Book review | Saumya Dey's 'The Seedbed of Pakistan' is non-dispensable to understand the history of Islamic separatism

The conception of Pakistan is an ideology which Indian political life everyday grapples with. The coinage ‘Pakistan’ goes beyond stirring up the raw wounds of partition, or pointing to the ever-looming presence of a neighbouring ‘hostile state’. Neither is it just a benchmark for the banality of communalism or an archetype of religious fundamentalism. Primarily, it signifies the articulation of a powerful cultural and political phenomenon which has dominated the Indian landscape for ages. While volumes of academic work have been produced on the political history of separatism and the movement for Pakistan, not much progress seems to have been made towards understanding the cultural and intellectual history of the idea of Pakistan. Studying the cultural forces of Islamic separatism at play during the colonial period is central to developing a nuanced comprehension of the ideology itself. The latest book of Saumya Dey (Professor, Rishihood University), titled The Seedbed of Pakistan: Cultural Conflicts, Elite Muslim Anxieties and the Congress 1885-1906, makes a solid attempt at filling this gap. [caption id=“attachment_12594242” align=“alignnone” width=“192”] The Seedbed of Pakistan: Cultural Conflicts, Elite Muslim Anxieties and the Congress by Saumya Dey. Image courtesy: Amazon.com[/caption] A central pillar of the argument formulated by the book is the analysis of states as cultural entities. Once we begin unravelling the cultural paraphernalia of a state, it opens up pathways for us to delve deep into the cultural psyche of the ruling classes as well as better explains the process of construction of cultural hegemony. The author notes that, “Every state has a cultural persona, or, rather, as this book shall argue, states are culture-power formations – they project and broadcast power through cultural symbols or tropes. The cultural persona of the Mughal Empire, it is contended in this study, was ‘Islamicate’ – it projected power using cultural tropes and symbols broadly associable with Muslims as a society.” The establishment of cultural hegemony and cultural sovereignty is a centuries-long process, and its crumbling subverts the entire dynamics of power relations prevailing in a society. The book painstakingly undertakes an attempt to trace the journey of ‘Islamicate’ culture, from being the media to display and wield state power, to being challenged by other cultural formations, and consequently morphing itself throughout the period of British colonialism in order to sustain its hegemony. Building on the theory of a renowned historian of Islam, Marshall Hodgson, the author describes ‘Islamicate’ as “a cultural matrix rooted in the social body of Islam” which “might find some participation, or room, or accommodation, for non-Muslims, but only, it seems, as subordinate or marginal partners”. He further argues that an important aspect of this ‘Islamicate’ cultural formation was the “curtailment of the cultural displays of non-Muslims”. The cultural displays of non-Muslims were curbed not just through prohibitions and violence against activities such as the celebration of festivals publicly, but also through the violation, demolition and destruction of the ‘sacred spaces’ of non-Muslims. History is a testimony to the fact of near absolute erasure of major Hindu shrines during the period of Islamic rule, during both the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal period. The saga of demolishing Hindu scared spaces was critical to projecting “an image of a ‘triumphant Islam’”. Centuries of Islamic colonial rule in India created a distinct ‘culture-power formation’, and the pillars and flagbearers of this formation were the ashrāf (the ruling class who generally traced their ancestry to foreign origins). It was the ashrāf, or the “Indo-Muslim elite” forming the backbone of Islamic states’ administrative systems, who were the purveyors and inheritors of “Islamicate legacy”. The ashrāf were ingrained with the idea of a triumphant Islam, and saw themselves as a conquering class having the right to rule their subjects. Culturally, they were at unease with their immediate Indian surroundings and tried to root their psyche in the “’Islamicate’ geo-cultural space” such as Persia or Central Asia. The author argues that, “The spatial setting of ashrāf culture and lifeworld was the qasbā, a settlement midway between a village and a town.” It was these settlements which resembled and disseminated the tropes of ‘Islamicate’ legacy into popular culture. The interaction of non-elite Muslims with the ashrāf in these settlements led to the percolation of the latter’s culture into the masses. As the author puts it, “We think that there is sufficient reason to believe that the ‘Islamicate’ high culture professed by the ashrāf, along with the fact that they were the service elite of the Mughal Empire, made the non-elite Muslims look up to them. Especially because we observe that the average Muslim emotionally identified with the Mughal state, imagining it to be ‘his own’.” Identification of non-elite Muslims with ashrāf culture also meant the possibility of their involvement in restricting the “cultural displays of the non-Muslims on behalf of the ashrāf”, and implied that the ashrāf were catapulted to the position of being “natural leaders of Indian Muslim society – they commanded a spontaneous and willing following in its midst”. The book puts forth some significant arguments about the historical forces at play during the nineteenth century. With the advent of European colonisation, the former colonisers lost their state power and were forced to face new threats to their social and cultural hegemony. The advent of British rule meant that the ashrāf could no longer sustain Islamic hegemony in social spaces by wielding state power and asserting their close association with an Islamic state. Moreover, attempts at resurgence of cultural displays by non-Muslims posed a direct threat to the dominance of Islamic lifeworld in public spaces. This also meant that the psychological makeup of ashrāf as being the superior race would be inflicted by self-questioning. To sustain their social status, the ashrāfs (particularly the Ulāmā) set out to transform Islam in the Indian subcontinent, such that all the local practices would be purged or turned dormant at least, while Islamic ‘fundamentals’ would be the core of Muslim existence in the region. The author states that: “In total, we might say, Indian Islam stood transformed in the nineteenth century due to a number of social and cultural re-engineering efforts undertaken by the Indo-Muslim elite… The Indo-Muslim elite, thus, it seems to us, laid the foundations of a more self-reflexive, socially and culturally cohesive, and politically and ideologically motivated Indian Muslim society in the period under our consideration. They also, in the process, we suggest, assumed a conspicuous leadership position in this society.” With the awakening of a trans-regional “Hindu communitas” and the introduction of local self-government based on elections by the British, it became quite evident to the Indo-Muslim elites that they would have to re-engineer their power retention strategies on the basis of “representative politics” to sustain their hegemony. “Hindu communitas”, the author tells us, “was becoming a socially palpable phenomenon and a solvent for the Islamicate cultural persona of the qasbās”. It is essential to note that the Indian National Congress (INC) was formed at such a critical juncture, when the Hindus had already begun establishing their ‘dominance’ over local electoral politics, and the ashrāfs were deeply anxious about their losing grip over the society. The organisation was conceptualised as a uniting force that would bring all the stakeholders together under a single banner to place their demands and grievances before the colonial administration. As very well elaborated in the book, the leaders of a fledgling INC sincerely believed that they were tasked with the creation of an Indian nationhood which would be modern in its vision and would transcend various identities such as religion, race, caste, class, etc. The leaders consciously constructed an “imagination of nationhood” which was “purely ‘civic’”. It was the modern state, its structural units and common issues across the entire subcontinent, which would shape a distinct identity for the people inhabiting the region as Indians. However, the INC did not discard group identities in toto, rather it very well acknowledged their dominant presence in the hope that its own conception of the Indian nation won’t be plagued by any of the issues and concerns that were centred around the groups. The INC’s vision of the nation was crippled (to be a bit harsh here) to begin with. As the author sharply puts it: “The contradiction that lay at the core of the Congress’s conception of Indian nationhood was thus this – though it had been imagined in purely ‘civic’ terms, it was not constituted by individuals but by religious and normative groups. Interestingly, one notices that the Congress understood India somewhat in the same way as the colonial administration. Further, the Congress granted the constituent units of the Indian nation that it was imagining something akin to an ‘internal sovereignty’. Their inner spaces, in terms of customs, mores and values, were sacrosanct and not meant to be breached.” The recognition and granting of legitimacy to religious groups meant that INC would have to cater to the Indo-Muslim elites as an interest group, while also maintaining its neutrality on questions relating to their social and political status. These contradictions were bound to collapse under their own weight, and did ultimately put the organisation in a fix. By not taking up the specific concerns of ashrāfs on its forum, the INC could never legitimately claim to be their voice. By sticking to its supposed nature as a purely civic organisation, it would have to either ignore or only partially address the issues of religious and political pressure groups. All that the INC had to offer was to be the forum for dealing with questions common to all the Indian people, which were few and far between, with no easy answers. Over its initial years, INC adopted various measures to establish its legitimacy as the common stage for all interest groups. In some cases, its leaders attempted to completely bypass or give up organisational stand on issues which ‘hurt’ the Muslim community. In others, leaders like Badruddin Tyabji acknowledged the Muslims as a distinct community and offered appeasement policies with “veto” power over subject matters which Muslims believed to be affected by. As very well pointed out by the author in the beginning of the book, the discourse of ashrāf Muslim groups reflected elitist politics, which wasn’t generally based “on the educational or economic laggardness of Muslims”, and the INC seemed rather clueless about the correct way of dealing with it. In the process of coming to terms with elitist Muslim politics, the INC lost its credibility as a pan-Indian organisation which could rightly speak for all. Neither was it able to contain the increasing separatism of Muslim elites, nor did it eventually have any rightful claim to speak on behalf of the Muslim masses. From the conversations of A O Hume and Tyabji as reproduced by the author, we learn that the Congress leadership was indeed aware of the fact that it did not have much appeal amongst the Muslims, which meant that it could be deprived of its ‘national’ status. Moreover, the Muslim clergy and sections of Muslims within the INC were rallying for political parity in terms of electoral representation with the Hindus, a demand which the INC could never adequately respond to. Ultimately, by the end of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the INC had failed to allay the ‘fears’ of the ashrāfs and could not succeed in its efforts at “‘building bonds’” with the larger Muslim community. But it could not afford to lose its legitimacy as ‘the’ pan-Indian political organisation. The INC found a rather untruthful way out of this mess: “The Congress, on the other hand, went on to unilaterally assume the role of the sole representative of the Indian nation…The Congress had found the line to which it was to tenaciously cling right up to the partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947…The Congress had come to a point when it cynically sought to ‘mend cleavages’ by simply ignoring them or pretending that they did not exist.” The Indian nation was bound to pay a huge price for this self-deception and falsehood later. This book has several other nuanced arguments about the cultural history of Islamic separatism which can’t be covered within a single review. Overall, the book marks a paradigmatic shift in the historiography of the movement for Pakistan, as it digs deeper into the cultural history of the movement, and brings out the underlying continuities of Islamic supremacy and separatism present in the ‘elite’ Muslim psyche throughout history which propelled the movement. It is a non-dispensable read for all those who wish to understand the complexities and motivations of the ‘separatist Muslim’ psyche. The author is an LL.M. graduate and is currently working as a Research Fellow at India Foundation.  Views are personal.  Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.