The myth of the two-nation theory: A colonial invention?

By Osman Sher* 

There is a famous axiom relating to the history of the Indian subcontinent: "Hinduism has a wonderful power of assimilation; it has always conquered its conquerors." When the Aryans, Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, Kushans, Huns, and other invaders came here, they could not withstand the overwhelming embrace of the forceful Vedic religion; they were absorbed into it and became completely Hindu. But this maxim is also untrue. 

Hinduism conquered only those communities that lacked strong religious codes or beliefs of their own. It was unable to bring into its fold even the small communities of early Jews, Zoroastrians, and Christians, who had been living here since the Apostle St. Thomas landed on the coast of Kerala in 52 AD. The same was true of the Muslims. They found no common ground on which to merge with Hinduism. The philosophy of life of the two communities differed radically. Some fundamentals of Hinduism, for instance, idolatry, the law of consequences (karma), reincarnation, and the caste system, were anathema to the unequivocally monotheistic Muslims. 

Yet, even though they felt a greater spiritual closeness to their Arab and Persian co-religionists, Indian Muslims never felt a physical bond with them. The soil on which they were born and the people among whom they lived exerted a far stronger pull on their social life. They claimed the local society as their own, and it was only the distant societies with which they had never come into contact that felt foreign to them.

In this context, two schools of thought have emerged. One is represented by scholars like the historian R.C. Majumdar, who writes in The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. V: 

"For the first time in the history of India, the country was permanently divided, from a religious and social point of view, into two distinct entities, the gulf between which even seven centuries of peaceful existence side by side has not been able to bridge… The advent of Islam constituted the first great rift in the solidarity of the Indian community since the incorporation of the aboriginal peoples into the Aryan society. Henceforth there were two communities in India—Hindus and Muslims—who formed two entirely separate entities."

Without commenting on that view, but writing about a period as early as the Sultanate, the historian Romila Thapar offers a different reading in A History of India, Volume One:

"In recent years many attempts have been made to prove that the Hindu and Islamic cultures at no time approached any kind of fusion, and that over the many centuries when they lived side by side, Hindus and Muslims existed as two separate communities. This is a clear example of historical 'back projection,' where sanction is sought from the past to justify contemporary attitudes. The concept that there was a separate community or 'nationality' of Hindus and Muslims did not exist during this period... 

"The argument for the reality of a separate nationality is drawn from the writings of the theologians and court chroniclers, who consciously emphasized the distinctions between Hindus and Muslims because it was in their interests to do so. Sources such as these cannot be accepted uncritically, since their own prejudices are writ large in their attitudes. The fusion of cultures in any case cannot be judged by the writings of a prejudiced minority determined to hold aloof: it can only be judged by the cultural pattern of the society as a whole. From the pattern of society in the Sultanate period it is evident that a synthesis of the two cultures took place, although this synthesis did not occur at every level and with the same intensity. Furthermore, the pattern which emerged was to mature in the period subsequent to that of the Sultanate."

Thus the Muslims, though never conquered in India from a religious standpoint, were conquered on the social and cultural fronts. This was evident not merely in superficial ways of eating, dressing, and speech, but more fundamentally in shared values and culture. The interaction between the two communities' ways of life was so strong that they sometimes seemed to merge even in matters of religion—the very factor that had most powerfully distinguished them. 

To cite a few examples, members of both communities participated in and mingled during religious festivals such as Dipavali, Holi, Ram Lila, Onam, Basant, Eid, Muharram, and the death anniversaries (urs) of Muslim saints. The bindi and sindoor were not confined to Hindu women alone; they were sometimes seen even beneath the veils worn by Muslim women. 

In remote rural areas, some Muslims revered Hindu deities—for instance, the smallpox goddess Sitla—and used "Ram Ram" as a greeting. Just as Hindus worshipped idols, ordinary Muslims' veneration of pious men often verged on the worship of their graves. Hindus, too, began venerating Muslim saints and offering chadar at their graves. The caste system, though not sanctioned by Islam, was adopted by Indian Muslims, who divided themselves into higher and lower castes by descent or profession. Another telling instance concerns the remarriage of widows. 

According to traditional Hindu practice, a widow was expected to burn herself on her husband's funeral pyre, and if she survived, she was not to remarry. In Islam, a widow's remarriage is encouraged. Under this cross-influence, Indian Muslims came to regard a widow's remarriage as an unpleasant act, even as Hindus themselves increasingly ceased to treat it as taboo.

Let us now examine the separate nationality of the Muslims from another angle. Even before the advent of Islam in the early seventh century, the Malabar coast played host to Arab merchants. Unlike Roman traders, they settled permanently in the coastal regions of south India. They were welcomed there and given land by local rajas for their trading stations, and they accepted Islam as soon as it appeared in Arabia. 

After them, Muslims reached India en masse in three waves: with the invading armies of Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 AD, of Shahabuddin Ghauri in 1175, and of Babur in 1526. The armies of those times numbered a few thousand, not even a hundred thousand. Further, with the establishment of Muslim rule in India, Muslims from the Middle East and Central Asia came here, attracted by opportunities of service. 

Since travel to distant lands was fraught with hardship in those days, Muslim immigration never amounted to much. Even so, by 1947 the Muslim population of the Indian subcontinent had swelled to 25–30 percent. Undoubtedly, such a large number was made up chiefly of local converts. To call them—roughly 85 percent of the subcontinent's Muslims—a separate nation in the very land of their origin, solely on the basis of faith, is patently absurd.

How, then, did the Muslims become a nation separate from the Hindus? Soon after the uprising of 1857 was suppressed, the East India Company appointed a commission to inquire into why it had happened and what was to be done to preserve British power in the future. Lord Elphinstone, a highly experienced civil servant of the Company and then governor of Bombay, advised the commission: "Divide et impera was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours." 

Thereafter, the administrative policies of the British rulers were directed toward dividing the Indian nation in two. One drastic measure was the 1905 partition of the province of Bengal into West (Hindu) and East (Muslim) Bengal. The deepest cut, however, came with the passage of the Indian Councils Act of 1909, which introduced separate electorates, requiring the two communities to elect their representatives separately, as though they were two separate nations. 

At the second reading of this bill in the House of Lords on February 23, 1909, the Secretary of State, Viscount Morley, justified this measure by arguing:

"Only let us not forget that the difference between Mahomedanism and Hinduism is not a mere difference of articles of religious faith. It is a difference in life, in tradition, in history, in all the social things as well as the articles of belief that constitute a community." 

This argument sketched, in advance, the ideological contours of the future Pakistan.  Muhammad Ali Jinnah would, therefore, place a similar argument before the Muslim League session of March 1940: 

"The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literatures. They neither inter-marry nor inter-dine together and, indeed, they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their concepts on life and of life are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussulmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history."

Undoubtedly, the two communities of Hindus and Muslims had their religious differences, but over the centuries they coexisted with little friction until the British rulers sowed the seeds of animosity between them. From the dawn of recorded history (around 550 BC), the country had not experienced intolerance on the social and religious planes. 

However, beginning in the nineteenth century, the curse of communal tension between Hindus and Muslims, the two largest communities, erupted across the length and breadth of the country with such force that, in the twentieth century, it climaxed in the country's break-up. Still, one can say with conviction that religion alone does not make a nation. 

The religious demography of countries around the world testifies to this fact. A nation is made up of many components that go beyond religion—social values, customs, traditions, language, geography, the degree of social assimilation, and simply living together for a long period of time, which in the case of Hindus and Muslims spans some twelve hundred years.

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*Former bureaucrat settled in USA