Muslim Separatism in India: A Brief Survey, 1858-1947

300 Pages·1967·14.363 MB·English

by  professor. Abdul Hamid

MUSLIM
SEPARATISM
IN INDIA
A Brief Survey
1858 -1947
ABDUL HAMID
XFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE
TRENT UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
R
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/muslimseparatismOOOOabdu

MUSLIM SEPARATISM IN INCJA
In token of affection and gratitude, this
little book is dedicated to my uncle, Sheikh
Nur Mohammad, whose influence became the
starting point of this study.
MUSLIM SEPARATISM
IN INDIA
A BRIEF SURVEY
1858—1947
ABDUL HAMID
Published under Ike auspices of the
Social Sciences Research Centre, University of the Panjab
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1967
Abdul Hamid, 1967
Printed by Syed Mahmud Shah at Mahmud Printing Press,
Gulbcrg Industrial Colony, LAHORE
FOREWORD
History is to a nation what memory is to an individual. It helps to
conserve the fruitful elements of the Past for the benefit of the Future.
Life is a continuous process and the direction of its movement is con¬
ditioned by experience and foresight—by its failures and successes as
well as by its aspirations. Whether therefore the historical process has a
cyclical character, as some believe, or it involves the unfolding of ever-
fresh possibilities on the human plane, its full significance can only be
appreciated in the context of its spatio-temporal record. It follows as a
corollary that the utility of history would depend on the extent to
which it embodies an objective approach to facts and events.
The creation of Pakistan, founded, as it is, on an ideological rather
than a geographical or racial basis, is a unique event in world history.
Its roots lie deep in the socio-political soil of the Indian sub-continent.
Patient research is needed to unearth the sources from which these
roots have derived their life-sustenance during the past centuries. Books
written by Western or Indian authors on the genesis of the Partition of
India are, by and large, oriented either by occidental prejudices or by
an ostrich-like refusal to see the minorities’ problem that existed in an
acute form in this land of linguistic, racial and cultural diversities. The
myth has been sedulously fostered by propagandists of the majority
community that Muslim separatism in India owed its inspiration to the
time-aged formula of Divide et Impera of alien rulers. This is at best an
over-simplification of a complex situation in which narrow Hindu
exclusivism in the socio-economic sphere and thinly-veiled militant
Hindu expansionism in the political field, played no insignificant part.
Competent Muslim historians have been strangely indifferent to the
necessity of providing the necessary corrective to this distorted picture,
though historiography has been the special metier of Muslim litterateurs
in the past. We must, therefore, be grateful to Professor Abdul Hamid
who has made a well-documented attempt in this book to present an
objective account of the cold and hot war that ended in what was describ¬
ed in Congress circles as the vivisection of the cow-mother. I feel that
the treatment of the subject could have been fuller and more detailed
if more original source material had been available to the author. So
far as it goes, however, it is a vivid and authentic story that he has
presented. We must regard it as an earnest of a more exhaustive study
from his piquant pen at some later date. Meanwhile he must be given
the credit for having blazed the trail for other travellers to follow.
65 Gulberg. Lahore S.A. RAHMAN
V
102570
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author acknowledges his indebtedness
to the Asia Foundation for assistance received
and to Mr Curtis Farrar for the interest that
he took in the completion of this volume.