The importance of partition in 1947 for the Hindus has been completely missed by the proponents of secular Indian nationalism and Hindu Rashtra alike. Indeed, I, for one, do not know of a single foreign scholar either who has grasped the true significance of the historic event. As a result, the political discourse on India, both at home and abroad, has continued to proceed broadly on old pre-partition lines. We still speak of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ communities as we did before August 15,1947.
It should, however, be obvious on careful reflection that partition could not have changed dramatically both the geography and the population composition of India without changing the very nature of the social, cultural and political order in the country. I submit that it did in fact produce such a change. On August 15,1947, the Hindus finally became a nation, though not a Hindu nation. The distinction is important and shall be discussed independently at some stage.
To be candid, I must admit that this formulation has crystallised in my own mind only recently. I had been dissatisfied with whatever I had read on partition and related subjects. But I was not able to come up with a comprehensive formulation of my own till the present turbulence in Kashmir obliged me to re-examine the problem. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have now fallen in place; or so I believe.
I have often said, half in joke and half in seriousness, that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was the greatest benefactor of the Hindus in modern times, if he was not a Hindu in disguise. This has been my way of saying that partition was the best thing that could have happened for the Hindus in the given situation in the mid-forties, because, without it, they could not have produced even a workable constitution, not to speak of a viable economic and democratic political order. But it never occurred to me till recently that the Hindu-Muslim problem, as we faced it in the whole of this century, was the result of an old civilisation stalemate and that partition had finally ended it in favour of the Hindus in three-fourths of India.
For over two decades, I have argued that the Hindus were not, and could not become, a community in the sense the Muslims could, and in fact had, and that it was, therefore, wrong to equate the two in the discussion on the so-called communal problem. In retrospect, I reject both these propositions.
Clearly, like other Indian writers and commentators, I, too, have looked at Hindu society through the eyes of Western scholars and found it hopelessly divided on the basis of caste, sect and language in the absence of unifying principles such as a common language and scripture – the Bible in the case of the Christians and the Koran in that of the Muslims. Under the same influence I have accepted that Islam served as a unifying force for the Muslims and I have interpreted the concept of nationalism in monolithic terms which in our case would mean a Hindu-Muslim ‘integration’.
My present position is strikingly different. I now believe that the civilisational unity of the Hindus has been too pervasive and powerful to have been shattered by external onslaughts; that Islam in India has been too syncretistic and internally divided to be able to define itself in terms of its own values; that its apparent unity was largely the product of a deliberately fostered hostility to the Hindus; and that nationalism in our case has to be pluralistic in its approach and has to centre on our civilisation which is universal in the deepest sense of the term by virtue of its being the only primordial civilisation to have survived intact and not to have degenerated into a narrowly defined religion.
I have not been opposed to caste system as such. On the contrary, I have regarded it as a powerful impediment against the rise of a kind of undifferentiated mass society which I believe accounted for the rise of Nazism in Germany to a great extent and accounts for the troubles of the western world as a whole. But I have been appalled at the consequences of the politicisation of the caste system and entertained for years the apprehension that Hindu society faced the prospect of dangerous fragmentation and not of consolidation. This problem still worries me. But now I do not link it with the issue of nationalism and see it as part of the Hindu society’s interaction with forces of modernity and politics.
I have not been opposed to the reorganisation of states, including finally Punjab in 1966, on linguistic basis, and I have never been attracted to the idea of merging Haryana and Himachal Pradesh into Punjab again in order to cope with the terrorist menace in Punjab. Indeed, I have taken the view that the Indian languages constitute a barrier against the erosion of our cultural values and civilisational forms which are under attack not only from the West but also by those of us who think, speak and write in the English language and constitute the dominant elites in all spheres. Yet I have also taken the view that if it were not for the continued and possibly growing use of English as a means of all-India communication among the elites, we would be lost.
This problem still remains to be resolved but only because we have not recognised the centrality of Sanskrit in our civilisation and the need to restore it to its former status. I do not think that this possible solution to our language problem is closed forever, though the difficulties are obvious enough. For, should the Bharatiya Janata Party ever come to power at the Centre, it can be persuaded to initiate moves in that direction.
To sum it up, despite my reservations regarding Nehru’s policies and pronouncements, my thinking has also been limited largely to the parameters defined by him. More recently I have had occasion to examine carefully the pronouncements of his critics, especially of Veer Savarkar who is possibly the most outstanding of them all, and found that they too are caught in the same intellectual trap of the West’s making. They, of course, reject Nehru’s concept of secularism but not the West’s assessment of the nature of Hindu society and its definition of what constitutes a nation. And the less said about their view of Indian history the better.
I do not blame them. On the contrary, I am only too well aware that it is not easy to resist the power and sweep of Western scholarship, which has become a fully integrated industry with each ‘component’ suitably ‘designed’ and ‘machined’ to fit the end objective of denying the uniquely coherent character of Indian civilisation. But that cannot detract from the horror of it all. Imagine men of the stature of Nehru and Veer Savarkar subscribing to the theory of an Aryan invasion of India through the north-west, conquest of the sub-continent and imposition on it of an ‘Aryan’ civilisation! Not one of them paused to ask obvious questions such as: why is there nothing comparable to the Veda in any other ‘Aryan’ country? Why has India alone managed to retain an unbroken continuity in its basic values and approaches? Why have the Hindus no memory of having lived anywhere else?
These are, however, too large and complex issues to be even touched upon in this space. Indeed, I have already gone too far afield in my desire to persuade fellow commentators to take a pause and re-examine the basic assumptions which have informed their thinking and writings all these years. Having engaged in a bit of intellectual autobiography with that end in view, I must return to the subject under discussion – the emergence of the Hindus as a nation, though not as a Hindu nation, in 1947.
Of necessity, I have to make what might appear to be sweeping statements to ‘serious’ scholars in this age of specialisation when we seek to know more and more about less and less. But each statement can be substantiated by any scholar, provided he is willing to abandon the iron cage in which our Western masters have imprisoned us. Of course, not all western scholars fall in this category of prison wardens. There are honourable exceptions. Indeed, I must confess that since I function mainly through the English language, all my formulations are derived from Western scholars who are not part of the ‘knowledge industry’. They are a miniscule minority. But they exist. In India we do not possess even such a miniscule group. Unless we appropriate Ananda K. Coomaraswamy as an Indian, we cannot cite figures comparable to Rene Guenon, Frith of Schuon, David Frawley, Antonio de Nicolas and Ernest McClain for the interpretation of the Vedas, Upanishads and Vedanta.
Now the first sweeping statement. All the convulsions, such as the rise and fall of dynasties and empires, including the great Moghuls, notwithstanding, I see the Muslim period of Indian history broadly in terms of a Hindu-Muslim civilisational stalemate. While the Hindus could at best limit the sweep of Muslim power in certain areas on certain occasions, the Muslims could not win a victory decisive enough to enable them to impose their faith and mores on the Indian people throughout the length and breadth of the sub-continent. The Muslims accounted for only one-fourth of India’s population at the time of partition and a vast majority of them began to shed their Hindu practices and acquire a Muslim self-awareness only towards the end of the nineteenth century.
I am aware that this sharply defined distinction between the Hindus and the Muslims has been, and will be, questioned. I have told in the past and I shall be told now that neither the Hindus nor the Muslims were so self-aware and that more often than not, Hindu soldiers and captains fought under the flags of Muslim rulers and vice versa. But surely no one can deny, at least with equal felicity, that the arrival of the Muslims in north India produced a confrontation between the culture they brought with them and the culture that prevailed in the land earlier and that neither triumphed up to the time of independence and partition.
Of course, it can be contended, as it has been contended in the past, that we did not then possess anything like an internally coherent pan-Indian culture. This is not true. We can trace a pan-Indian Sanskritic civilisation in India from at least the second century BC when Buddhist and Jain monks went south and helped shape the so-called Dravidian languages, literatures and cultures. It is more than likely that the Brahmins were there even earlier as references in the Ramayana to Agasteya and his ashram suggest. In any case, the Buddhist and Jain presence is well documented. What we lacked was a coherent pan-Indian political order. The great and lasting contribution of the British is that they have helped fill that gap in our civilisation. Indeed, it is this contribution which has made the rise of a nation state possible in India.
It is well-known that a thin crust rose on top of Hindu society during the Moghul rule, the members of which spoke and wrote in the Persian language and imitated the ways and mores of the Muslim rulers. In secular terms, they constituted the dominant elite among the Hindus so much so that, as rulers, even the Marathas and the Sikhs maintained their records in the Persian language. But it is a gross exaggeration to speak of an Indo-Muslim or Indo-Persian culture much beyond the court circles. Bhakti was essentially a Hindu phenomenon and Sufism a Muslim one. A syncretism of sorts prevailed more widely. But that only meant that neither the Hindu nor the Muslim mould could dominate and triumph.
This stalemate continued under the British. Indeed, an incontrovertible case can be built to prove that the British policy after the 1870s was designed to ensure that the stalemate continued. That was the purpose of the separate and weighted (in favour of the minorities) electoral system as provided for in the Montague-Chelmsford and the Minto-Morley schemes and the Government of India Act of 1935, and a number of other measures which the British enforced.
Similarly it is not open to serious argument that the British lent every possible support to Jinnah in his campaign for Pakistan. But that is where they went wrong. Jinnah had to over-reach himself in order to be able to implement his grand design about which I wrote briefly last week. In the process, he could not help making himself vulnerable. The British anxiety to get out of India as quickly as possible for a variety of reasons added to Jinnah’s vulnerability and finally enabled Nehru and Patel to call his bluff. Pakistan, as it emerged in 1947, constituted the biggest set-back the Muslims had received since the fall of the Moghal empire.
To the best of my knowledge again, no scholar or political figure has seen this event in this historical perspective. I have not yet explored the reasons for this intellectual failure. But my tentative view is that the main reasons for this failure are that hardly anyone thinks in civilisational terms these days; that even those who do so tend to under-estimate the power and resilience of Indian civilisation, if they do not denigrate it as a mass of primitive superstitious beliefs and practices; that the inherent weaknesses of Islamic civilisation in India are ignored and the magnitude of Muslim power, influence and impact is vastly exaggerated; and that the freedom struggle has been interpreted, including by its principal leaders, especially Nehru, in Western political terms. I have come to believe strongly that the sources of our thinking have been poisoned and that unless we eliminate that poison, we shall continue to misread our past and present and jeopardise our future.
Despite my criticism of him, Nehru remains, in my estimation, a great Indian, second to none in the contribution he has made to the well-being of his people. But, in my opinion, his contribution needs to be placed in the Indian perspective. I hope to be able to attempt this in these columns.
Sunday Mail, 18 February 1990