Nichola Tucker's put together a collection of The Atlantic's coverage of Pakistan, dating back to the country's origins in the 1940s. Way back in 1946, the magazine took the view that a "land of the pure" for the subcontinent's Muslims was a bad idea, arguing that the "two nations" theory of the sub-continent was nonsense since "The rice-eating Moslem mopla of Malabar has far more in common with his Hindu neighbors than he has with the wheat-eating Punjabi Moslem" and that under the circumstances "Only the most confused thinking could produce a two-nation theory in India, where there are dozens of distinct races and languages."
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Pakistan Through the Ages
06 Nov 2007 03:44 pm
Comments (30)
I liked this too:
West Pakistan, the left-hand ear, has some 33 million people, including energetic mountaineers and light-skinned members of the ancient Aryan races. East Pakistan, separated from the other ear by a thousand miles of Indian brow, has a arker, tamer race of rice and jute growers and there are some 42 million of them
Seriously, I really did like it. Atlantic articles from the 40s and 50s are cool. Recent stuff -- we'll see.
Also, why the gap between 1960 and 1996?
Interesting article. It wasn't clear to me, though, whether they were really talking about a division of the country into two separate countries as it is today. In any case, the "Malabar moslem" stayed within India with his "rice eating" Hindu bretheren, and did not join the wheat eaters of the Punjabi Moslems. (Of course, the idea that Pakistan is not one people was taken even farther when Bangladesh came about.)
Still the article did not seem to mentioned the most significant event in Pakistani history - the first summit of K2. OK, that's the most significant event to me, but still...
Rice eaters unite! Down with the wheat eaters!
"In any case, the "Malabar moslem" stayed within India with his "rice eating" Hindu bretheren, and did not join the wheat eaters of the Punjabi Moslems. "
There was this thing called "partition"...
"Only the most confused thinking could produce a two-nation theory in India, where there are dozens of distinct races and languages"
Well, massive forced population transfers solved that problem, didn't it?
Which is kinda why Joe Biden is an idiot.
The rejoinder to that thesis would be that Islam unites all men in a universal brotherhood that transcends notions of language, culture, ethnicity, etc. Pakistan was supposed to be a place where such a brotherhood could exist in a state where Muslims were sovereign, per God's directive. To live in a Hindu majority-state would have been a perversion of His will, or so the argument goes/went.
I can't tell if this post is meant as a bankshot criticism of the two-state solution CW on the Israel-Palestine situation.
Or is it just whimsical fascination with the racial descriptions?
One of the things that makes me really nervous about the Biden solution in Iraq is the incredible amount of violence that happened with the Indian partition.
Something like half a million people were killed in partition-related violence, and there was a subsequent war over Bangladeshi independence, and continuing fighting over Kashmir, and now the tense nuclear standoff between the countries. I don't know how bad it would've been without partition, and I can't rule out that it might've been worse, but it's important to remember that these things don't often go cleanly.
"I don't know how bad it would've been without partition, and I can't rule out that it might've been worse, but it's important to remember that these things don't often go cleanly."
The English and the Belgians always seemed to leave a mess behind them in their colonies.
The English were continually playing the Moslem card in the final years of colonial India to avoid departure in such a way that seems to have made a unified post-colonial India impossible.
Divide and rule has humanitarian consequences.
You are ignoring the widely held antiliberal belief amoung muslims that to be part of a nation that does not activly support islam is wrong.
There was no two nations really. A section of the nation split on the basis of religion. The rest of India remained (and remains) secular where religious minorities rights are protected by law. India roughly has the same number of Muslims as Pakistan.
One could argue that the basic problem with the nation state is this notion that everybody, no matter how different in lifestyle, can be yoked together as a "nation." Trying to be an empire" makes that notion even less likely to work.
It's hard to take "tribes" and make a "nation" out of them. It's usually guaranteed to fail sooner or later, as Iraq has proven. There is no evolutionary predisposition for humans to engage in social relations outside of a very narrow range.
It hasn't worked well for the most part, except for those nations whose natural resources were so large that everybody could get a piece of the action.
Even in the US, we're still more simply tolerant of other ethnicities than we are "united". Beat this country down to Third World status and see how fast this country would fracture along ethnic and cultural lines. It almost did in the Civil War - and we were half the size then that we are now.
Richard, you represent the best of 1920's thought. I look forward to your future intellectual discoveries.
Jinnah successfully raised the slogan of "Islam in Danger!" which is still used by reactionary politicians in the subcontinent, of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi variety.
The Indian National Congress seemed bent on land reform which was one of the things that resulted in most of the Muslim landlords ending up with Jinnah.
West Pakistan, the left-hand ear, has some 33 million people, including energetic mountaineers and light-skinned members of the ancient Aryan races. East Pakistan, separated from the other ear by a thousand miles of Indian brow, has a darker, tamer race of rice and jute growers and there are some 42 million of them.
World Factbook
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
Bangladesh, population
150,448,339 (July 2007 est.)
Pakistan, population
164,741,924 (July 2007 est.)
i.e, West Pakistan went from 33 million to 164 million (a factor of 5), and Bangladesh, nee East Pakistan went from 42 million to 150 million (a factor of 3.5) in the same period.
And India has more Muslims than Bangladesh and only slightly less than Pakistan.
Which exposes a lot of the silliness behind having a subcontinental Muslim nation(s)
Far be it from me to endorse the two-nation theory; an Indian-American and avid follower of South Asian politics and history, I certainly believe the creation of Pakistan to have been a serious mistake, one with major repercussions up to the present day.
BUT, while arguing against a 60-year-old decision may be a fun academic exercise or parlor game, it has very real relevance for the world. At some point, a nation's existence no longer needs justification - it has a right to exist because it HAS existed. (A shockingly large number of countries in the world are fairly "accidental" in nature.)
The point is, Pakistan DOES exist and even in India nobody would want to see it re-attached. Whatever the circumstances of its creation, the world needs to deal with Pakistan.
The fundamental problem with the country is simply that it has long lacked any rule of law. Hand in hand with that is the fact that it has simply been grossly misruled for decades. This is the result of many factors - conflict in the '50s between secularists and the Mullahs (who even at the time exhibited power grossly disproportionate to their numbers), a poor division of resources and political institutions at the time of independence (India got most of the assets but Pakistan got a disproportionate share of the British Indian army), a lack of a coherent political party at independence, serious ethnic strife between East and West Pakistan (which stunted Pakistani political development), and some seriously poor luck. By which I mean the deaths, in quick succession of Jinnah and his chosen successor, the able Liaquat Ali Khan.
Of course, having raised the question, I will do the easy thing and back out. I know Pakistani history - it doesn't mean I have any idea what to do with it now. I don't think anybody does.
Pakistan's population doubling every 18 years guarantees violence and instability, Patel. And India will be hard-pressed to avoid the fallout from it. Malthus may have his day after the next war.
Patel, a lot of my Indian friends have expressed similar feelings - that Pakistan doesn't make sense, but it exists.
I think the really dangerous thing, and the reason Pakistan has so much trouble staying cohesive, is that if you look at the subcontinental empires, they tended to include Central Pakistan, but not the Sind, which I recall being quasi-independent, or Baluchistan, which I *know* was part of Persia.
As mentioned by Petey above, the "two nation" solution wasn't really adopted because it made sense, it was consciously promoted by the British. First as part of a "divide and conquer" standard sort of colonialism. Then, once independance came closer, as part of a wider geopolitical strategy. Britain and the US didn't want to lose their bases on the subcontinent (which were nice to have for a variety of reasons.)
Since it seemed like the broader Indian independance movement was tilting anti-Britain/US and would likely kick them out, they decided to support a two-state policy that would preserve a military ally in the region in Pakistan. The Moslem parties, meanwhile, were happy to sign on as allies in return for getting their own country to run, rather than being marginal figures in a new post-colonial India.
It would seem to me that the 60 years of repression of Muslims in India, and the refusal to give up majority Muslim Kashmir, would prove the point that there needed to be an independent Pakistan.
I wouldn't describe Muslims in India as "repressed." That's not saying they're in a great position - their position is somewhat similar to American Blacks (somewhat worse) - they have equality before the law and there is a Muslim middle class (the middle class is about 15% Muslim, roughly the same as the general population), plus integration is much better in certain areas (like Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, West Bengal) than in others (Gujurat).
The Kashmir situation is extremely complicated. "Kashmir" is actually a multiethnic province with about a 60% Muslim majority. However, Muslims are most heavily concentrated in the Kashmir Valley, the most populous part of the state, where they traditionally formed ~90% of the population. These were the true "Kashmiris," speaking the Kashmiri language. Hindus formed about 10% of the population and were the leading merchant and political class (the Nehru-Gandhi family is of Kashmiri Hindu - or Pandit - descent).
The rest of the state comprises Jammu (a majority Hindu region whose inhabitants speak Dogri, a Punjabi dialect), Ladakh (a Tibeto-Buddhist region), Kargil (a mixed Buddhist-Muslim region), and Baltistan and Gilgit (non-Kashmiri-speaking but tribal Muslim areas that are both controlled by Pakistan).
The anti-India movement is concentrated in the Kashmiri valley, which has a strong secular tradition and is fairly hostile to Pakistan as well (polls show that an overwhelming majority of Muslim Kashmiris want independence - a small portion favor continued union with India and an even smaller portion favor union with Pakistan).
India, however, sees no reason to give up the territory b/c India is a multiethnic/multilinguistic state (with other states that are majority non-Hindu, such as Punjab and several Christian-majority Northeastern states) - the threat of unraveling is a real one.
The answer is autonomy for Kashmir on both sides of the Indo-Pak border, combined with normalization of relations across South Asia.
Also, although I think British divide-and-rule techniques certainly played a role (particularly prior to the 1940s), when partition came, it was more due to the actions of Indian leaders than the British (although the British did do a hash out of it).
The fear of the Muslims - not an entirely illogical one - would be that in a strong, centralized Indian state, they would be outnumbered by the Hindus and would be shut of jobs, resources and potentially oppressed.
The Pakistan pledge remained quite vague and there's substantial evidence (per Ayesha Jalal) that the demand for Pakistan was really a negotiating ploy. It's not clear how committed to the idea of an independent Pakistan Jinnah actually was, but it seems clear that his top choice was actually some kind of power-sharing or confederal scheme.
As alternative to partition, Jinnah suggested parity at the federal level between Hindus and Muslims. Since Hindus outnumbered Muslims 3:1, most leaders of the Indian National Congress saw this as grossly unfair.
Nevertheless, there is some evidence that Jinnah may actually have been somewhat flexible - moreso, in fact, that the senior Congress leadership.
In 1946, a British cabinet mission, the Cripps Mission, proposed a scheme for an independent "Federation of India" (really a confederation). It proposed granting independence to India under a three-tiered structure. The central administration would be divided up between regional capitals administering (A) the Western provinces, (B) the central and southern provinces - what is today India, minus Indian punjab, West Bengal and Assam, and (C) the Eastern provinces, Bengal and Assam. Group A would have a Muslim majority, Group B a Hindu majority and Group C parity between Hindus and Muslims. The position of the princely states was ambiguous - they may have remained self-governing, or they may have joined the groupings.
There would remain an Indian central government, with jurisdiction over foreign affairs, defense, currency, and communications.
Whether this scheme would have worked is an open question (it's not dissimilar to that of Bosnia or Biden's Iraq plan). But the point is that Jinnah accepted it and, in fact, rejected the alternative proposed at that point - a partition of India as it actually happened (including a partition of Punjab and Bengal provinces).
Congress reluctantly accepted but then backed out of the deal.
In short, neither side was really willing to compromise, and Congress was actually even less willing to compromise than the Muslim League.
The senior Congress leadership, whether Socialists or not (i.e. Sardar Patel), favored a strongly centralized state and were unwilling to settle for a confederation or even a federation. Nehru even wanted to do away eventually with provinces and simply create 4 national administrative districts. To them, a confederal India would mean power-sharing with the Muslim League and would stall their grandiose nationwide plans for their new state.
As they saw it, partition was preferable. They envisioned a rump Pakistan, economically and socially dependent on India (and they never anticipated the population movements that took place). They figured this arrangement would leave them in a more powerful position than a power-sharing deal with the League in a confederal India.
As it turned out, a de facto civil war ensued anyway, 1 million people died, 10-20 million fled their homes and the two countries have had poisonous relations ever since. The leadership of the Congress came to regret their decisions fairly quickly and by the early '60s, near his death, Nehru resuscitated the idea of a confederation, proposing an Indo-Pak confederation that would grant self-rule to East Bengal and Kashmir.
The truth is that in 1947, although the Brits had laid the groundwork, neither Attlee, nor most of the British administration favored a partition. Neither did the Americans. The decision came about solely because neither side was willing to compromise.
To be fair, comparing the status of Muslims in India to that of African-Americans is not quite fair. When a great many non-Muslims in India look at Muslims, they see (unfairly, of course) the spiritual descendents of the people who repeatedly invaded India for five centuries, built a pyramid of human skulls outside Delhi, tore down Hindu temples and built mosques on the ruins, broke the tenets of their own religion by lending money usuriously to starving Hindu peasants, raped Hindu women, mercilessly repressed the Hindu religion, roasted the Sikh gurus alive, forcibly circumcised Christian converts, set themselves up as a predatory aristocracy of slaveholding landowners, and to top it all off, willingly collaborated with the British occupiers. And when they think of Pakistan today they think of the country that collaborated with the Mujahideen and the Taliban, whose cities ran red with Hindu blood during Partition, who massacred three million of its own citizens during the war for the independence of Bangladesh, and that today executes Hindus and Christians for blasphemy if they question the divine inspiration of the Muslim prophet.
Great wrongs were done to the Hindus, Sikhs and Christians of India by the Muslim invaders. Of course it would be unfair to blame Indian Muslims today for any of that. For the most part they are the descendants of peasant converts, not the Persian/Turk/Moghul occupiers. But you must understand that when a great many Indians think of Islam they think of nearly a thousand years of pillage and oppression. We ought not to condone anti-Muslim sentiment but to compare it to racism in America is without foundation.
Yeah, and much of the brutality of the Muslim invaders has been grossly exaggerated.
Not to say they were all pleasant folks. Timurlane and many invaders were ravenously blood-thirsty. But it's important to know the full context; often, the most brutal Muslim invaders were fighting other Muslim rulers in India. Even many of the most brutal ones had Hindu allies. And the Moghuls and many other regional dynasties were closely tied and linked to ruling Hindu castes in several states. The Moghuls, for their part, were comparatively benign. There were virtually no pillages and relatively little destruction by the famously irreligious Babur, up until Aurangzeb.
Again, none of this to say that there weren't some extremely brutal Muslim invaders, but that they weren't all like that, their fights were often political, not religious, and the enormity of Muslim damage to India has often been grossly overstated by Hindu nationalists creating a fake history to justify their quasi-Fascist political views. Fascist movements like stories about "1000 years of brutal repression."
Does it matter if the Muslim rulers weren't a continuous string of Aurangzebs and Timurlaines? one of each is enough....and actually, Aurangzeb was probably more typical of the period than the tolerant emperor Akbar. What about the fifth Sikh Guru who was roasted alive on a hot plate? What about Prithvi Raj Chauhan of Delhi, whose eyes were burned out with red hot pokers? what about the sultans of Luknow who lived in unbelievable decadent luxury while their Hindu subjects were starving to death? what about the last king of Junagadh who spent vast sums on his pet dogs when his people were dying of hunger and disease? what about the fact that the predatory landlords and usurers were disproportionately likely to be Muslims (even though Islam supposedly condemns usury). what about Muhammad of Ghazni who massacred fifty thousand pilgrims at the temple of Somnath. what about the son of Shivaji whose eyes, tongue, nails were torn out before he was flayed alive by Aurangzeb?
The significance of Muslim oppression in India should not be understated. I'm a Christian but from a part-Hindu family, so I have been hearing these stories all my life. At the end of the day, the Hindus did not go to Muslim lands, torture their leaders, massacre their people, jeer at their 'idolatry' and convert them to Hinduism. It happened the other way around.
Hector, no one is denying that there wasn't oppression by some Muslim rulers. But many of the most destructive behaviors WERE the result of raiding parties who had no intention of building a functioning state.
And the history of Moghul rule, in particular, is highly well detailed. And among Mughal rulers, Aurangzeb was more of an exception; both the preceding Moghul rulers and the following (weak) Moghul rulers were far less tyrannical.
Moreover, the idea that Hindu rulers were saints is equally untrue. Few Hindus saw themselves as "Hindus" until the Muslim and British eras and in the pre-Islamic era, violence between rival sects was common. Thousands of Buddhist stupas and religious sites were destroyed by Hindu rulers in medieval times, and Hindu kings often did destroy the temples and orders of rival castes or sects when they conquered or invaded neighboring states.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1725/17250620.htm
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rowan_Hamilton >William Rowan Hamilton - Wikipedia
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Comments closed November 20, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Everybody knows you don't mix rice-eaters and wheat-eaters.
Posted by steve duncan | November 6, 2007 3:51 PM