Recompense for past pitfalls
Hemayetuddin Ahmed goes back to history and emerges a sadder soul
Understanding the Muslim Mind by Rajmohan Gandhi looks like recompense for the past 'pitfalls' of the Indian National Congress in the half-a-century long freedom struggle in India that pushed Muslims aside from the political mainstream. It caused intractable Hindu-Muslim bitterness, eventually forcing the departing British Raj to partition the country. This is a remarkable book at least on three counts. First, it is a well-researched, non-partisan, objective analysis of five decades of tumultuous events in the Indian social and political scene before partition. Second, this was written after a painstaking research by the author for eight months in the US as a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington that allowed him to take a cool, dispassionate view of the past eventful days he watched first-hand from the privileged position of being a family member of the illustrious saint-philosopher and politician who dominated Indian politics single-handedly for half a century preceding the freedom - Mahatma Gandhi. Third, the methodology the author followed in this study is also rather rare in historiography research. He made an eclectic selection of eight outstanding Muslim leaders ranging from so-called 'communal' to others branded as 'nationalists,' to find out what had gone wrong and why India had finally to be partitioned. Gandhi begins his tale with a rueful remark he heard from his father as a twelve year old boy one day in 1947 in their second floor flat at Connaught Circus. His father Devdas Gandhi was talking to his friend Moulvi Hamid of the Jamia Millia College with a nationalist bent. Devdas was then a very influential journalist, being the editor of the Hindustan Times. In a remorseful voice he told the aggrieved Muslim educationist: "Hamid Sahab, Mei Sharminda Hoon" (Mr. Hamid, I am ashamed). All around Delhi at the time, in what was still an undivided India, people "vied with one another in the capacity to kill, maim, abduct, burn, loot and expel." And in Delhi, "the Muslims were the victims." While writing the book 38 years later, the author could still see Hamid Sahib clearly saying very little, "conveying his pains through his silence and somewhat surprised and moved". Today, after half-a-century, to a reader, this would ring somewhat like the title of a present day Mahesh Bhatt tragic blockbuster. Devdas Gandhi was deeply moved by the carnage and sufferings of the people and regarded the transfer of power in 1947 as less significant than the inhumanity to which many Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs sank together that year "a year of shame, not of achievement". With all the major players in the political drama during the freedom struggle deceased meanwhile, and no other sources available for first hand interviews, Rajmohan had to take recourse to the published documents sometimes left by the leaders themselves and sometimes by other historians and writers. Of the eight outstanding leaders from amongst the Muslims of the latter half of the nineteenth century, ranging from Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, social reformer loyal to the Raj who first raised the awareness of the need for advancement by the backward Muslim community through education to Dr. Mohammad Iqbal, who conceived the idea of Pakistan- a homeland for the minority Indian Muslims (comprising the Punjab, NWFP, Sind and Baluchistan) and also later added to it Bengal. Then came M.A. Jinnah who took up the cause of a separate Muslim homeland and carried it with single-mined determination and dexterity to success. Rajmohan also discusses the life and times of Moulana Mohammed Ali (1878-1931), a leader of the Hindu-Muslim Khilafat movement, Moulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958), one time President of the Indian Congress, Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan (1895-1951), and India's President Zakir Husain (1897-1969) and Bengal Chief Minister A.K. Fazlul Haque (1873-1962) The author has gathered a mass of materials from different published sources as evident in over 30 pages of bibliography notes and references, carefully sifted them and made a beautiful brief presentation reflecting the life and times of these leaders that sometimes read like fiction. The story en passant of the passionate poet-philosopher Dr. Muhammad Iqbal's affairs with Atiya Fyzee, a young avant-garde woman from an aristocratic Muslim family of Bombay and their spending time together in Cambridge, London and Germany is revealing. To Atiya, the poet admitted once, " I am pragmatic and utilitarian outside but a mystic inside". Atiya, attractive, intelligent and ahead of her time, on the other hand, spoke of the Iqbal of this period as "self-assertive and gregarious". Similarly the story of the fastidious bachelor and a successful lawyer, M.A. Jinnah at 40, living alone in a large but somber Malabar Hill bungalow, bowing to ladies and praising their sarees, keeping, however a distance from them, falling in love with the 17 year old daughter one of the most eminent Parsee families in Bombay, Sir Dinshaw Petit is no less absorbing. At the end Rajmohan asks himself: Do the eight lives say anything to us? Our times differ from theirs. After the 1947 and 1971 divisions and the consequent population migration, Hindus have outnumbered Muslims by 15 to 2 in India, and Muslims similarly outnumber Hindus in Bangladesh, and even more decisively in Pakistan. Rajmohan concludes the main reason for the great divide between two major communities in undivided India was due to 'ungenerous' Indian National Congress support towards reforms introduced by the British Raj to prepare the Indian populace for self-rule first by the 1909 reforms (Morley-Minto Act) that provided for separate electorates, then by 1919 reforms (Montague-Chelmsford Act) that gave partial self government with two-third elected legislators and cabinets of Indian ministers, but retaining vital subjects of finance, police and general administration for the governor to handle with the help of a nominated Executive Council, and a stage further by the1935 reforms (Government of India Act)that provided for provinces to be governed entirely by Indian ministers responsible to an assembly. In the concluding chapter, the author's finding is that the Raj had not created the divide. He held as true what Maulana Mohmmed Ali said in 1930 in London, "We divide and they rule." When Sarat Bose repeated this to Lord Wavell, the Viceroy retorted and said what they were trying was for the Indians to unite and the Raj to quit. The book finally ends with the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946 envisaging a loose federation of three groups of statesone large central comprising what is now by and large present-day India with a Hindu majority and two others, on the east and west, with Muslim majorities. Though the Muslim League had promptly accepted this, the Congress had laid down certain conditions, following which the Muslim League had also withdrawn its acceptance. When Rajmohan started the book, it looked like recompense. But as the study was nearing completion, it turned out to be a requiem for what had been a lofty idea of Hindu-Muslim partnership.
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