Islam and Nationalism in India

South Indian contexts

M.T. Ansari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317390503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Islam in India, as elsewhere, continues to be seen as a remainder in its refusal to "conform" to national and international secular-modern norms. Such a general perception has also had a tremendous impact on the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who as individuals and communities have been shaped and transformed over centuries of socio-political and historical processes, by eroding their world-view and steadily erasing their life-worlds.

This book traces the spectral presence of Islam across narratives to note that difference and diversity, demographic as well as cultural, can be espoused rather than excised or exorcized. Focusing on Malabar - home to the Mappila Muslim community in Kerala, South India - and drawing mostly on Malayalam sources, the author investigates the question of Islam from various angles by constituting an archive comprising popular, administrative, academic, and literary discourses. The author contends that an uncritical insistence on unity has led to a formation in which "minor" subjects embody an excess of identity, in contrast to the Hindu-citizen whose identity seemingly coincides with the national. This has led to Muslims being the source of a deep-seated anxiety for secular nationalism and the targets of a resurgent Hindutva in that they expose the fault-lines of a geographically and socio-culturally unified nation.

An interdisciplinary study of Islam in India from the South Indian context, this book will be of interest to scholars of modern Indian history, political science, literary and cultural studies, and Islamic studies.

Part I
“Two circles of equal size”

1
“An impossible factor”

Ali’s autobiographical fragment

I know, the only thing that the government dreads is this huge majority I seem to command. They little know that I dread it even more than they. I have become literally sick of the admiration of the unthinking multitude.

(M.K. Gandhi, 1999, vol. 26, 260)

All other forces having failed the Congress, after it became the government of the day, it saw a new force in the plan of mass contact…. It can only create exasperation, bitterness and hostility. This is precisely what the mass contact plan of the Congress did. For there can be no doubt that this mad plan for mass contact has had a great deal to do with the emergence of Pakistan.

(B.R. Ambedkar, 2000, 59)

From an Islamic perspective, two key events (often referred to as “setbacks”) form the backdrop of early attempts of Indian Muslims to engage (with) modernity. The first was the replacement of Persian as the official language in 1835, which “rendered, as it were, a whole nation illiterate” all of a sudden (Afzal Iqbal, 1978, 3).¹ The second was the 1857 rebellion (see Hasan, 2008) and its aftermath, where a community trying to adjust and cope with its changed situation was faced with severe repression. Nonetheless, though reeling under the loss of prestige and cultural power and accustoming itself to the suspicious gaze of the British, this community managed to start three seminal educational ventures during this time; a fourth was started in the 1920s. These educational ventures, with different persuasions and preoccupations, were attempts from within the community to address the new questions raised for the Muslim community at large.

Unfortunately, the leaders of the community, the traditional/organic intellectuals,² could not forge an alliance with similar forces among other peoples, given the political turmoil in the Indian subcontinent during the pre-Independence period. Well before the 1920s, contradictions within the nationalist ideology and their resolutions made the Congress party project itself as the sole representative party of all Indians while at the same time it allied with Hindu revivalist movements. In their ardent desire for a unified nation, some of the Congress leaders valorized a notion of continuing love and trust between Hindus and Muslims and spoke rhetorically about an emotional bonding between the two communities. Such rhetoric flew in the face of the Muslim League position, which was guided by motives of self-preservation and its felt threat of being beleaguered within a future Hindu majority nation.³ The imagined fraternity upheld by the Congress, being caught between colonial histories of Islamic conquest by various Muslim invaders and the construction and consolidation of Hindu communal nationalism, was pitted against the fear and frustration of the Muslim League and, as a consequence, “nationalism” and “communalism” emerged as contradictory ideologies. However, there was a significant phase in this troubled history when these two communities did come together, politically and passionately. This phase was one of the last joint initiatives between the Hindu and Muslim leaderships, known as the Khilafat movement of the 1920s. The Khilafat movement was part and parcel of the Congress-League initiative of mass mobilization in its anti-colonial drive. However, the Khilafat movement also threw up new questions that exceeded the scope of the Congress-League policy. Hence, I focus on the autobiographical fragment of one of the prime movers of the Khilafat movement, Maulana Mohamed Ali (also spelled/known as Maulana Mohammad Ali Jouhar or Jauhar) in order to analyse the relation between the emerging contours of an Islamic community, reconstituting itself in relation to modernity and the nation, in the context of an individual’s experience.

I

The flier of a seminar on autobiography pointed out that its intention is “to examine autobiography as a genre of discourse that has gained special significance in the background of the emergence of Dalit and women’s writings, where the genre occupies a privileged position and also of the poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and the construction of the self in language.”⁴ But, does not autobiography have another minor instance? Or, is it that by its very constitution autobiography is not a viable opening for/from the minority position? Such a question is particularly of interest if only because of the repeated demand made on minorities to Indianize themselves.

Before reading Mohamed Ali’s autobiographical fragment, it would be instructive to look at two definitive nationalist autobiographies. The compulsions – political at the most personal level and vice-versa⁵ – in the act of writing an autobiography are brought out by Gandhi’s and Nehru’s forays into the genre. Gandhi notes in his introduction that he started writing An Autobiography, or the Story of my Experiments with Truth, at the instance of some of his nearest coworkers, as early as 1920. However, the project was brought to a standstill by riots that broke out in Bombay. Subsequently, he was imprisoned and, urged by a fellow prisoner, recommenced work on his autobiography and was so caught up with it that he was actually sorry when he was released from the prison a year early, since it disrupted his autobiographical project. However, he found another way out. Since he had no spare time, he decided to serialize his autobiography in Navajivan. The problems Gandhi had to tackle in this venture were entirely of a new order:

A God-fearing friend had his doubts, which he shared with me on my day of silence. “What has set you on this adventure? He asked. “Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the East having written one, except amongst those who have come under Western influence.… Don’t you think it would be better not to write anything like an autobiography, at any rate just yet?

(1927, ix)

This argument had some effect on him and he justifies his autobiographical project in these terms:

But it is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. But I shall not mind, if every page of it speaks only of my experiments. I believe, or at any rate flatter myself with the belief, that a connected account of all these experiments will not be without benefit to the reader. My experiments in the political field are now known, not only in India, but to a certain extent to the “civilized” world.… But I should certainly like to narrate my experiments in the spiritual field which are known only to myself….

(ix–x)

It is worth our while to note that the language of the finished English version, though translated from Gujarati, reads as if it was the original itself, with such a seamless transparency of self, nation, and text that the regional would indeed seem to be the national.

On the other hand, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote his autobiography, almost the whole of which he finished while in prison, in English itself, possibly with a national reader in mind. In the preface to the 1936 first edition, he states that his primary object was to occupy himself with a definite task so necessary in the long solitudes of gaol life and to review past events in India. Nonetheless, he is keenly aware of his addressee and remarks that if at all he thought of an audience, it would be his own countrymen and countrywomen. Moreover, “For foreign readers I would have probably written differently, or with a different emphasis” (1936, xv). Foreign readers are advised to consider unimportant those aspects that do not interest them, though Nehru felt that everything he touched upon had a certain importance in the India of his day. Nehru goes on:

My attempt was to trace, as far as I could, my own mental development, and not to write a survey of recent Indian history. The fact that this account resembles superficially such a survey is apt to mislead the reader and lead him to attach a wider importance to it than it deserves. I must warn him, therefore, that this account is wholly one-sided and, inevitably, egotistical….

(xv–xvi)

While Gandhi could not be dissuaded from writing his autobiography, Nehru was worried it would be read as a political rather than a personal document. In the case of Nehru, even as late as the preface to the 1962 edition – apart from the sense of a firm locus standi from where he can presumably address other Indians as well as other nationals – he still thinks of his work as having general interest and is glad that a cheap paperback edition has been brought out (xiii).

In this context, it is significant that Mohammad Ali Jinnah never wrote an autobiography, despite the perception that he was the sole spokesman (Jalal, 1994) of all Indian Muslims. However, there are autobiographies by other Muslims, including a fragment of an autobiography by Mohamed Ali, an equally prominent leader of the struggle for independence. His largely ignored autobiographical fragment is of special interest since it can help one study the logic of the minoritarian enunciation of selfhood. The internal conflict involved in minor instances of the autobiographical is succinctly brought out by Afzal Iqbal, the first person to edit Mohamed Ali’s autobiographical sketch, written, like Nehru’s, in English in the late 1930s.⁶ Afzal Iqbal came across the manuscript in May 1939 at the Jamia Millia Islamia. It was hitherto unpublished because M. Mujeeb, as Mushirul Hasan points out in the introduction to his edition (1999, 9), who had the manuscript with him, had by then become highly critical of Mohamed Ali and had not pursued its publication. The autobiographical nature of the work aroused Afzal Iqbal’s interest so much that he volunteered to edit the manuscript. The title of the manuscript – “Islam: Kingdom of God” – was deemed inappropriate by Afzal Iqbal, although he acknowledged the possibility of it being apt for the finished work. Given the fragmentary nature of the text, Afzal Iqbal edited the title to My Life: A Fragment; An Autobiographical Sketch of Maulana Mohamed Ali and the volume was finally published in 1942, more than a decade after Mohamed Ali’s death. Introducing the text, Afzal Iqbal comments:

Curiously enough Mohamed Ali had never meant to write the present book. He started with the life of the Prophet and ended with his own! Like many other good things in life, the hazel-wand of chance has given us this fragmentary account which lays bare the working of a great mind who had so much to do in shaping the destiny of India. It was by chance alone that the book was written in the present form, and it is by another chance, less dramatic, but perhaps equally important, that it is now seeing the light of day, after about eighteen years since it was actually written.

(1946, vii)

Mohamed Ali’s autobiographical venture while in prison is often referred to as marking his shift to a more communal position. Hence, it would be instructive to juxtapose here Nehru’s observations of his experience of the prison. Asked by the publisher to update An Autobiography, Nehru felt that he cannot possibly do justice to the work. Since the request is reasonable, he could not deny it, nonetheless

I have found it no easy matter to comply. We live in strange times, when life’s normal course has been completely upset. But a more serious difficulty confronted me. I wrote my autobiography entirely in prison, cut off from outside activity. I suffered from various humours in prison, as every prisoner does, but gradually I developed a mood of introspection and some peace of mind. How am I to capture that mood now, how am I to fit in with that narrative? As I glance through my book again, I feel almost as if some other person had written a story of long ago.

(599; emphases added)

Nehru could look back at his autobiography five years later, in 1940, and feel that, though written by someone else, it still was a story; elsewhere he calls it an “egotistical narrative of my adventures through life, such as they were” (595). On the contrary, Mohamed Ali’s is another story altogether. His introspection during enforced leisure brought him up against the fact that his life was not a story, or at least did not have a story that could be taken for granted, and his autobiographical endeavour acquires political overtones, in fact becomes a political project of minoritarian enunciation. The fragmentary nature of the text, the long delay in its publication, and the significant change of title point, in an uncanny manner, to the unfinished nature of Islam in India.

I use Mohamed Ali’s autobiographical fragment to frame my discussion of some of the pioneer Muslim educational institutions in the next chapter. The following analysis, it is hoped, will provide a backdrop for my discussion of these educational ventures and the different positions they made available for Muslims vis-àvis re-interpretations of Islamic traditions in terms of modernity, the notion of community and nation they helped circulate, and the subjectivities they tried to institutionalize. Therefore, rather than attempting an in-depth textual reading, I focus on examining the implications of his shift to a (more) communal position.

At first glance, Mohamed Ali’s conception of Islam appears to have a world scale. It seems not to be limited to the recasting of a community within India, but envisages a pan-Islamism that stands up against the “White Peril” of imperialism alongside “sturdy little Japan,” “the [wakening]… sleeping giant in China” and the Blacks (1944, 54).⁷ If Europe and America feared the Yellow Peril and the Black Peril, from the perspective of Asia and Africa, the White Peril was more real and alarming. Pan-Islamism, which he refers to as the “Revolt of Islam,” is then a countering “force [set up] for purposes of defence, not of defiance” (1944, 55) in the face of European and American imperialism.⁸ And Ali would still maintain: “What has the Muslim situation abroad to do with the conditions of the Indian Muslims?” (1944, 70). From his other writings we know that the other prong of his attack on imperialism was to request Hindu Indians to stop their “quarrel with history” and forgo “the unfortunate habit of ignoring the one great reality of the Indian situation – the existence of about 70 million Muslims who had made a permanent home in this country” (1944, 66). Presenting “the communal patriot” as a critical position in 1912, his appeal to Hindu communal patriots was to stop treating the Muslim “as a prisoner in the dock,” “as an impossible factor in the scheme of India’s future” (1944, 67). While it was possible for Gandhi to give confused messages about whether to owe primary allegiance to one’s religion or nation,⁹ Mohamed Ali emphatically proclaims:

Where God commands I am a Muslim first, a Muslim second, a Muslim last, and nothing but a Muslim. If you ask me to enter into your empire or into your nation by leaving that synthesis, that polity, that culture, that ethics, I will not do it. My first duty is to my Maker, not to HM the King, nor to my companion Dr. Moonje; my first duty is to my Maker and that is the case with Dr. Moonje also. He must be a Hindu first, and I must be a Muslim first, so far as that duty is concerned. But where India is concerned, where India’s freedom is concerned, where the welfare of India is concerned, I am an Indian first, an Indian second, an Indian last, and nothing but an Indian.¹⁰

I draw attention to the crucial use of the word “synthesis” in the above as pointing towards not a stagnant or static notion of subjectivity, but of an individual shaped and reshaped in a historical community.¹¹ Nonetheless, Ali’s exasperation is obvious when examining the different trajectories of Hindu and Muslim communal patriots, he demands that the Hindu communal patriot accept Islamic communities in India such as they are without letting the Muslim “weigh on his consciousness… as a troublesome irrelevance… [that] some great exodus or even a geological cataclysm could give him riddance” unless the Muslim “quietly shuffles off his individuality and becomes completely Hinduised” (1944, 66).

Mohamed Ali’s shift in position, his turn, if not return, to Islam, has a long personal history. He notes how his mother had to go against his uncle in order to give him “the Godless influence of English education” and thus make a third infidel in the family, after his elder brothers (1999, 50). This family background is counterpointed with his exposure to Aligarh’s raison d’etre and his new acquaintance with the Quran during his internment (61–68, 112–130). Maybe there is a sense in which this transformation can be re-interpreted. Mushirul Has...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• PART I “Two circles of equal size”
• PART II Malabar contra memory
• PART III Literary nationalism in Malayalam
• Epilogue
• References
• Index