Muslim identity in subcontinental politics

THE mainstream Indian nationalism under the stewardship of the Indian National Congress was first challenged by the Muslims. Muslim leaders could see that the Congress failed to maintain its separation from the blooming Hindu nationalism. In spite of the important differences, both demographic and sectarian, of the Muslim community spread over the subcontinent, it was the British colonial rule that conjured up an image of homogeneous "religiopolitical community" of the Indian Muslims.
The colonial rule ignored the finer distinctions in regional philosophical orientations of South Asian Islam. A section of the Muslim population "began to see themselves in the colonial image of being unified, cohesive, and segregated from Hindus." Muslim leaders started constructing a Muslim community identity that was later enlarged into Muslim nationhood.
The Indian colonial census made religion its fundamental ethnographic category for ordering and classifying demographic and developmental data. Each census report sought to give concrete and recognisable shape to the religious communities indicating their majority or minority status in each region and the country as a whole. The break-up of literacy and occupational statistics, religion-wise provided an objective picture of the relative or comparative material and social conditions of each religious community. The result of this census taxonomy was the new concept of "religion as a community."
Religion came to be identified with "an aggregate of individuals united by formal official definition." The colonial knowledge of redefined religion was incorporated into every structure that the state created, every opportunity that it offered to the colonial subjects -- from educational facilities, public employment, representation in local self-governing bodies to entry into the expanded legislative councils. Thus, relationship between religious groups was reconstituted in the late 19th century India.
As Hindu mobilisation made progress, it also simultaneously sculpted and vilified its 'other,' the Muslims. The Muslims began to discover their community identity informed by their common religion and an invented shared past. An aggressive Arya Samaj movement contributed to the counter-mobilisation of the Muslims in urban Punjab.
In the countryside, too, Islam penetrated rural politics in the 19th century through such intermediaries as the sajjad nishius, pirs and the ulama. In Bengal, particularly as the frontier of cultivation expanded between 16th and 18th century, Islam also spread as the "religion of the plough," bringing local people gradually into its fold. Under the leadership of a section of Bengali speaking Muslim literati and religious preachers (pirs), Islam in Bengal in 16th and 17th centuries acquired a syncretistic face.
In all the regions of India, Muslims suffered from a sense of relative deprivation in comparison with Hindus. This feeling was shared differently by the richer and poorer sections of the community. However, when the political mobilisation of the Muslims began, the interests of the peasants came to be subordinated to the interests of the elites, which were projected as the interests of the entire community.
Among the Bengal Muslims a distinct Muslim identity had been developing at a mass level from the early 19th century through various Islamic reform movements. These movements sought to purge whatever they thought to be of un-Islamic origin. This gave the lower orders or the atrap a sense of social mobility. This was developed through various agencies, such as the itinerant mullahs, the bahas (religious) meetings and the anjumans (local associations). This process helped in political mobilisation and in strengthening the argument about separate Muslim interests.
The elite Muslim leaders soon linked this new sentiment to the relative backward condition of Muslims and to the need of organising themselves as a political pressure group to demand their just share of the institutional opportunities created by the colonial rule. The first Muslim organisation in Bengal was the Mohammedan Association, or the Anjuman-I-Islam, in 1855. Thus, the essentials of Muslim politics had taken shape in Bengal even before the more well known Sayyid Ahmed Khan's movement was started in UP. The Muslims of Bengal became conscious of the political implications of their number and the necessity of social mobilisation across cultural barriers.
The easiest way to forge horizontal solidarity was to harp on the common faith, and the mullahs through the local anjumans carried the urban message to the countryside. Around 1905, almost all major towns in Bengal had local anjumans. Close collaboration between the educated Muslims and the mullahs was a distinctive feature of the small town anjumans. Those anjumans forged a link between the urban elites and the rural masses and thus brought the latter into the larger political conflict.
Extremist politics and Hindu revivalism further facilitated Muslim mobilisation by reinforcing the social fault lines. The Hindu bhadrolok in Bengal often looked down upon the Muslims with contempt. The Hindu jatras (rural theatrical performances) often indulged in vilification of Muslim historical persona, which was not very lightly taken by the anjumans or the mullahs. The cumulative effect of all those factors was the accumulation of social tension, which ultimately culminated in communal tension.
The social separation of the two communities was further politicised by the Swadeshi leaders freely using Hindu religious symbols and coercing Muslim peasants to observe boycott. They unwittingly allowed the movement to grow into a Hindu-Muslim question. Instead of having a secular approach to the political issue, they constantly harped that the Muslims were being given extra privileges at the expense of the Hindus. The Swadeshi movement put on the Muslims the unmistakable stamp of 'otherness.' Therefore, in no time the anti-partition agitation appeared in Muslim consciousness as an anti-Muslim campaign. The Bengali Muslim Society, both the elites and their peasant followers had begun to pull in a different direction.
In north India, in late 19th century a variety of locally instituted bodies, such as anjumans, neighbourhood akhras, and festival committees got involved in popular cultural activities that gradually constructed the cultural identities based on a symbolic religious vocabulary. The crafting of a "religiously informed cultural identity" was taking definite shape. Such reconstructed cultural identity was later deployed in the institutional politics of identity.
Aligarh College was a "profoundly political enterprise" that succeeded in producing an ethos of solidarity in educated Muslim minds. Added to this was the direct opposition to the Congress strategy, which Sir Sayyid thought was an attempt to organise and consolidate the Hindu majority electorate to dominate over the Muslim minority in the new representative bodies and civil services. This majority phobia increased further because of the cow-killing riots of 1893, the Hindu demand for legal ban on cow-slaughter and Congress silence about it.
The inadequacies of Sir Sayyid's loyalist politics gave rise to the urgent need for a political organisation for the Muslims in order to mobilise the community against the Congress and to also offer an independent political platform. The possibility of Bengal partition being rescinded made the Bengal Muslim leadership panicky.
The Bengali Muslims were always more politicised than their north Indian counterparts, and after all it was the Bengal situation of 1906 that had acted as a catalyst in bringing into existence the new Muslim party. The granting of separate electorate for the Muslims in 1909 provided an official legitimacy to the minority status and the separate political identity of the Indian Muslims, with Muslim League representing its public face. The subsequent evolution of this Muslim identity from minority status to nationhood took a long and tortuous trajectory.

The writer is a columnist of The Daily Star.