Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

In the heart of the modern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) lies the erstwhile region of Awadh—or Oudh as it was known in British historical texts—an independent state that rose to prominence in the early eighteenth century as the power wielded by Mughal emperors was on the wane. The first ruler of Awadh, and the progenitor of the Nawabs of Awadh, Saadat Khan, laid the foundation of the capital city, Faizabad, on the outskirts of Ayodhya in 1722 ce. Awadh was truly God’s own country with the Ganga, Jamuna, Sarayu and Gomti flowing through it. It was circumscribed by the Triveni at Prayag (Allahabad), Kashi (Varanasi), Vrindavan (Mathura), Haridwar and Rishikesh—the core of Hindu civilization. The reign of the nawabs gave rise to what is known as the Ganga–Jamuni tehzeeb—a multiculturalism particular to this area of the central plains of northern India, a fusion of Hindu–Muslim elements. And it is here, in the qasbah of Mustafabad—near Rae Bareli and Lucknow—in the heart of Awadh’s syncretic culture, that my early years (the 1950s) were spent.

Akbar Allahabadi succinctly summed up the Muslim social hierarchy in the late thirties: Council mein bahut Sayyid; Masjid mein faqat Jumman (The Viceroy’s executive council is full of Sayyids, But the mosques are packed only with the Jumman.) It is a sensitive social detail to dilate on. Jumman is a common name for a low-caste Julaha or weaver. It is also shorthand for the largest number of converts at the hands of proselytizing groups. At the heart of it all was the tension between the liberal Muslim, Persianized and broadminded and the majority of Indian Muslims, the newly converted ‘Jummans’, Arabized and focused on the mosque. A basic rule of thumb was: culture came from Persia, Islamism from Arabia. The Persian stream had tributaries of Sanskrit, Awadhi, Brajbhasha flowing into it, enriching it to a point that it became something organically new. It came to be known as Urdu culture, totally independent of religion. Arabic remained the language of the Quran, and, therefore, the language of prayer and of religious reform.

The title of the Shah of Iran was ‘Arya Mehr’, or ‘Light of the Aryan’. When Aryan tribes arrived from Persia and Central Asia and settled in the Indo-Gangetic plains, they called it Aryavarta or the Land of the Aryans. Persia’s Shia Islam did not erase Zoroastrian culture but absorbed it. Navroz, the Persian New Year, is celebrated by sprinkling saffron colour in all countries which were once part of the pre-Islamic Persian Empire. This tradition has been preserved by the Shias of Awadh and the Parsis of India. Awadh, after all, is the undisputed ‘markaz’ or centre of Shia culture in India, indeed in South Asia.

Akbar Allahabadi’s mischievous play on ‘Jumman’ was actually a commentary on hierarchies in Muslim society that I have briefly touched upon earlier. These divisions were as rigid as those in the Hindu caste system. Of course, there was a difference between the two. The varna or caste-based system was the social architecture designed by Brahmins. Muslim hierarchies evolved under the feudal system. When Sir Syed Ahmad Khan laid the foundation of Aligarh Muslim University (patterned on Cambridge) in the late nineteenth century, he was quite firm that it was a...

The Prophet’s immediate family was called ‘Panjatan’ or ‘The Five’. The five were Prophet Muhammad, his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima, and his grandsons, Hasan and Hussain. The extended family is called Ahle Bait, or the fourteen ‘Masoom’, the ‘Pure Ones’, consisting of the twelve Imams, Ali being the first...

Sayyids prided themselves on being direct descendants of the family of the Prophet. In the list of the Muslim elite, which consisted of landowners and other upper-caste Muslims like Shaikhs and Pathans, Sayyids were the most influential. Their stat...

There are numerous ways to describe the dividing line between Shias and Sunnis. One of them, which applies to the Shias and Sunnis of India, is simple: Shias are in agreement with the followers of the family of the Prophet on the issue of succession after the Prophet’s death in 632 CE. By their reckoning, Ali should have succeeded him as the first caliph. He was the first convert to Islam, an outstanding soldier who led most of the Prophet’s military campaigns. He was, at the same time, an exceptional administrator and scholar. Did the Prophet nominate him as his successor? Shias cite the incident at Ghadir Khumm as clinching proof that the Prophet had indeed announced that Ali should be accepted as his successor. Returning to Medina after his last Haj at Mecca in March 632, three months before his death in June that year, the Prophet halted at a place called Ghadir. He lifted Ali’s hand and proclaimed: Munkunt O Maula, Haza Ali Maula (They who consider me their Maula or leader appointed by God, must also consider Ali their Maula). This line has become an essential declaration of faith at the start of every Qawwali session, the form of spiritual music based on Hindustani ragas initiated by Amir Khusro. Qawwals go into ecstasy singing the ‘Qaul’ or declaration of Ali’s prophethood. No Samma (qawwali sessions in Sufi shrines) can be held without the Qaul. Interestingly, a large percentage of the audience at a Samaa is usually Sunni. This is ample evidence of Sufi influence o...

Shii Sunni differences

Notionally, Mecca and Medina are equally holy to both Shias and Sunnis, but in practice, Shias have different priorities—Najaf, Karbala, and Damascus, where the shrine of Zainab (Imam Hussain’s sister) stands, are the most sacred pilgrimage centres. Zainab, incidentally, was the one who witnessed the Battle of Karbala in which Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, was martyred and recounted it to the people in her eloquent sermons. Without Zainab the tragedy of Karbala would have been buried in Karbala. For Shias, the ten days of Muharram, mourning the Battle of Karbala, trumped everything else.

The grandeur of Lucknow’s architecture is in its imambaras, the elegant halls and palaces built in memory of Imam Hussain. Numerous tazias (replicas of Imam Hussain’s tomb in Karbala), and Zuljenahs (horses that represent Imam Hussain’s horse) are taken out in decorative processions several times a day during Muharram. Zuljenah or ‘dul dul’ in common parlance is admired for its equine feats, of course, but particularly because it returned to the tent of Zainab and other ladies without its rider, Imam Hussain. The Zuljenah is, therefore, the first bearer of the news of what Shias consider the greatest tragedy to have overtaken them. Lucknow, the headquarters of India’s Shias, was known for these Zuljenah processions.

After the shock of 1857, the British strategy was obvious: devise ways to keep Hindus and Muslims in conflict. The arrival of more British troops to boost the British component in the armed forces in India led to an unexpected complication. When numbers rose from 20,000 in 1857 to more than 60,000 in the next two decades, the provision of beef for British troops became a priority. This became a sensitive issue because of the rapid increase in gauraksha or cow protection organizations across north India which, in the early twentieth century, were patronized even by national leaders like Mahatma Gandhi. The British establishment kept itself insulated from Hindu anger by allowing official underlings to point fingers at Muslim butchers who actually performed the physical act of slaughtering the cows. This led to numerous Hindu–Muslim riots. Exhaustive correspondence between British officials, quoted by senior Gandhian scholar Dharampal—who spent months in the India Office Library and the British Museum in London studying British records on the subject—shows the Raj deliberately provoked Hindus against Muslims, sowing the seeds of their divide and rule policy. In 2002, Dharampal and his colleague T. M. Mukundan published their research. The title of the book says it all: The British Origin of Cow Slaughter in India. The book is replete with instances of Muslim leaders, editors, social workers joining cow protection groups as a mark of solidarity with the Hindus. But the British...

Among the revelations made in the Transfer of Power documents was the fact that Lord Louis Mountbatten, who arrived in the country in March 1947 as Britain’s last Viceory, specifically tasked with overseeing the transfer of power, concealed from public view the Punjab award—the Punjab border delineated by Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s Border Commission. It was expected that violence would most certainly follow the award—this would spoil the Independence Day festivities in which he was to star. The delay in publishing the report multiplied the scale of the holocaust. Timely publication of details of the award would have enabled the administration to take preventive measures. It could be said, therefore, that Mountbatten was largely responsible for the scale of the massacres.

In his book, India Wins Freedom, Maulana Azad, one of the foremost leaders of the political establishment at the time of Independence and president of the Indian National Congress from 1939 to 1946, exposes the role his colleagues in the Congress Working Committee played in partitioning the country. He argues that, until the very end, Jinnah was merely using Pakistan as a ‘bargaining counter’. The Maulana was vocal and vehement in his opposition to partition and tried to persuade Nehru and Patel to stop it. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a barrister and statesman, was convinced that there were two separate nations within India and rather than be like brothers bickering every day, they should have ‘one clean fight’ instead. The Maulana was pained that Patel had now become an even greater supporter of the two-nation theory than Jinnah. ‘Jinnah may have raised the flag of Partition but now the real flag bearer was Patel’, he notes in his book.

The Maulana had left careful instructions regarding thirty-odd pages of India Wins Freedom—these were to be made public only after he and Nehru were dead. When Azad’s brutally honest version exposing the duplicity of the Congress finally came to light in 1988, it invited some motivated criticism but it did not inspire the extended debate which it deserved. History owes the Maulana gratitude for having recorded crucial facts which may have been erased by time. Where Azad disappoints is in his own role during this phase. The Congress volte face on partition was strong enough reason for him to resign from all posts in the party, even from the primary membership of the party. Why did he not resign? Had he resigned, the Congress would have been exposed for having partitioned the country into two entities—one led by Hindus and the other by Muslims. By staying on, Azad provided the Congress with a fig leaf of secularism. It is instructive to note that the Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, one of the tallest Muslim leaders of the time, wept at the meeting where the partition decision was taken.

The Maulana writes about the time after Patel and Nehru had become supporters of partition and Gandhiji remained his only hope. When the Maulana met Gandhiji on 31 March 1947, he told him categorically, ‘My only hope now is in you. If you stand against Partition, we may yet save the situation. If you however acquiesce, I am afraid India is lost.’ Gandhiji replied passionately that if the Congress wished to accept Partition ‘it will be over my dead body’. He added that as long as he was alive he would never agree to the partition of India nor allow the Congress to accept it. But soon after, events took an astonishing turn. Later that same day Gandhiji met Lord Mountbatten. He saw him the next day as well and again on 2 April. Sardar Patel came to Gandhiji after his first meeting with Lord Mountbatten and was closeted with him for over two hours. When the Maulana met Gandhiji again, he got ‘the greatest shock of my life’. Gandhiji had changed: while he was not openly in favour of partition, ‘he no longer spoke so vehemently against it’. What further surprised and shocked the Maulana was that Gandhiji had begun to repeat Sardar Patel’s arguments. The Maulana proceeded to plead with Gandhiji for over two hours but failed to make an impression on him. ‘In despondency I at last said, “If even you have now adopted these views, I see no hope of saving India from catastrophe.”’ Gandhiji replied saying that he had already made the suggestion that they should ask Jinnah to form the g...

Maulana Azad’s testimony about the reality of partition is valuable because few leaders command as much credibility. The premium Nehru placed on the Maulana’s qualities of head and heart was enormous. Nehru’s deep respect for the Maulana as a loyal friend and intellectual comes out clearly in the letters he wrote to Indira Gandhi from Ahmadnagar Jail, including his intention to learn Urdu and Persian poetry from the Maulana, ‘an ideal teacher, except that he is too erudite’. But, as we have seen, the Maulana felt betrayed when Nehru lined up with Patel and others to accept the partition of India on 3 June 1947. Dramatic irony attends Maulana Azad’s role in the proceedings after the acceptance of the partition plan. In a letter to Nehru on 24 July 1947, Gandhiji suggested that Maulana Azad need not be accommodated in the Cabinet. My guess is that the suggestion had its roots in the fact that many leaders were uncomfortable with the Maulana’s vocal discomfort with the enthusiasm with which the Congress had accepted partition. Let me quote the letter from Gandhiji that his biographer Pyarelal records. Dear Jawaharlal, I did not say anything yesterday about the Maulana Saheb. But my objection stands. His retiring from the cabinet should not affect our connection with him. There are many positions which he can occupy in public life without any harm to any cause. Sardar is decidedly against his membership in the cabinet and so is Rajkumari. Your cabinet must be strong and effect...

A year after India gained independence one would have expected remorse to have set in among the Congress leadership. But, during and after ‘police action’ (in reality military action) in Hyderabad, a brazenly anti-Muslim attitude surfaced. The Nizam of Hyderabad had refused to surrender sovereignty to the new nation which outraged Congress leaders. These were the very same leaders who had talked of a secular state and were opposed to the two-nation theory. But in the immediate aftermath of Partition they were beginning to fear the idea of a ‘Muslim State’ of Hyderabad in ‘Hindu India’. Patel called it a ‘cancer’ in the heart of India. Nehru signalled for a division of the Indian Army, under Major General J. N. Choudhuri, to march in and take over Hyderabad in September 1948. The immediate pretext for military action were the misdeeds of members of the powerful Razakar militia—the armed wing of Hyderabad’s most powerful separatist Muslim political party aligned with the Nizam—who were terrorizing Hindu villagers. The Indian troops defeated the Nizam’s forces within days. According to official estimates, the massacre of Muslims that followed took the lives of more than 40,000. The stories of atrocities committed are horrifying. This is the estimate of the report of the fact-finding team under the chairmanship of Pandit Sunderlal. A 2015 BBC documentary revealed that the government (Nehru and Patel) tried to suppress the publication of the report, a fact echoed by the jurist ...

On 9 November 1989, one of the wisest Congressmen I have known, Saiyid Nasir Hussain, sat in his office in the Faizabad mosque, contiguous with Ayodhya, holding his head in his hands and weeping: ‘They have cheated the Muslims.’ He then blurted out: ‘The deal with the VHP was struck at the very top.’ He knew what he was talking about. ‘In UP the Congress is finished,’ he declared. His words would prove prophetic. In a move to pre-empt Hindu mobilization to liberate Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had ordered the locks of the Babri Masjid to be opened in 1986. This would allow Hindus to have ‘darshan’ or be able to see the Ram idols which were placed under the central dome of the mosque. Rajiv Gandhi was advised that by opening the locks of the Babri Masjid, he would kill two birds with one stone—he would defuse Hindutva mobilization and, at the same time, silence mounting criticism that he was appeasing Muslims on the Shah Bano issue. The Shah Bano case was a landmark judgement in April 1985, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Muslim Personal Law could not stand in the way of Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which applied uniformly to all Indians, including Muslims. The issue was the case of Shah Bano, a sixty-two-year-old divorcee claiming maintenance, which Muslim Personal Law denied her. Conservative Muslim opinion was incensed at the court interfering in their Personal Law. Rajiv Gandhi decided to placate the Muslim vote bank. He ...

The 1991 elections brought Rao to power. But the result carried in it ingredients which disturbed him. Except for a handful, all Brahmin candidates from the Congress (and some other parties) were rejected by the electorate. As an overreaction, Rao planted Brahmins all around him as advisers. Traditionally, the vice president was invited to become chairman of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR). On this occasion, Rao blocked K.R. Narayanan, a Dalit vice president, from the chairmanship of the ICCR. Vasant Sathe, who had been defeated in Maharashtra, was accommodated in the slot instead. In 1993, a year after the Babri Masjid demolition, when Rao decided to have an elected Congress Working Committee, the results shocked him. Arjun Singh, who was fiercely opposed to Rao, led the pack. Apart from his political secretary, Jitendra Prasad, the top six candidates were non-Brahmins. On a flimsy pretext, Rao had the results annulled. Rao was going through a phase when his interests as a Brahmin superseded his interests as a Congressman. It can be said without fear of being contradicted that if Rao were given the power to choose between Arjun Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister, he would have, without any hesitation, cast his vote for Vajpayee. He was politically the most ‘Hindu’ of all Congress prime ministers. Kamaluddin Ahmed, a Congress MP from Warangal in Telangana, who had observed Rao closely, said to me: ‘His sharp anti-Muslim edges are derived from...

My association with Vajpayee was spread over his two spells in government. He was external affairs minister in the post-Emergency Janata Dal. That is when he revealed his admiration for Nehru. K. K. Katyal of The Hindu and I were in the external affairs minister’s room in South Block waiting for a word with Vajpayee on his first day in office. ‘I am overwhelmed with emotion,’ he said. ‘I remember with reverence that Pandit Nehru once sat on the chair I am about to occupy.’ This was his first spell at South Block as Minister for External Affairs from March 1977 until July 1979. Vajpayee was receptive to the Indo–Pak, Hindu–Muslim, New Delhi–Srinagar triangle when I first sketched it for him in the course of the conversations his helpful press secretary, Ashok Tandon, arranged for me. Even during the bus journey to Wagah (advertised as the ‘Lahore bus journey’), he whispered to me, ‘Do you think one line of your triangle will have been addressed on this visit?’ The triangle, in my view, is a pithy metaphor for the mess left behind by Partition. India–Pakistan, New Delhi–Srinagar and Hindu–Muslim are essentially one set of issues. Not one line or an angle of this triangle can be tinkered with without affecting the other two. ‘It is a law of triangles that if one line, or angle, is addressed, the other two will be correspondingly affected.’ He relapsed into one of his lengthy, intimidating silences. Vajpayee did make a real bid for improved ties with Pakistan. His visit to Min...

What was the death toll in the killing fields of Jammu? There are no official figures, so one has to go by reports in the British press of that period. Horace Alexander’s article on 16 January 1948 in The Spectator is much quoted; he put the number killed at 200,000. To quote a 10 August 1948 report published in The Times, London: ‘2,37,000 Muslims were systematically exterminated—unless they escaped to Pakistan along the border—by the forces of the Dogra State headed by the Maharaja in person and aided by Hindus and Sikhs. This happened in October 1947, five days before the Pathan invasion and nine days before the Maharaja’s accession to India.’ Reportedly, as a result of the massacre/migration, Muslims who were a majority (61 per cent) in the Jammu region became a minority. Mountbatten was in control in Delhi and had news of the genocide of Muslims in Jammu filtered out of the media. Sadly, there has been precious little discussion in India about this horrible phase of history. Maharaja Hari Singh’s involvement, with the support of the RSS, is evident from a letter Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Vallabhbhai Patel on 17 April 1949 (quoted in Frontline magazine): In this (intelligence) report, among other things, a reference was made to a growing Hindu agitation in Jammu province for what is called a zonal plebiscite. This idea is based on the belief that a plebiscite for the whole of Kashmir is bound to be lost and, therefore, let us save Jammu at least. You will perhaps remem...

It is an amazing coincidence that Muslim contact with India and the West began in the same year—711 CE. It was in this year that Muhammad bin Qasim’s probe into India took place. He was a young general in the Umayyad’s army. Another general with the Caliphate, Tariq ibn Ziyad, crossed the narrow strip of ocean between Morocco and the tip of Spain. He anchored by the giant rock which he called Jabal al Tariq (the Rock of Tariq). The British renamed it Gibraltar. North of Gibraltar, through Spain and Portugal, the entire Iberian Peninsula came under Muslim rule. This lasted nearly 800 years until Columbus set sail for the New World in 1492. During the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, Andalusia’s capital, Cordoba, became the biggest and ‘most dazzling city in Western Europe’ in the tenth century, when London and Paris were small towns. Jewish, Muslim and Christian philosophers met in the city square. It became a renowned intellectual centre. It had more hamams (steam baths) for its population of about 200,000 than even some of the later and bigger Ottoman cities. This, at a time, when there was a taboo on bathing in Europe. Composer Mozart had died at thirty-six because of this taboo. At the other end, Muhammad bin Qasim’s probe which landed him in Sindh signalled the Arab world’s continued interest in India. Before Islam, there had been thousands of years of trade relations between the two, punctuated by acts of piracy, to loot and to control the shipping lanes. Qasim’s invasi...

Pakistan, on the other hand, had remained the West’s ally since 1947 because that was the pre-determined trajectory it was supposed to follow. Narendra Singh Sarila’s The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition explores the role played by Pakistan as one assigned to it by imperial powers. After the discovery of oil on an industrial scale in the Gulf, which the West was thirsty for, it needed a major Muslim country as a ‘pliable’ ally, and Pakistan more or less chose itself for historical as well as geopolitical reasons. So Pakistan was nursed along in every possible way since Indian non-alignment was declared ‘immoral’ by John Foster Dulles who served as Secretary of State under US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Even Pakistan’s nuclear programme was silently tolerated. Pakistan paid its dues by allowing the US and the Saudis to help create the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. These Islamic militants would drive out the Soviets from Kabul in 1989, an event which was a precursor to the collapse of the Soviet Union. All this was not without costs, including to the US. The spare jihadi reservoir exported militancy to Kashmir, Egypt, Algeria and eventually to New York on 9/11. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s remark to an interviewer in January 1998 will be remembered for its callousness. The priority, he said, was to defeat the Soviet Union and not worry about ‘some stirred up Muslims’. Well, the ‘stirred up’ Muslims are plaguing the world today.

Ashraf, Ajlaf and Arzal. (Elite, weavers and middle craftsmen and the menials.)