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03 August, 2015
The following excerpt is from the article "Between the Lines" by Manan Ahmed Asif in "The Caravan", Volume 7, Issue 7, July 2015.
What is at stake in arguing for the inevitability of Partition? Were the imaginations of Jinnah, Ambedkar, Iqbal, Usmani or even the JUH scholars the "plentifully imagined" that we seek? At the heart of the imaginations invoked by these leaders and intellectuals was the understanding of Muslim "foreignness" to India, and of Islam as having its "origins" in Arabia. This claim was first articulated by British Orientalists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and by the time of early twentieth century, it was a naturalised story (emphasis added). It was not, however, unchallenged. One particular voice against it was that of the medievalist historian Mohammad Habib. His keynote address at the annual Indian History Congress in December of 1947 in Bombay is a critical text that shows how historians could, and did, formulate critiques of colonialism during British rule. Habib proclaimed:
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The breaking up of India into two separate states, or lawmaking organisations with exclusive citizenship, which creates a spirit of hostility, and in any case of independence and separateness, not only between the governments but also between the people, and the establishment of one of these states upon a purely religious and communal basis --- this sort of monstrosity has never been known to the history of our land.
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This is strong language, and we should acknowledge this historian's use of it. Habib reminded his audience that the Muslims of India, like the Hindus of India, were the farmers, the workers, the powerless (emphasis added). They all belonged to the "sacred land where the black gazelles graze and the munja grass grows and the pan-leaf is eaten, and where the material and the spiritual are organically interwoven." However, 200 years of British rule "completely altered their basic character," and the Indic whole fractured into "communities" which focus only on materialism, on "gangsterism." "There is, I believe, at present no graveyard in the land to which an Indian citizen could lay claim merely on the basis of his Indian citizenship," Habib lamented. The Indian's connection to the land was no longer valid --- having been superseded by claims of religion.
Habib's historical research looked at the origins of India's Muslims. He was one among a whole host of Muslim intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century who were inspired or trained with historians and educationists Shibli Nomani and Syed Ahmad Khan. This generation of scholars emphasised Islam's history in Arabia, the connections between Arabia and India during the eight and ninth centuries, and the spiritual genealogy of Indic thought. Bewteen 1927 and 1930, Habib published seminal papers on the Arab general Muhammad bin Qasim, who campaigned in Sind in the early eighth century --- who "alone had a conscience, the instincts and the feelings of a gentleman"; on Mahmud of Ghazni, the Central Asian ruler of the late tenth century --- who "morally disgraced" Islam; and on Shahabuddin Ghur, the founder of the Afghan kingdom in the early thirteenth century --- "a man of unexpansive nature." His work underlined, again and again, that Muslim "rule" in India was a misnomer (emphasis added); the Muslim kingships were ecumenical, and Muslims got no special favour. For Habib, as for Nomani, the past was excavated not to fuel sectarian or communitarian difference in the present, but to assert a historically sound vision of the Indic Muslim past to counter the British take on India's history. Habib directly critiqued works of H M Elliot, W W Hunter and Vincent A Smith, which detailed floridly the insidiousness of the Muslim character and Muslim imperial history in India.
Habib examined historical fact, the ways it was written about, and what political purposes its narration served. That task was also taken up by his son Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, and many other historians who wrote against a communal understanding of history, who deconstructed the myths of origin that fuelled communal violence, such as in Gujarat 2002. Their scholarship is a shadow history of the Partition, and driving it is a clear awareness that Partition was no singular event, and cannot be claimed for any dead past.
The histories and memories in the new books considered here are in tension with one another. They open up new archives, methods and understandings, just they continue to naturalise the incommensurability of the Muslim with India. It is evident in reading them that our need to understand the deep history of Partition is acute. Just as graveyards are segregated by communities, so are histories. In partitioned South Asia, the Shia, Sunni, Muslim, Hindu or Assamese, Sindi, Baluchi pasts are also constructed to be separate. The histories we produce must acknowledge the burden of recognising differences and parsing it. For the subalterns, those adrift among borders, the fuller history of Partition remains unwritten. The Rohingya floating at sea are also part of the forgotten stories of Partition. They who once were Indian or Burmese or Pakistani or Bangladeshi are now of nowhere. Without land, they are also without history.
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