Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915-1930

Constructing Nation and History

Prabhu Bapu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136254994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Hindu nationalism has emerged as a political ideology represented by the Hindu Mahasabha. This book explores the campaign for Hindu unity and organisation in the context of the Hindu-Muslim conflict in colonial north India in the early twentieth century. It argues that India's partition in 1947 was a result of the campaign and politics of the Hindu rightwing rather than the Islamist politics of the Muslim League alone.

The book explains that the Mahasabha articulated Hindu nationalist ideology as a means of constructing a distinct Hindu political identity and unity among the Hindus in conflict with the Muslims in the country. It looks at the Mahasabha's ambivalence with the Indian National Congress due to an extreme ideological opposition, and goes on to argue that the Mahasabha had its ideological focus on an anti-Muslim antagonism rather than the anti-British struggle for India's independence, adding to the difficulties in the negotiations on Hindu-Muslim representation in the country. The book suggests that the Mahasabha had a limited class and regional base and was unable to generate much in the way of a mass movement of its own, but developed a quasi-military wing, besides its involvement in a number of popular campaigns.

Bridging the gap in Indian historiography by focusing on the development and evolution of Hindu nationalism in its formative period, this book is a useful study for students and scholars of Asian Studies and Political History.

1 Introduction

Nationalism in India was an acutely contested and contradictory terrain, with divergent religious and communitarian impulses exerting pressure on the incipient nation in the early twentieth century.¹ The crucial dichotomy which shaped the debate on Indian nationalism was that of secular versus cultural nationalism, both of which claimed sovereignty and formed the background against which the process of imagining of the Indian nation as a historical entity had occurred.² Secular nationalism guided the Indian National Congress's drive for a united front of all communities in India's struggle for freedom from Britain as the ‘ruling ideology’.³ The Congress's universalist narrative, positing ‘unity in diversity’ as the essence of Indian nationhood, evoked the image of a nation as ‘neutral’ in religious affairs.⁴ Its construction of a secular Indian identity signifed an equality of all communities and creeds [sarvadharma samabhava] and a spirit of accommodation among them.⁵ This position was in contrast to the colonial view that the basic unit of Indian society was the community defined by religion, and that India's religious differences were ‘irreconcilable’.⁶ In claiming to transcend religious differences, the Congress represented itself as a ‘truly nationalist movement to confront colonialism and meet its criticisms — to make India “better” ’.⁷ However, to Indian nationalism posited in opposition to colonialism, the real diffculty was with cultural nationalism, Muslim and Hindu, which gave rise to an alternative counter-hegemonic — anti-Congress and antisecular — discourse in the country.⁸

The debate on Indian nationalism has been advanced over the past few decades through the exploration of the social and political dimensions of the rival paradigms — the Muslim League's ‘two-nation’ theory and the Congress's ‘secular nationalist’ creed — which largely offered an explanation for the partition of Indian subcontinent.⁹ This work revisits the ‘great divide’ by exploring the third dimension of partition: the politics of Hindu nationalism. It seeks to explain the long silence on the history of Hindu nationalism, which has been marginalised as ‘subordinate’ or ‘separate’ in the narratives of the larger issue of India's freedom struggle. It explores the ideological development of Hindutva, which arose in a specific historical context from efforts based on the evocation of a classical ‘Hindu past’ in the early twentieth century.¹⁰ It focuses on the emergence and evolution of Hindutva narrative as part of a particular historical trajectory articulated by the Hindu Mahasabha in the context of the growing Hindu—Muslim conflict, more so as a counterweight to the Muslim League's theory of a separate ‘Muslim nation’, in north India.¹¹ The reconstruction of the Mahasabha's political programmes and activities centring on ‘Hindu unity’ and organisation forms an integral part of this project. This study aims to examine what Hindu nationalism signified at the time of the Mahasabha's formation, how it conflicted with the Congress's secular regime of power and democracy, and why it continued to be so deeply inflected with a ‘Hindu’ idiom. It argues that Hindutva discourse was established in a particular historical moment, making possible the articulation of new categories of a ‘Hindu identity’ and politics in north India. The central thesis of this study is that the Mahasabha launched a campaign for a distinct Hindu ‘political identity’ and unity in a conflict with the Islamic ‘other’, and that the party had its ideological focus on an anti-Muslim antagonism rather than an anti-British struggle in the mobilisation for India's freedom.

This project aims to uncover the lost tracks to a negotiated unity which may have prevented India's partition by exploring the construction of Hindu nationalism — which referred to the ‘prejudice’ dividing Hindus and Muslims and was seen in opposition to the Congress's ‘secular nationalism’.¹² Hindutva — a cultural vocabulary on the construction of a political vision of India as a ‘Hindu nation’ — was the expression of a communitarian ‘Hindu identity’, which receded from the Congress's ideal of an ‘inclusionary nationalism’ and shifted towards an apparently exclusionary politics.¹³ It represented a religiously informed cultural identity and politics, laying an emphasis on the aspects of Indian tradition and history rooted in a ‘Hindu’ idiom, challenging the theory of ‘one nation’ and ‘undivided sovereignty’ advocated by the Congress.¹⁴ In Hindutva theory, territory, race, and culture were cohesively articulated as the basis of a ‘Hindu nation’.¹⁵ Crucially, it represented a Hindu cultural divide which was not negotiable or amenable to accommodation, disproving the histories of a ‘composite culture’ or ‘assimilation’ in India.¹⁶

The United Provinces, comprising the North Western Provinces and Oudh, was the largest Muslim minority province of India in the colonial period, occupying about one-sixteenth of British India — an area of 105,000 square miles.¹⁷ By 1900, its population numbered 44,107,869 — the second largest provincial population after Bengal [one-fifth of British India's total population]. Thirtyeight million were Hindus, and over seven million, or 14.5 per cent, Muslims.¹⁸ It was a relic of Muslim rule in north India and a home turf of the Muslim elite, which had fostered a distinctively Muslim culture and politics.¹⁹ Politically, the UP was India's most dominant region and the key province that had been a pivot in the Muslim League's political projection of the ‘two nation’ theory and the ‘Pakistan’ plan in the 1940s.²⁰ This study's main focus will be on the provincial stage, in particular the UP — the political nerve centre of Indian nationalism.²¹

In the first section on ‘Hindu nationalism’, the opening chapter examines the emergence of a ‘Hindu unity’ movement in the Punjab in the early twentieth century, analysing the beginnings of an urban, upper-caste Hindu politics and consciousness, which constituted the ideological basis of Hindu nationalism.²² Hindu organisations in the Punjab advocated an exclusive form of ‘Hindu politics’ and made efforts for national ‘regeneration’, a drive that eventually led to the establishment of the Punjab Hindu Sabha in 1909 and the All-India Hindu Mahasabha in the UP in 1915.²³ The Mahasabha's formation was predicated on the new arenas of conflict and competition between Hindus and Muslims, resulting from the colonial state's census enumeration and electoral politics introduced in the country.²⁴ The state's institution of separate electorates under the Morley—Minto reforms of 1909 in its search for potential loyal and conservative allies in Indian society had resulted in the creation of a separate Muslim electoral category in its own right, triggering the propaganda by Hindu publicists that became so prominent in the Mahasabha's birth.²⁵ The Mahasabha's Hindu-oriented discourse and its emphasis on Hindu tradition and culture as the basis of a national political order had effectively resulted from its perceived need to combat Muslim ‘domination and influence’ in the state's networks of collaboration in the early twentieth century.²⁶

Chapter 3 studies the nature and composition of socio-economic classes, which became crucial for the emergence of the Hindu Mahasabha movement in the UP in the early 1900s. The Mahasabha had originated with the active patronage and influence of social groups which were once the patrons of the Congress, even though it heavily depended on the support of landed and aristocratic groups, business classes, and urban traders in the province.²⁷ This study suggests that the Mahasabha was an elite-led organisation like the pre-Gandhian Congress, but that its reliance on the power of the aristocracy and notables with attendant conservatism and factionalism hampered its development as a mass organisation. The Mahasabha was conspicuously absent in the Congress's anticolonial mass struggles and failed to attract mass support in north India.²⁸ However, there was a marked ambiguity of relations between the Congress and the Mahasabha due to the existence of informal associations and nexus in the UP in the 1920s and 1930s, a key issue explored in this work. It is argued that even though the Congress's image at the all-India level remained secular, its associations with the Hindu Sabhas had persisted in informal forms in terms of the personnel and programmes in the towns and districts of the UP until the Mahasa-bha was blacklisted as a ‘communal organisation’ in 1938.²⁹ The Mahasabha had emerged as a fully fledged political party under V.D. Savarkar's leadership since the late 1930s, making vigorous efforts to develop as the political challenger of the Congress.³⁰ In strategy, its plan was to consistently distinguish its Hindu-oriented goals from the Congress's national programmes on the basis that it was the sole legitimate organisation to represent the Hindu community in India.³¹

In the second section on ‘sangathan ideology’, Chapter 4 explains that a grassroots movement — sangathan [Hindu unity and oganisation] — came into existence in the aftermath of the Moplah massacres and the Khilafat movement in the 1920s, representing an aggressive and militant anti-Muslim mobilisation in north India.³² The basis of sangathan narrative was a ‘unified’ Hindu society, emphasising community rather than hierarchy, and unity rather than division — all presumed to create a monolithic Hindu community in opposition to the Islamic ‘other’.³³ The Hindu Mahasabha relied on various means to create a ‘unified’ Hindu society — particularly shuddhi [ritual purification] organised through the Arya Samaj's networks, untouchable integration, and caste uplift programmes — in the UP.³⁴ This study reveals that there were several conflicts and divisions in Hindu society due to the institutional pervasiveness of the caste [varna] hierarchy, which had yielded itself as an instrument of ‘upper caste’ hegemony.³⁵ The campaign for a ‘Hindu homogeneity’, which the ‘Hindu identity’ politics treated as fundamental, was not a natural but a constructed form of closure, as untouchable integration and lower caste uplift were not fully accom-modated due to a sanatanist [orthodox Hindu] resistance and blacklash.³⁶ The Mahasabha's programme of ‘Hindu unity’ and consolidation was driven in part by an apparent reconciliation of caste tensions, but more fundamentally a need to combat the ‘Muslim other’, resulting in the recurrent outbreak of riots in the UP in the 1920s and 1930s.³⁷

Chapter 5 discusses the Hindu Mahasabha's articulation of militant nationalism firmly set within the framework of the ideas and writings of V.D. Savarkar — the ideological father of Hindutva — demonstrating a shift from anti-British themes to an anti-Muslim antagonism in India.³⁸ Hindutva — or political Hinduism — became a foundational doctrine devoted to explicating the ideological contours of a ‘Hindu nation’ [Hindu rashtra].³⁹ Hindutva represented an ethnic conception of India as a nation based on territory, race [ethnicity], and culture, which was to be both a fatherland [pitribhumi] and a holy land [punybhumi] for one to be defined as a ‘Hindu’.⁴⁰ It viewed India as originally the ‘land of Aryans’, rooted in Hindu culture and tradition.⁴¹ The primal patronymic, ‘Hindu’, was fundamentally antagonised in history through a conflict with the Islamic ‘other’, the ‘enemy’ of the Indian nation being not the British, but Muslims.⁴² Hindutva articulated a ‘Hindu identity’ based on a cultural difference, which was denied by the Congress's ideal of a singular ‘secular nationalism’.⁴³ It rejected the Congress's vision of a territorial Indian nation in favour of a ‘Hindu nation’ based on a Hindu majority rule by situating Muslims outside the nation. To Hindutva, India was culturally defined as a nation, not a ‘territorial nation’.⁴⁴ This work suggests that Hindutva was firmly based on a conception of Hindu majoritarian rights counterposed against the potential rights of the minorities — Muslims and Christians — who were to be assimilated by their allegiance to Hindu culture. An anti-Muslim hostility was central to Hindutva narrative, which became profoundly aggressive and militaristic under Savarkar's presidentship of the Mahasabha in the late 1930s.⁴⁵

Chapter 6 reveals that in the UP, Hindu publicists — comprising a disparate variety of r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on translation and references
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Hindu nationalism
• Part II Sangathan ideology
• Part III Hindu nation
• Index