the catalyst for the end of Muslim power in India and the coming of Hindu rule once the British had gone. The partial failure of the secular ideal in Partition was now to problematize Islam within India for the first time. For if Partition had been on religious grounds, and if Pakistan was an Islamic state, then was India, as Congress asserted, a secular state, or was it really a Hindu country? For Hindu nationalists the answer was obvious. These questions were already insistent at the moment of freedom. Gandhi, who (to Nehru’s disquiet) had promised to restore the Ramraj, the golden age of Rama, was assassinated by a Hindu for pandering to Muslims. And this sectarian divide has continued to influence Indian politics over the last twenty years, during which even the terms of India’s secular constitution have been called into question.

  The main opponent of Congress became a Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, which was founded in 1980 but grew out of earlier ‘Hindutva’ parties, such as the Hindu Mahasabha (which began in 1915 as a response to the Muslim League), and more hardline organizations, such as the militant RSS (founded 1925) and the VHP (1966). The BJP’s rapid rise in the late 1980s was predicated on historical arguments about Hindu– Muslim history (supported and contested by opposing groups of professional historians and archaeologists). They mobilized support around the issue of the destruction of Hindu temples by Muslim rulers in the Middle Ages, focusing in particular on a mosque in Ayodhia alleged to have been built on top of a demolished Hindu temple by Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty. Dangerously tapping into communal tensions, the leader of the BJP rode a Toyota truck converted into Rama’s chariot on a rabble-rousing pilgrimage across northern India to ‘liberate’ the birthplace of Ram at Ayodhia. This issue, which, as it turned out, was based on a fantasy of the past, was to threaten the very fabric of the body politic, as Nehru himself had accurately foreseen in 1950. The destruction of the mosque by a mob in 1992 generated an atmosphere of fear and violence that has intermittently spilt over into horrific killings, as in Gujarat in 2002. When they became the leaders of the government in the late 1990s the BJP sponsored an archaeological dig on the site of the destroyed mosque to test the truth of the myth, but, ironically, the dig proved that there had been no significant structure on the site before the Middle Ages: it had not been an early location of the Rama cult. A salutary lesson for those who mix myth and politics.

  INDIA INC.

  Unexpectedly, given the increasingly favourable economic climate, the BJP Hindu nationalists were defeated in the 2004 national elections, and the old Congress consensus returned to office to preside over India’s economic ‘miracle’. These dramatic economic changes had begun in the same year as the Ayodhia disaster, but their long-term effects will reshape our world. To avoid national bankruptcy the then prime minister, Narasimha Rao, dropped Nehru’s socialist protectionist economics and opened India up to foreign investment, reformed its capital markets, and deregulated domestic business. Soon Pepsi and Coke could be found on stalls even in India’s remotest villages. The final rejection of Gandhi’s self-sufficiency ideas has caused some introspection; the biggest Bollywood hit of 2006 even brought the mahatma back to offer guidance to India’s new ‘It’ generation! Tremendous problems no doubt remain, especially in caste inequalities, rural poverty, environmental degradation and overpopulation. But the world’s largest democracy is now firmly set on the path of growth and change, and will go about it in the way that Indian people have always done – adopting what is useful from the outside and holding on tenaciously to the old goals of life inherited from their past.

  UNITY AND DIVERSITY

  ‘You have to remember that “India” is your name for us,’ says my journalist friend Ravi, expansive and jovial in an extravagantly patterned weekend kurta. We are sitting on the steps below the Great Mosque in Delhi: good-natured crowds are pouring out after Friday prayers; shoppers are milling around the clothes stalls and dharbas (roadside restaurants); boys are selling cheap watches and laminated posters of the Kaaba, the Taj and London’s Big Ben. Around us are smoky fires heaped with sizzling kebabs.

  Our name for us is Bharat, which has a very different meaning from India. In India time is linear. In Bharat it is circular, mythic. They stand for two different mindsets; and Indian people, even the lowliest, move comfortably between the two. Multiple identities have been part of our history for thousands of years. And these identities are perfectly comfortable with both the ancient and the modern. There is no stigma for a nuclear scientist to worship Ganesh, the elephant-headed god – in fact, we all love him. India has gone through many ups and downs. We have known terrible poverty, but we have great riches from our past. We are comfortable with our culture.

  Ravi gestures to the crowds around him:

  India is a modern construct – a creation of the British that was made political reality by the freedom movement. Essentially, India was a fantastic, supremely aesthetic and ethical idea dreamt up by a handful of outstanding nationalists, chief among them Nehru, a child of modernism and rationality. He saw the future of India as a grand fusion of West and East. He wanted to cut across ancient allegiances, those encoded memories built up over thousands of years. That past to him was a bar to progress: the iniquities of ignorance, superstition, the caste system and untouchability were all gross inequalities. Democracy and secularism, he thought, would free people from the weight of the past.
And despite Partition and secession wars, they did it: they created an allegiance. And about religion surely Nehru was right. In a land of so many religions and 33 million gods, secularism is the only protection for human rights. In any case, is religion the way we should be defined?You know, in the 1991 census, for the first time, they asked a series of questions about religious belief. The interesting thing was, whether Hindus Muslims, Christians, Jains or Parsees, people agreed on most things. In fact, more than 90 per cent of people agreed on what they did and what they believed. Whatever you believe, if your allegiance is to India then you are Indian.