Number of words: 1,228 Comparing Gandhi and Jinnah is an extremely complex exercise but important for they were, or rather became, the two foci of the freedom movement. Gandhi was doubtless of a very different mould, but he too, like Jinnah, had gained eminence and successfully transited from his Kathiawari origins to become a London … Read more

Number of words: 220 This device of the communal electorates served its purpose so well, in the manner devised that a decade later we find a successor secretary of state for India, Montagu, and the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, placing on record their observation: ‘Division by creeds and classes means the creation of political camps organised … Read more

Number of words: 231 It is this one single step, acknowledged and encouraged by Minto, among of course, various other factors, which we examine in subsequent chapters that contributed to a ‘separation’ mentality. And indisputably this rejection of personal enfranchisement and acceptance of the device of reservation, based on religion, finally moved the Muslim political … Read more

Number of words: 432 In the final analysis, it was more the fact rather than any prospects of a partitioning of Bengal that crystallised Muslim opinion against an anti-Partition agitation launched by the Hindus. This was largely a consequence of a stir amongst Hindus of rural Bengal, who opposed Partition, consistently, both before and after … Read more

Number of words: 632 Outside of the particularities and rituals of the two faiths, what also separated them was the medium of education, the language used and the curriculum adopted; they were entirely different and separate. Schools of teaching tended to be attached (mostly) to temples, mosques and such other congregational centres. The medium of … Read more

Number of words: 476 At the leading edge of this Islamic reform, was Deoband, founded in 1867 by Ulema imbued with the tradition of Shah Waliullah. They believed that education should no longer be for the purpose of training Muslims for serving the Empire, instead it ought to train them in the art of ‘survival’ … Read more

Number of words: 307 Afghani’s views were astonishingly correct for those times; he advocated nationalism of a linguistic and territorial variety, implying a unity of Hindus and Muslims, with little said about unity amongst Indian Muslims or with Muslims of other lands. He was not a pan-Islamist, at least not then, effectively refuting such notions … Read more

Number of words: 162 An unexpected, perhaps inevitable but nevertheless, sad consequence of the multiple traumas of 1857 was a decline in the status of Persian in India. In consequence the ashraf suffered most, and some of the rational sciences, those distinctive contributions of Iran and Central Asia to Indian Islam, began to lose their … Read more

Number of words: 285 In areas where the Persian Islamic traditions were dominant, that distinctive culture (Perso-Islamic) began to represent the culture of the rulers, these were/are the ashraf, the global people, whose ancestors had come from other cultures, or so they averred, and some certainly had but most only so claimed. The ashraf had … Read more

Number of words: 425 Because most Indo-Persian chroniclers of medieval India identified Islam with the fortunes of their royal patrons, therefore, with sycophantic inaccuracy they reduced accounts of those reigns into such hagiographical nonsense as ‘India’s history’ begins only from when Muslims began to rule areas around Delhi/Agra/Malwa. This attitude can be traced to the … Read more