While it remains to be seen whether Mr MJ Akbar, journalist – author – politician, will succeed in putting the question of a ‘redefinition’ of majority and minority on the country’s agenda, it has to be said to his credit that he is trying to do so.
Clearly Mr Akbar is one of the few Indians who questions the proposition that Muslims are a minority in India by virtue of their religion and the culture that has come to be associated with it. Most of us take that to be the case, regardless of our political affiliations and sympathies. Some dispute that Hindus are a community and, therefore, not a majority. But that is a different issue.
Pertinent Question
Did Muslims regard themselves a minority during Mughal rule? he asks. The question is pertinent and the answer is obvious. Muslims could not possibly have seen themselves as a minority then. But implicit in this question is also a suggestion which is not quite valid. The suggestion is that the Muslims’ perception of themselves as a minority is primarily the result of a loss of power.
The concept of Muslim power itself is deeply flawed. An overwhelming majority of Muslims, converts from among Hindus, were by no means partners in that power. That was by and large the monopoly of the Ashraf (the respected and respectable) who were invariably men of foreign descent.
Equally important, in large parts of the country successor states to the Mughal empire were Muslim as in Bengal, Avadh, Rohilkhand and Hyderabad. They provided enough opportunities for the Muslim elite earlier centred in Shahjahanabad (Delhi). Nadir Shah’s raid in 1739 and Ahmad Shah Abdali’s attacks in 1748, 1757 and 1760 were catastrophic for Muslim power in north-western India. But the rise of a self-conscious Muslim community defining itself in terms of distance from Hindus cannot be traced back to those events.
It is not wholly a matter of speculation whether in the wake of the disintegration of the Mughal empire and regionalisation of power, India could have become once again the great melting pot it had been for millennia. There is evidence to show that that would have been the case. Avadh illustrates that possibility. Gosains, Hindu sanyasi-soldiers, provided the bulk of its armed strength, Hindu and Muslim festivals were celebrated jointly, nawabs made grants to temples; the last nawab Wajid Ali is known to have worshipped at the Hanumangarhi temple in Ayodhya.
The Raj put paid to that possibility. Its principal instrument in this regard was not so much the ‘divide-and-rule’ policy as the decennial census. The technique was simple. In a manner of speaking, limbs were chopped off the living body of India, analysed, labelled and given an independent existence. That sharpened and hardened distinctions of religion, caste and language. What was fluid and malleable became rigid. The elites in particular became self-conscious, insecure, competitive and aggressive.
A comparison of the census in India under the Raj with the one in Britain itself is revealing. To quote Kenneth W. Jones, well-known for his work on the Arya Samaj, religion was the one area in which the divergence was most marked.
Since the beginning of census operations in the 18th century in Britain, only once, in 1851, did it contain questions concerning religion. Apparently in view of the history of religious conflicts in English history, religion was regarded too dangerous a subject to be incorporated in census reports.
Census In India
By contrast the census in India employed religion as one of the fundamental categories. It ran like a thread through the descriptive material as well as statistics. The census in India, unlike in Britain, also possessed a strong ethnological (racist) character. Castes were converted from professional groups into ethnic groups. Under religion, the census discussed the size of each group, its percentage of the total population, relative and absolute decline, and geographical distribution. Religion also appeared increasingly in other sections. Information on education was, for example, sub-divided in a series of tables by geography and religion. Only the deaf, blind, lepers, idiots and the insane were not so categorised.
This approach was followed despite the difficulty of defining Hinduism and therefore a Hindu. In the first Punjab census, for instance, Sikhs were listed among Hindus; in the second in 1868 they were excluded. Then arose questions about the religious status of untouchables, and tribals, the so-called ‘animists’ and the ranking of various castes in the theoretical varna hierarchy. British officials became the arbiters of caste hierarchy.
All in all, census reports provided “a new conceptualisation of religion as a community, an aggregate of individuals united by a formal definition, and given characteristics based on qualified data. Religions became communities, mapped, counted and above all compared with other religious communities”. Thus the ‘majority’ and minorities had been duly manufactured.
These comparisons produced competition and exacerbated tensions. This was especially so for those elites which felt threatened on account of their newly discovered minority status as did the Hindus in Punjab and Bengal and the Muslims in present-day Uttar Pradesh. They played a critical role in shaping events which finally led to partition in 1947.
While it is open to question whether an exit from this British-laid trap was available after partition, it is self-evident that we did not even look for one and, indeed, that we could not have looked for one, hooked as we have been to the majority-minority syndrome. We continued to reject the two-nation theory but not its source. Religion has continued to figure in independent India’s census reports. Developments in the larger world have added to our predicament. An intellectual plague known as multi-culturalism has swept the western academia and media so much so that in contrast to the traditional American view of their country as a melting pot, many of them have come to see it as a cartel of tribes with separate cultures existing side by side.
Proponents
The proponents of this view in the US have not been some dissident intellectuals but, as one writer puts it, “tenured university professors, scions of wealthy families with prodigal trust funds, influential journalists, chic artists, lavishly paid entertainers, owners of media conglomerates, corporation board members, mayors or even senators”.
It is only natural that American intellectuals have worked overtime to sell multi-culturalism to us. The tragedy is that many of us have been only too willing to buy this proposition. Non-party Leftist intellectuals have been especially active in this ‘enterprise’ and there has virtually been no resistance to it at the level of ideas. If anything, the appeal of multi-culturalism has increased recently, especially after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
The Times of India, 16 July 1992