The redundancy of prejudice

Partition studies also suffer because of the tendency toextol the heroic deeds of past national leaders and to provide a legitimising historical perspective as the basis of the national project. For decades we have been busy profiling national8217; parties and their leaders, investigating their activities like a detective, recording their pronouncements and constructing the master narrative of Partition. Yet the complex nature of the Partition story cannot be unravelled only by concentrating on the British-Congress-League negotiations. Similarly, individual pronouncements and party resolutions often convey the misleading impression that the national leaders occupied an unassailable position in deciding the destiny of the nation. The reality is that the major8217; players in the high politics of the 1940s were by no means free to pursue their own or their party8217;s agenda, and that their initiatives were severely curbed by their constituencies which were deeply influenced by the communal campaigns and by the rapidly-changing political scenario in Punjab and Bengal.

Theconstraints on national leaders have to be probed in the context of the overall direction, thrust and strategies of the countrywide Congress and Muslim League-led mobilisation campaigns which raised new fears and uncertainties, enlarged areas of conflict and competition and paved the way for religio-cultural bodies to assume the mantle of community leadership and intervene in national affairs with their strident demands. Many of their ideas, developed outside institutional structures, gathered support and strength independently of colonial policies and influences. Often, they derived sustenance from their own complex repertoire of ideas.

How and why this happened must be investigated; in fact, making sense of the occurrences outside the national and regional domains requires a systematic analysis of the local roots of Hindu and Muslim nationalism. That is how we can perhaps establish how, by the end of World War II, a number of local groups in cities and towns, often operating within sharply-demarcatedreligious boundaries and taking advantage of their linkages with the protagonists of Hindutva or Islamist ideas, mounted pressure on their leaders in Delhi or Calcutta to safeguard their specific interests and resisted any form of concession to their adversaries as a price for a bargain or a compromise. Once the profile of pressure groups, their location and their linkages are known, we may begin to understand why they came to occupy a vantage point in Indian politics in the mid-40s and how they had prepared the groundwork for Partition long before the formal parting of the ways in mid-August 1947.

It is true that the localities often mirrored both the regional and all-India scene. Yet the complex and intricate processes of the formation of community-based solidarities and how, these also reached upwards, can be delineated in, the public arena8217;. So that the untold story lies in the lanes and bylanes of Indian towns and cities, in and around newspaper offices, district courts, thanas, municipalities,madarsas and pathshalas, shuddhi and Gauraksha sabhas, the anjuman-i Islamia outfits. These are the sites where myths, memories and divisive religious symbols were invented and circulated to raise communitarian consciousness and create the image of the Other, where contentious issues were pressed into service for community-based politics.

My own concerns are simple enough: why a people, with a long-standing history of shared living, responded to symbols of discord and disunity at a particular historical juncture? Why, a society with its splendidly plural heritage, became the site of one of the most cataclysmic events in twentieth century history? And last but not the least, if Ghalib had been alive, he would have asked in his inimitable style:

When all is You, and nought exists but You
Tell me, O Lord, why all this turmoil too?

These questions are as pertinent today as they were at the time of Independence, and that they need to be analysed afresh. To do so, it isimportant not to read the present into the past; in other words, shed our present-day prejudices and preconceived suppositions on communalism. In this schema, it is necessary to challenge the commonly-held assumptions on Muslim politics, delineate the multiple ideological strands among Muslims, and trace the evolution of a Muslim political personality not simply in the context of colonial policies but also in relation to the Hindutva and Islamist campaigns at the local and regional levels.

Islam, for one, can no longer be treated as a static point of reference. No longer can one assume the existence of a single, inalienable Muslim identity. Generally speaking, identities in South Asia have seldom been unified; in colonial India they were increasingly fragmented and fractured. Indeed, they were not singular but multiple, and thus difficult to capture on a single axis. Constructed across different, intersecting and antagonistic sites, discourses, and practices, they are subject to a radical historicisation,and are constantly in the process of making and unmaking.

This column will have served a purpose if it encourages at least a few students and colleagues to reassess the literature on inter-community relations and Partition, and to conclude that it may no longer be possible, in Lenin8217;s phrase, to go on in the old way8217;.