Literature review| Adeel Hussain’s new book is a must read for Indians concerned about emerging separatist attitudes

Law in colonial India has been scrutinized by legal historians and modern history scholars threadbare to shed light on the working of colonialism and the centrality of the legal framework in perpetuating colonization. There’s also substantial work on the impact of colonial laws on religious communities and the latter’s changing self-perceptions. Lesser attention has been given to the way in which Indians adopted the colonial legal system in their fight against the Britishers as well as during inter-communal clashes, adapted themselves to the legal language and appropriated it to further their own agendas. A striking, yet minimally explored aspect is the intersection of colonial law and the construction of sovereignty by the Muslim community. In this backdrop, a book titled Law and Muslim Political Thought in Late Colonial North India, authored by Adeel Hussain and published by the Oxford University Press earlier this year, arrives as an important research work on the subject. [caption id=“attachment_11830131” align=“alignnone” width=“193”] Law and Muslim Political Thought in Late Colonial North India, written by Adeel Hussain. Oxford University Press.[/caption] The book comes as an intervention into the portrayal of Muslims under the colonial regime in mainstream historiography, which has presented them as docile subjects who withdrew from the political sphere after the ‘First War of Independence’ in 1857, embraced ‘colonial modernity’, only to later return to the political stage by cosying up to British rule and indulging in minority and separatist politics with British support. Colonial law, in this portrayal, is presented only as a method of dabbling in separatist politics through the language of rights. The mainstream historiography also creates set stereotypes out of Muslims, wherein a substantial chunk of the elites come out in support of Muslim separatism for a variety of reasons while the Muslim masses remain committed to the Indian freedom movement and the syncretic idea of India’s nationhood in the making. As opposed to this, Adeel Hussain’s book argues that the Muslims of North India actively engaged with colonial law, not just as docile minorities, but instead as agents who instrumentalised the law to carve out their political visions and pushed towards incorporating their religious and political positions into colonial law. It argues how this interaction of the community with colonial law led to a disenchantment with the British legal framework, and propelled a quest for the construction of Muslim political selfhood and sovereignty outside the realm of colonial law. This book is also significant as it seeks to provide us insights into the crucial role played by political thought in “shaping the envisioning of legal orders”. In essence, according to the author, the book makes the following argument: “Indian Muslims in the early-twentieth century developed a peculiar fascination with the law, which, through a series of frustrations, led them to move away from it entirely to ask more pertinent questions about nationhood, religion, and sovereignty.” (p. 21) The trajectory of Muslim politics in colonial North India is reflected upon to highlight the following: “The history of Indian Muslims regarding the law appears to be scattered with instances where the law is turned into the primary space for imagining political participation, contesting the colonial state, engaging in legal antagonism, and, as this book will explore more closely in relation to the early-twentieth century, the demand for constitutional safeguards, minority status, and in time perhaps even the actualizing of these principles in a demand for separation.” (pp. 14-5) Adeel Hussain attempts to unravel the conceptual history of Muslim politics in colonial North India by weaving it through the story of two significant events and two consequential Muslim ideologues of the early twentieth century. The book shows how those events led to a decisive turn in the ideology of influential leaders and set in motion the popular discourse of Muslim separatist politics. The book registers the idea that it was religion which allowed the space for generating a “novel vocabulary” in the political and legal spheres, led the Muslim community to navigate their way through the perceived onslaught of colonial law and come up with their own response in the form of “immediate political action”. The two events discussed in the book are the Rangila Rasul episode and the Shahidganj dispute, and the book analyzes how these events had a drastic influence on Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal, the ideologue-duo who laid the foundation stone of Pakistan. The author argues that the Rangila Rasul pamphlet, which was categorised as an instance of blasphemy by the Muslim community, and the legal proceedings that followed it, became a rallying point for the community to generate a stable political identity. The ‘vulnerability’ of their Prophet, the “symbolic core of Muslim communities”, who was denounced in the pamphlet, emerged as a reason for mobilization of the Muslim masses calling for political action and for initiating a working method within the legal framework to acknowledge this vulnerability. Colonial laws would either have to make space for such acknowledgement by offering innovative legal remedies or would have to be tweaked through interpretation to serve the community’s purposes. While the colonial regime did in fact introduce the anti-blasphemy legislation, i.e., Section 295A, into the Indian Penal Code to calm down the raging Muslim masses, by then the latter had arrived at the conviction that colonial law wasn’t capable enough to protect their religious sentiments or safeguard the community from harm in the future. On the other hand, the Shahidganj dispute arose around a small mosque which was razed to rubble by Sikh jathas in 1935 as it was believed to have been built on a gurudwara. The legal battle fought for the reclamation of the mosque resulted in a realization among large sections of Muslims that claims to territoriality needed a powerful political articulation of the right to collective ownership in accordance with the divine will alongside a deep sense of linear historical understanding which would justify such ownership. Through a historico-legal analysis of the above-mentioned events, the author also brings out the transformations in the political and intellectual worldviews of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal. It was Jinnah who legally defended Ilmuddin, the murderer of Rangila Rasul’s publisher. Iqbal wrote paeans and couplets in the murderer’s praise, who was eulogized as a ghazi by the community. Both of Pakistan’s father figures were also involved in the Shahidganj dispute. The book argues that the events reinvigorated the ideologues into thinking about Islamic nationhood and sovereignty. What has been labelled ‘separatism’ was actually a manifestation of this zeal for attaining sovereign power and to carve out a distinct Islamic nation. Jinnah’s politics was not just that of the ‘sole spokesman’, who could be lured and tamed through ego-massaging; rather he genuinely believed that Muslims were a culturally distinct nation, and that this perception was widespread within the community. So, it was the collective fate of Muslims to create their own territorial and conceptual space for establishing Islamic sovereignty. While Jinnah spoke in the language of his community’s ‘vulnerability’ and threats to its ‘existential survival’, Iqbal was propelled by the ideological force of ‘combative constitutionalism’, as the author terms it. Iqbal proposed a different version of transformative constitutionalism which would go beyond the metes and bounds of colonial law to embrace Islamic notions of ‘honor’, ‘purity’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘violence’, to create a stable edifice for Islamic statehood. Reading this book closely is very crucial to drive home the point that the construction of Islamic sovereignty and statehood to establish a culturally, politically and religiously distinct Islamic state was central to the Pakistan project. Once the disillusionment with law dawned upon the Muslim community, all of its political endeavors turned out to be “always pregnant with the possibility of violence”. The language of sacrificial violence for the larger vision of Pakistan fueled the foot soldiers and ideologues with ‘raw strength’ which had to be wielded mercilessly upon the majority community. More importantly, it was the core of the religion itself, coupled with the ethical moorings of the community, which birthed and nurtured the impulse towards mass sacrifice, unleashing of violence and a ruthless sovereignty. It’s noteworthy that despite the disillusionment with colonial law, the community leaders continued to maneuver their separatist politics through the instrumentalization of the colonial legal system wherever possible. The book pushes one to question the role of constitutional politics and its limitations. It provides insights into how communities dabble in constitutional battles and political violence simultaneously, and leads one to question whether the resolving of disputes peacefully in the realm of constitutional law can be an adequate assurance of harmonious co-existence. It forces us to rethink our presumed notions about minority rights, constitutional guarantees, separatism, and the need for a civilizational approach towards resolving the tussle between contesting visions of sovereignty. On a sidenote, the book also takes certain academic positions which need to be questioned. For instance, the book passes off the worldview of ashrafs as the “cultural tradition of Indian Muslims”. Recently, there has been some literature pouring in from Pasmanda social activists who claim that the worldview of ashrafs is foreign to our land, highly discriminatory and that of the barbaric Islamic colonisers. In fact, the book engages in a subversion of the term ‘indigenous’ by implying that ashraf culture has an authentic claim to Indian indigeneity. This portrayal also has the possibility of a serious implication: that the separatist movement witnessed by colonial India was an expression of assertion of sovereignty by a section of indigenous peoples. Surprisingly, during a critical assessment of Venkat Dhulipala’s work ‘Creating a New Medina’, the author’s criticism misfires and labels Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s 1940 book ‘Thoughts on Pakistan’ as arguably a book that was “written in bad faith”, without submitting a reasoned argument for the same. Overall, the book is a must read for all Indians concerned about the waves of religious fundamentalism and emerging separatist attitudes in India. It’s a text that helps understand the psyche of politically indulgent masses, and assists in capturing the essence of what is termed as Muslim separatism by mainstream historiography of modern India. 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.