Welcome again. This is the second section of the lecture on contemporary Indian history. And in this one we are going to discuss pre-partition history. In the previous one we looked at India's colonial history. And so in the pre-partition, history is important because it actually gives you an idea of how the population of India, which is multi-religious, lived together before partition happened in 1947. And the important thing to understand in this context, is that the Muslims in India who came in various manifestations as rulers from about 1000 A.D., Muslims in India were not a united group of people. They had Arab, Persian, Turk, Afghan heritage, so they were quite diverse. And vast majority of them were also converts to Islam. So they were local people who had converted to the religion. And they had very often retained vestiges of their previous religions, and previous religious practices and customs. And there were a lot of customs, traditions, rituals especially, at the domestic level, that Muslims and Hindus at that point certainly had in common. Many shared cultural and social practices and beliefs with other religious groups. There was revivalism in the 19th century amongst both Hindus and Muslims, Monks and Muslims there was Deobandis, Jamaati-Islamis, Ahmadis, and all of this definitely sharpened the Muslim sense of identity. This picture is Salim Chisti's dargah in Fatehpur in Fatehpur Sikri and this dargah is an example of the syncretism I've been talking about, it is visited by a people of all faiths, various Hindus who go and pray to the pier, the saint to grant them whatever wishes they want. So it's a good example of a Muslim saint who is venerated by all religions in India. But after the 1857 rebellion, the Muslims were seen as a great threat by the British, because the British had displaced the Muslim rulers, the last ruler of the Mughal Empire. This meant also, that the British followed a kind of divide and rule policy, which they had also imposed on a variety of other colonies, and perhaps the one that is best known to you would be Ireland, you know, where this divide and rule policy caused the troubles in Ireland for, you know, up to the present really, you know, in the division of Ireland into Eire or Ireland and Northern Ireland. So after 1870 the British imperial strategy involved attracting the support of powerful Muslims. And the British were very much into codifying and categorising. And one of the things that they did was to categorise the people of India by religion and without an understanding of the various connections and syncretic relationships that people of different religious faiths had with each other. And to help to win the Muslims over to their side, the British helped establish the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh. And supported all India Muslim conference, both of which were institutions from which the leaders of the Muslim League, that were absolutely crucial in the formation of Pakistan, the ideology of Pakistan the Muslim League emerged from those two organisations. As soon as a League was formed, Muslims were placed in a separate electorate, and therefore the separateness of Muslims were built into the electoral process, the separateness of Muslims from Hindus and from people of other religions were built into that process. So by 1946 Jinnah, who was import… of well, probably the most important leader of the Muslim League won the majority of seats reserved for Muslims and partition became more or less inevitable. So pre-partition I don't want to paint the pre-partition era as some kind of golden-age where everybody lived together in happy harmony. There were communal tensions and violent conflicts, these did occur. However, such events remain small-scale and marginal. What partition did was to supplant the normal model of the small-scale, marginal conflicts and tensions which would happen in any case when people live together. This normal model was supplanted with an extremist model of conflict resolution, an extremist model involving huge violence, death and a disruption. And what is tragic about it is that it is now the inevitable backdrop of post independence politics in both India and in Pakistan. It provides the rationale of anti-minority politics in both countries, and it has kept Pakistan and India at war for ever since 1947 which is the moment of independence till the present Pakistan and India have fought three wars and have also constantly had hostilities over the disputed border in the State of Kashmir. And they have not been able to have what I suppose one would say a normal relationship between nation state, states that the pathology and violence of partition has influenced, and has poisoned really the future relationship that Indians and Pakistanis have with each other, even though people in India and Pakistan, on both sides of the border, had relations, friends, relatives on the other side. And if you, I mean some of you might have looked at an advertisement for Google. This Google advertisement actually shows this old man missing his Muslim friend in Pakistan and their grandchildren getting them together. It's a very sentimentalised evocation of partition, feel good partition, you know, nostalgia. But there is an element of truth, and there were friendships and relationships and so on, which were ruptured. And because of the pathology of the relationship after partition, these friendships and relationships remained ruptured. And finally, in a sense the illogic if you like of some of the partition rationales came to fruition in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, where there was uprising in Bangladesh over really the language policies imposed by what was called then West Pakistan. And the Bangladesh War happened with Indian aid. Bangladesh, which was previously East Pakistan then became independent. So in the next section we're going to talk about the moment of independence for India and Pakistan in 1947.
