At a recent seminar, the well-known journalist-turned-politician, Mr M.J. Akbar, posed the question: when did Indian Muslims become a minority? And by way of amplification, he added: after all, they did not regard themselves a minority when Mohammed Ghauri conquered north India or Malik Kafur the Deccan.
Mr Akbar answered his own question. Indian Muslims became a minority when they began to be afraid, he suggested. Rather surprisingly, however, he did not raise the next logical question: when did they begin to be afraid? It needs to be.
The question is, of course, not new. It has been debated for almost a century. But it has acquired urgency once again.
Final Eclipse
The most widely accepted view among the intelligentsia is that the Muslim elite in India began to be apprehensive about its future after the failure of the sepoy mutiny in 1857 which meant the final eclipse of Muslim political power, that these fears got accentuated as Hindus, quicker to take to Western education, came to dominate the professions and the services, and that the Muslim leaders began to move towards some kind of separatism when they felt that the movement towards representative self-government would put them at a permanent disadvantage.
The validity of this view cannot be questioned. Developments in the 19th century adversely affected the status of the Muslim aristocracy and this set in motion a chain of events which resulted in partition in 1947. But this view is open to question, since the spread of modern education among Muslims in the United Provinces (present day Uttar Pradesh) proportionate to their numbers and protection of their representation in services did not help reassure them and stem the growth of separatism. Indeed, U.P. became the centre of the separatist movement and Western-educated Muslims its spearhead,
This obliges us to look for a possible earlier and deeper source of the problem. Indeed, we do not have to look too far and too hard. Aziz Ahmed has traced it in his well regarded work ‘Islam In The Indian Environment’ (Oxford University Press). He has argued that Muslim leaders were apprehensive of being sucked back into the Hindu sea from which they had emerged even when they ruled over most of India from the 14th to the end of the 17th century.
For some reasons the implications of Aziz Ahmed’s observation have not received the attention they deserve. One of these is that we are not sufficiently sensitive to the complexity of the phenomenon of conversion. Thus while a great deal continues to be said and written on whether Islam owes its spread to the sword, or its inherent appeal, or the sufis, there is not much discussion of what conversion to Islam, or for that matter, any other faith, involves.
It is popularly believed among Muslims and non-Muslims alike that conversion to Islam is a simple affair, involving little more than recitation of the Kalima which acknowledges the Unity of God and prophethood of Mohammad. In reality, it is an arduous process. Pagan beliefs and practices are tenacious; they revive in various guises time and again and have to be fought continually. That is the raison d’etre of the Tablighi movement.
Twelve hundred years after the mission of Mohammad and conversion of almost the whole of West Asia to Islam, Ibn Abdal Wahhab in Southern Arabia (Saudi Arabia) waged war on the same polytheistic practices which the prophet had sought to eradicate. His followers tore up the graves of Mohammad’s companions in Medina because, according to them, the cult of saints amounted to idolatory. They even prevented pilgrimages to Medina for many years.
In modern parlance, al-Wahhab was a fundamentalist. The movement he spawned is also so regarded. Regardless of our like or dislike for him, however, he should help focus attention on an important issue, which is that it is extremely difficult to extirpate polytheistic tendencies; they are part of human nature.
The task must inevitably be far more complicated, indeed well nigh impossible, in India which managed to remain predominantly non-Muslim even under prolonged Muslim rule. This is not a matter of speculation or inference. Considerable evidence is available in support of this proposition.
We have Asim Ray’s authoritative study ‘The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition In Bengal (Princeton University Press) which establishes it beyond reasonable doubt that conversion to Islam in pre-partition Bengal (about one-third of Muslims in the sub-continent live in that part) was far from complete and that, in fact, the message of the Koran was accessible to most of Muslims only through Hindu concepts, categories and folklore.
Ethnicity Remains
Rafiuddin Ahmed makes the same point in his The Bengal Muslims: 1871-1906: A quest for Identity (Oxford University Press). Ahmed also tells us that they used Hindu names till as late as the end of the 19th century. And on top of it all, the saint cult continues to prosper despite the Wahhabi denunciation and opposition.
The implication of Ray’s and Ahmed’s works is that Islam has not been able to overcome ethnicity. It has been the same story in other countries. But that, despite its obvious importance, cannot be detailed here.
It is now widely recognised that ethnicity cannot be overcome by any kind of universalism, religious or secular. If there was any scope for doubt, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Serbian-Croatian armed conflict in Yugoslavia and the upsurge of cleavages in eastern Europe should clinch the issue.
The matter can also be viewed in terms of the relationship between culture and civilisation, as Geoffrey Barraclough has discussed in his Turning Points In World History (Thames and Hudson) on the basis of Oswald Spengler’s and Arnold Toynbee’s monumental works and theories. Moreover, culture is tied to a locality. “It cannot be exported or imported.”
In India’s case, the issue of ethnicity has been confounded by the Western-imperialist discourse, inevitably a product of the West’s own history and environment. The problem has, however, begun to ease. A number of scholars have, for example, come to reject the Aryan invasion/migration theory and to question the Aryan-Dravidian divide.
Vedic Indus
Some of them have put back the date of the Rig Veda to the 10th millennium BC instead of the standard second. The well-known archaeologist, SR Rao, has established fairly conclusively that the so-called Indus valley civilisation was Vedic and not pre-Vedic and that it covered at least 1.5 million sq. km. of territory.
This turn in scholarship has an important bearing on our understanding of the history of Iran as well and, therefore, of Indian Islam because Islam as a civilisation came to us via Iran through the medium of the Persian language and Persian or Persianised poets, sufis and others. But that will take us too far afield.
The pertinent point for us is that Indian culture (ethnicity) cannot be said to be rooted in anything other than Vedas not only because nothing older survives but also because nothing basically alien to them can be located in any part of the land. Intimacy of the interaction between oral and literate, folk and classical, tribal and non-tribal cultures has also been fully established now.
Ethnicity is, of course, a multilevel phenomenon and it admits of superimposition, though not of supersession. These have to be accommodated within a socioeconomic-political framework. This can be done provided the foundations are strong and well spread and the framework sufficiently resilient.
About the strength and spread of the foundations in our case, there can be no doubt. It is not an accident that India is the only land in the world where ancient civilisation has remained a living reality through the millennia despite any number of upheavals. As for the framework, it has to be suitably adapted from time to time. This is the challenge we face.
The Times of India, 17 December 1991