The Wounded Civilization — Part 2: The Narrators

By /

How British rule wrote, counted and divided India’s memory, 1757–1947.

British India

The Insult of Eight Hundred Years

In late 1842, the Governor-General of India, Lord Ellenborough, issued a proclamation to the princes and chiefs of India. A British army, retreating from a disastrous war in Afghanistan, was bringing home a pair of gates taken from the tomb of Mahmud of Ghazni. These, Ellenborough declared, were the gates of the temple of Somnath, carried away by Mahmud eight centuries before. “The insult of 800 years,” the proclamation announced, “is at last avenged.”

The gates turned out to be made of deodar, a wood native to Afghanistan, not the sandalwood of Gujarat. They had nothing to do with Somnath, and they still lie in a storeroom of Agra Fort. In London, Thomas Babington Macaulay rose in the House of Commons in March 1843 to ridicule the whole affair. The Governor-General, he said, had announced his intention “to retaliate on the Mussulmans beyond the mountains the insults which their ancestors, eight hundred years ago, offered to the idolatry of the Hindoos.” “Morally, this is a crime,” Macaulay told the house. “Politically, it is a blunder.”

Put two dates side by side. In 1842 a British Governor-General spoke of the “insult of 800 years.” In 2014 an Indian Prime Minister spoke of a “slave mentality of 1,200 years.” The first official statement that India’s history was one continuous story of Hindu humiliation at Muslim hands was made not by a Hindu nationalist but by a British colonial ruler, eighty years before the RSS was founded, to win the goodwill of Hindu princes after a military disaster. That is the subject of this second part.

For readers joining the series here, a brief recap. Part 1, The Soil and the Encounter, examined seven centuries of Islamic rule in India and reached three conclusions. The events were real: the raids, the temple destructions, the enslavements, the massacres and the burning fortresses of Chittor were documented, often boastfully, by the conquerors’ own chroniclers. So was a second record of alliance and synthesis, of Rajput generals in Mughal armies, shared Sufi shrines, and a Mughal prince who translated the Upanishads. And the memories of that history were real but plural: Rajput, Sikh, Maratha, Kashmiri, Bengali and Malayali memories differed enormously, and large parts of India barely experienced Muslim rule at all. What did not exist by 1757 was a single story: one people, one wound, one villain, one golden age before the fall. A collective trauma of the kind that drives mass politics, Part 1 argued, needs a narrator.

This part is about the narrators. They include British historians who wrote India’s past as a drama in three acts, translators who decided which medieval chronicles the English-reading world would see, and census officers who required every Indian to declare a single religion. They include, just as importantly, the Indian reformers, Hindu and Muslim, who took that history and turned it into politics. The story ends in 1947, when the memory of conquest became, for millions of people, lived experience.

One caution before we begin. This is not a tale of scheming British villains manipulating innocent Indians. The British did not invent the grievance; Part 1 showed it was a thousand years old. Indians on every side took up the new story eagerly, and Hindu nationalism and Muslim separatism grew up together, each feeding the other. What colonial rule supplied was the frame, the numbers and the categories, and the political incentives that made organizing by religion pay. Part 1 found that the great work of manufacture had barely begun by 1757. This part is about how it was done.

Table of Contents

A Company Inherits an Empire

The East India Company did not set out to rule India. It set out to make money, and it discovered, in the chaos that followed Aurangzeb’s death, that ruling was the most profitable trade of all. After its victory at Plassey in 1757, the Company installed a pliant Nawab in Bengal. In 1765 the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, a ruler with a title but almost no territory, granted it the diwani: the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. A joint-stock company of London merchants had become the tax collector, and soon the government, of some of the richest provinces on earth.

The India it moved into was not a single kingdom waiting to be conquered. It was a patchwork of successor states. The Mughal emperor still sat in Delhi, revered and powerless. The Marathas were the strongest military force in the subcontinent. The Nizam ruled Hyderabad, the Nawabs ruled Awadh, and Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan built a formidable state in Mysore; later, Ranjit Singh would build a Sikh kingdom in Punjab. The Company’s wars against these powers did not follow religious lines. It fought Tipu, a Muslim ruler, with Maratha and Nizam allies, and then spent decades fighting the Hindu Marathas, until their final defeat in 1818. Its armies were made up overwhelmingly of Indian soldiers of every faith.

But a ruler needs more than an army. It needs a reason to be obeyed. The Mughals had claimed legitimacy through descent from Timur, through Persian traditions of kingship, and through the emperor’s role as protector of all his subjects. The Company could claim none of this. For decades it governed in the emperor’s name, and its coins carried the name of the Mughal emperor until 1835. It needed a story in which its rule was not usurpation but rescue. History became an instrument of government.

The first step was law. In 1772 Warren Hastings, the Company’s governor in Bengal, laid down that in matters of inheritance, marriage, caste and religious usage, Muslims would be governed by Islamic law and Hindus by the law of the shastras, the Sanskrit legal texts. It sounded like respect for Indian tradition. In practice it did something new. Hindu custom had varied enormously from caste to caste and region to region, and much of it was never written in any Sanskrit text. To find “the Hindu law,” Company judges consulted Brahmin pandits, and the pandits consulted Brahminical texts. What emerged over the following century, known to lawyers as Anglo-Hindu law and Anglo-Muhammadan law, was a pair of codified religious systems that defined every Indian, before the courts, by religion first. A plural world of customs was being sorted into two legal communities.

No one in 1772 intended this to divide Indians politically. But it established a principle that would shape everything that followed: that for the purposes of the state, an Indian was above all a Hindu or a Muslim. Personal law still divides Indians by religion today, and the argument over a uniform civil code, which Part 3 will reach, is an argument about a decision a British governor made two and a half centuries ago.

The Golden Age and the Fall

The British who first studied India seriously were not its enemies. Many of them were its admirers.

Sir William Jones arrived in Calcutta in 1783 as a judge of the Supreme Court and founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal the following year. In a famous lecture in 1786 he argued that Sanskrit shared a common ancestor with Greek and Latin, an insight that founded the modern study of the Indo-European languages. He translated Kalidasa’s play Shakuntala, which enchanted Goethe and the European Romantics. Over the next century, scholars such as Max Müller, who edited the Rig Veda, presented ancient India as one of humanity’s great civilizations: philosophical, poetic, sophisticated, the elder sibling of Greece.

Educated Indians embraced this picture with understandable pride. But it carried a hidden structure. A golden age implies a fall, and a fall demands a cause. If ancient India had been glorious and modern India was poor, divided and ruled by foreigners, something must have happened in between. The Orientalists’ admiration for the Sanskrit past quietly turned the centuries of Muslim rule into the explanation for decline.

The man who gave this structure its lasting form was no admirer at all. James Mill published his History of British India in 1817. He had never visited India and could read none of its languages, and he regarded this as an advantage, since it left his judgement uncorrupted by sympathy. He thought Hindu civilization barbaric and Muslim civilization only slightly less so. But his most durable contribution was not his contempt. It was his scheme. Mill divided Indian history into three periods: Hindu, Muslim and British. His book became the standard text at Haileybury, the college that trained the Company’s administrators, and generations of officials learned to see India’s past through it.

Notice what the scheme does. It names entire centuries after the religion of their rulers. It is as if English history were divided into a Catholic period and a Protestant period according to the faith of the monarch, and every English farmer were assigned the religion of the crown. Yet under Mill’s scheme, a Hindu farmer in Awadh in 1600, worshipping the same gods as his grandfather and paying the same kind of revenue to the same kind of landlord, lived in “the Muslim period” because the emperor in Agra was a Muslim. The scheme turned the religion of kings into the identity of an age.

Indian nationalists later rejected Mill’s contempt, but many kept his boxes and simply changed their values. The Hindu period became a golden age. The Muslim period became an age of foreign rule and darkness. The British period became, for nationalists, a second foreign occupation. Some historians, Romila Thapar prominent among them, spent decades arguing that the scheme itself was misleading, and Indian textbooks eventually spoke of “ancient,” “medieval” and “modern” India instead. But the older shape survived beneath the new labels. It survives in the phrase “1,200 years of slavery,” which is simply Mill’s second and third periods merged into one, with a new fourth act, awakening, added at the end. The structure of the most powerful story in Indian politics today was drawn, two centuries ago, by a Scotsman who never set foot in the country.

An Archive of Tyranny

If Mill supplied the structure, a civil servant named Henry Miers Elliot supplied the evidence.

Elliot spent his career in the Company’s revenue administration in northern India, and he devoted his spare hours to collecting and translating the Persian chronicles of the Sultanate and Mughal courts. He died in 1853 before he could finish, and the orientalist John Dowson completed the work. The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians appeared in eight volumes between 1867 and 1877. For nearly a century it was the main English-language window onto medieval India, and in many ways it still is.

Elliot was candid about his purpose. He hoped the work would “make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and equity of our rule.” The way to do that was to show them what Muslim rule had been like, and Elliot chose his passages accordingly. The volumes concentrate on the political and military chronicles, with their accounts of campaigns, sieges, massacres and temple destructions. They largely leave aside the Sufi literature, the poetry, the administrative records and the descriptions of ordinary life that might have complicated the picture. Later scholars noted that some translations were made from a single manuscript where better ones existed, and that the selection itself told a story. Richard Eaton has argued that the project was designed to delegitimize the Muslim rulers who preceded the British.

It matters what this does and does not mean. Elliot did not invent the atrocities he translated. The chronicles were real, and so were their boasts; Part 1 quoted several of them. Medieval court historians wrote to glorify their patrons, and glory, in that literary tradition, was measured in temples broken and infidels slain. What Elliot did was select. He took the most triumphalist passages of flattering court historians and presented them to the English-reading world as the authentic voice of seven centuries, “as told by its own historians.” The title itself made the claim. A boast written to please a sultan became the sultan’s own confession.

The afterlife of these volumes is extraordinary. When the American popular historian Will Durant wrote in 1935 that “the Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history,” he was writing from translated sources, and for medieval India the standard English source of his day was Elliot and Dowson. Durant’s sentence now circulates on social media millions of times over. So, in one form or another, do Elliot’s selections. There is a deep irony here that neither side of India’s history wars likes to acknowledge. Much of the documentary arsenal of today’s Hindu nationalist history was assembled by a British official whose stated aim was to persuade Indians to be grateful for British rule.

Scripting Memory: Somnath and the Rajputs

Historians wrote the structure and translators supplied the evidence. But memory is not made of structures and evidence. It is made of stories, places and heroes, and here too the colonial era did decisive work.

Somnath is the clearest case. Part 1 showed that the temple Mahmud raided in 1026 was repaired within a few years, rebuilt in stone in 1169, and attacked several more times over the following centuries. In the Sanskrit inscriptions and Jain texts of the period that followed, the historian Romila Thapar found little sign of Mahmud’s raid being remembered as a defining Hindu catastrophe. In her reading, it was the 1842 proclamation, and the furious debate it provoked in the House of Commons, that lifted Somnath into a symbol of eight centuries of Hindu suffering. Her critics reply that the absence of lament in courtly inscriptions proves little about what ordinary worshippers felt, and that a temple desecrated again and again could hardly have been forgotten. Both points have force. What is beyond dispute is that after 1842 the story of Somnath took on a new life: in English debate, then in Indian nationalist writing, then in K.M. Munshi’s popular Gujarati novel Jay Somnath in 1940, and finally, as Part 3 will show, in the rebuilt temple of 1951 and the political pilgrimage that set out from it in 1990.

The Rajputs are the second case, and in some ways the more consequential one. James Tod was a British officer who served as political agent in the Rajput states in the early nineteenth century. He fell in love with the region, collected its bardic chronicles and genealogies, and in 1829 and 1832 published the two volumes of his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. Tod saw the Rajputs through the lens of European romanticism. To him they were India’s medieval knights: chivalrous, feudal, proud, defending their honor and their women against Muslim invaders in a long epic of heroic resistance. He gave the English-reading world the full drama of Chittor, of jauhar, and of Padmini.

Tod’s book did something its author never intended. It travelled to Calcutta, where it was read by an English-educated Bengali middle class that had no martial tradition of its own and was being told by its rulers that it was soft, timid and unfit to govern itself. The Rajputs Tod described offered exactly what that class lacked: a heroic Hindu past of resistance and sacrifice. Bengali writers seized on it. Rangalal Bandyopadhyay’s long poem on Padmini appeared in 1858. Rajput tales became a staple of Bengali drama, poetry and children’s literature, culminating in Abanindranath Tagore’s much-loved Rajkahini in 1909. From Bengal the stories spread across India in school readers, plays and, later, films.

So the most famous heroic memory in modern Hinduism took a remarkable route to its audience. A Sufi poet’s allegory of 1540 became Rajput bardic tradition, which a Scottish officer turned into English romance, which Bengali nationalists turned into a national Hindu epic, which a Hindi film turned into a national controversy in 2018. At every stage the story grew grander and its Muslim villain darker. That is not a reason to dismiss it. It is a reason to understand how it was built.

Counting and Fixing Identities

Of all the instruments of colonial rule, none changed Indian identity more deeply than the census, and none did it more quietly.

The first all-India census was taken between 1867 and 1872, and from 1881 it was held every ten years. It asked every person in British India to state, among other things, a religion and a caste. To a modern reader this seems an innocent administrative question. In nineteenth-century India it was a revolution. As Part 1 described, much of the population did not live inside neat religious boxes. There were Meos near Delhi who prayed in mosques and celebrated Diwali, Bengali villagers who honored Satya Pir, Gujarati communities who followed a saint revered by both faiths, and countless groups whose customs mixed what would later be called Hindu and Muslim practice. The census reports of the period are full of puzzled officials trying to decide which column such people belonged in. The census could not record a person as partly one thing and partly another. Every Indian had to be counted as one religion, and once counted, people increasingly understood themselves that way.

Caste went through the same process. In 1901 the census commissioner, Herbert Risley, attempted to rank the castes of each province in order of social precedence. The result was a flood of petitions from caste associations demanding a higher place, claiming Kshatriya or Brahmin origins, and organizing themselves to press the claim. The anthropologist Nicholas Dirks has argued that caste as modern Indians know it, rigid, all-India and political, was shaped as much by colonial ethnography as by ancient tradition. Caste was not invented by the British. But it was counted, ranked and written into the machinery of the state, and an institution that is counted becomes an institution that organizes.

Counting religion produced something even more consequential: majorities and minorities. Once communities were enumerated, they could be compared, and once the British began introducing elected bodies, first in municipalities in the 1880s and then in provincial councils, numbers became power. Every census became a scoreboard.

And the scoreboard seemed to show a trend. Between 1881 and 1901, the Muslim share of the population rose slightly, mainly because of higher birth rates among the Muslim peasantry of Bengal and Punjab and partly because of changes in how people were classified. In 1909 a Bengali doctor, U.N. Mukherji, published a series of articles in The Bengalee titled “Hindus: A Dying Race.” Drawing on the censuses of 1881, 1891 and 1901, he projected the decline of the Hindu share in a straight line and concluded that Hindus would disappear from India in about 420 years. He ended with a line that would echo for a century: “They count their gains, we calculate our losses.” In 1926 the Arya Samaj leader Swami Shraddhanand repeated the warning in a book called Hindu Sangathan: Saviour of the Dying Race, writing that “while Muhammadans multiply like anything, the numbers of the Hindus are dwindling.” In 1979 the Hindu Mahasabha reused Mukherji’s closing line as the title of a pamphlet.

This is the origin of a fear that is now everywhere in Indian politics: the fear that Muslims will outnumber Hindus. It was born not from any medieval memory, but from a colonial table of numbers, read by an anxious educated class that had just learned to see itself as a community competing for its share. Part 3 will test today’s version of that fear against the data. For now it is enough to note its birthplace.

The census had one more consequence, which would not become visible until 1947. When the time came to divide British India, the boundary commission drew the new border district by district, using the religious majorities recorded in the census of 1941. The question first asked in the 1870s, which religion are you, became the question that decided which country millions of people would wake up in.

1857 and After

In May 1857, Indian soldiers of the Company’s army rose in revolt at Meerut, marched to Delhi, and proclaimed the aged Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, their sovereign. The uprising spread across northern and central India and took more than a year to suppress. It is worth remembering what it looked like. Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelled together, over cartridges rumored to be greased with the fat of cows and pigs, offensive to both. Rebel proclamations appealed to Hindus and Muslims alike to defend their faiths against a foreign Christian power. The rebellion’s symbol was a Muslim emperor, and many of its leaders, from Nana Sahib to the Rani of Jhansi, were Hindu.

The British response shifted over time, and each shift left a mark. At first, many British officials saw the revolt as a Muslim conspiracy to restore Mughal rule. Delhi’s Muslims were driven out of the city for years after its recapture, the emperor was tried and exiled to Rangoon, and his sons were shot. In 1871, at the request of the Viceroy, the official W.W. Hunter published The Indian Musalmans, which asked whether Indian Muslims were bound by their religion to rebel against the Queen. It portrayed them as a disaffected and declining community, and recommended conciliation.

Conciliation followed, and it took a particular form: the cultivation of Muslims as a distinct community with distinct interests, which the government would protect. When Bengal was partitioned in 1905, creating a Muslim-majority province in the east, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, presented it to the Muslims of Dacca as a restoration of a unity they had not enjoyed since the days of Muslim rule; Bengali nationalists, overwhelmingly Hindu, saw it as an attempt to break their movement. In 1909 the Morley-Minto reforms gave Muslims separate electorates, in which Muslims voted only for Muslim candidates. From then on, being counted as a Muslim was not just a matter of identity. It was a political asset, guaranteed by law.

Did the British, then, deliberately divide Hindus and Muslims in order to rule them? This is one of the oldest arguments in Indian historiography, and the honest answer has two halves. Indian nationalist historians have pointed, with good reason, to officials who openly discussed the advantages of division, and to a pattern of policy, from separate electorates to communal quotas in government jobs, that consistently rewarded organizing by religion. Other historians have pointed, also with good reason, to the competition among Indian elites themselves, Hindu and Muslim, for jobs, seats, patronage and status, which existed independently of British design and which British policy exploited rather than created.

Both halves are true, and the combination is more damning than either alone. The British did not invent the fault line between Hindus and Muslims; Part 1 traced it back a thousand years. What colonial rule did was make the fault line pay. Every institution of colonial politics, the census, the personal laws, the separate electorates, the quotas, gave Indians an incentive to see themselves first as Hindus or Muslims and to organize accordingly. A memory that had been plural and local was given a national arena, a scoreboard and a prize.

The Colonized Self

Colonialism did not only write India’s history. It entered India’s psyche, and it did so through a wound that the agrarian psychology described in Part 1 was poorly equipped to resist.

The colonial encounter did not simply add external oppression to an inherited habit of submission. It produced something more complex and more lasting: a colonized self that learned to manage its dignity through moral superiority and spiritual transcendence rather than political confrontation. The psychologist Ashis Nandy, in his extraordinary book The Intimate Enemy, traces how this self took shape. The West was powerful, but violent, materialistic and spiritually shallow. India was subjugated, but ancient, spiritual and morally elevated. This was not only propaganda. For millions it was a genuine survival mechanism, the only way to keep a sense of self intact under the grinding humiliation of foreign rule. You may have defeated us, the colonized self told itself, but we have something you cannot conquer.

Colonialism attacked one part of that self with particular precision: its masculinity. British rule justified itself partly through a theory of manliness. The rulers were vigorous, martial and rational; the ruled were soft, emotional and unfit for self-government. In 1841 Macaulay, the same man who mocked Ellenborough, wrote that “the physical organisation of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy.” After 1857 the army developed a doctrine of “martial races,” recruiting from Punjabis, Pathans, Gurkhas and Rajputs and treating other communities, the educated Bengali Hindu above all, as constitutionally unwarlike. The historian Mrinalini Sinha has shown how deeply this language of the “manly Englishman” and the “effeminate Bengali” shaped colonial politics. And it carried an implicit history lesson. Why had Hindus been conquered by Turks, Afghans, Mughals and now the British? Because, the answer went, they were weak.

This was the wound that Indian responses to colonialism had to answer, and two answers emerged. They are, I would argue, the two halves of India’s political psyche to this day.

The first answer was to accept the equation between manliness and power, and to rebuild Hindu manliness. Swami Vivekananda, the most influential Hindu voice of the 1890s, told young Indians that they would “be nearer to Heaven through football than through the study of the Gita.” Gymnasiums and wrestling akharas multiplied. In Bengal, revolutionary societies such as the Anushilan Samiti began life as physical culture clubs. And it was in this spirit that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925 and discussed below, built its daily shakha around drill, exercise and discipline. Hindu weakness was the diagnosis; Hindu strength was the cure.

The second answer was Gandhi’s, and it was far more original. Gandhi refused the equation altogether. Nandy argues that he deliberately rejected the colonial idea that power belonged to the hard, aggressive and masculine, and embraced instead a politics of endurance, self-suffering and something close to androgyny: the spinning wheel, the fast, the refusal to strike back. Non-violence worked not despite the Indian collective psyche but because of it. Satyagraha was not a technique borrowed from political philosophy. It was the authentic political expression of a people for whom direct, violent confrontation with authority was psychologically alien, and who found in non-violent resistance a form of courage that felt like their own. It took the most deeply conditioned reflex of the agrarian psyche, endurance, and gave it political meaning and moral grandeur.

But Gandhi’s genius had a shadow, and it extends to the present. It permanently validated endurance as political virtue. The same psychology that made non-violent resistance magnificent in 1930 makes sustained political accountability extraordinarily difficult today. A population conditioned for centuries to experience endurance as nobility and confrontation as transgression does not easily convert its grievances into organized political demands, even when those grievances are legitimate.

These two answers to colonial humiliation coexisted uneasily for half a century. Muscular Hindu nationalism regarded Gandhi’s non-violence, and his concessions to Muslims, as a continuation of the very weakness that had lost India its freedom. That conviction would end, on 30 January 1948, in three shots fired at a prayer meeting in Delhi. Nandy’s reading of that assassination is that the killer saw in Gandhi not merely a political opponent but the embodiment of a feminized, defenseless India that he believed had to be destroyed for the nation to become strong. The two halves of the colonized self met, in the end, at Birla House.

The Hindu Revival and Its Edges

The nineteenth century saw a great awakening of Hindu self-consciousness. Much of it was reform: an effort to answer the criticisms of Christian missionaries and British officials, to purge Hindu practice of what reformers considered corruptions, and to recover the dignity of an ancient tradition. Rammohun Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1828, campaigned against sati and idolatry. Swami Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj, founded in 1875, called Hindus back to the Vedas, rejected caste by birth and idol worship, and promoted the education of women. These were serious movements of renewal, and much of modern Hindu social reform descends from them.

But renewal had an edge, and the edge pointed outward. Reform movements defined a purified Hinduism partly by contrast with its rivals. Dayananda’s major work, Satyarth Prakash, included long polemical chapters against Islam and Christianity, as well as against many Hindu sects. And as Hindus began to think of themselves as a single community, they needed symbols that every Hindu, of every caste and region, could rally around.

The cow became the first of those symbols. Dayananda founded a society for the protection of cows in 1882, and cow protection societies spread rapidly across northern India. The cow was sacred to Hindus of every caste, and its slaughter, associated with Muslim butchers and with the Bakr-Id sacrifice, offered a grievance that united a high-caste Brahmin and a peasant Jat in a way little else could. In 1893 cow protection agitation led to deadly riots in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bombay. A religious symbol had become a mobilizing tool, and the Muslim neighbor its target.

Language came next. In the courts of the North-Western Provinces, the official language was Urdu, written in the Perso-Arabic script, the language of the old Mughal administration. Hindu campaigners demanded recognition for Hindi in the Devanagari script. The two are, in their spoken form, essentially one language, but the scripts carried religious associations. In 1900 the provincial government allowed Devanagari in the courts, and the controversy hardened into a communal one. A popular slogan of the era, attributed to the writer Pratap Narayan Mishra, compressed the new identity into three words: “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan.” Urdu, the shared language of Hindu and Muslim north India, became a Muslim language in the public mind.

Literature supplied the emotions. In 1882 the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay published Anandamath, a story of Hindu ascetic warriors rising against the Muslim rulers of Bengal in the 1770s. It gave India the hymn Vande Mataram, which became the anthem of the nationalist movement and which many Muslims found objectionable for its imagery of the nation as a goddess. Bankim, who lamented that Bengalis lacked a history of their own, was in effect writing one. In Maharashtra, the nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak turned the domestic worship of Ganesh into a public festival in 1893 and launched a festival honoring Shivaji soon after. Both were brilliant instruments of mass mobilization. Both also gave Hindu crowds occasions to assemble in public, and, in a decade of riots, processions playing music outside mosques became a recurring flashpoint.

The 1920s brought the sharpest edge of all. The Arya Samaj leader Swami Shraddhanand launched a shuddhi, or purification, campaign in 1923 to reconvert communities that had partly become Muslim, starting with the Malkana Rajputs near Agra and Mathura, communities very much like the in-between groups described in Part 1. Muslim organizations responded with tabligh, preaching campaigns to make such communities properly Islamic. In 1926, a cleric named Muhammad Ilyas began work among the Meos of Mewat, the community that had kept Diwali and the Hindu epics alongside Islam, to bring them into orthodox practice; the movement he founded became the Tablighi Jamaat, today one of the largest Islamic revival movements in the world. Later that year Shraddhanand was assassinated. The in-between communities that the census had struggled to classify were now being fought over, soul by soul, by rival revivals.

One more figure belongs here, because he saw the problem of conversion from the other side. V.D. Savarkar, whom we will meet properly in a moment, listed among the “seven shackles” of caste that he wanted Hindus to break the ban on readmitting those who had left the fold, shuddhibandi. Part 1 argued that caste made individual conversion out of Hinduism socially fatal. Savarkar noticed the other half of the same fact: caste also made return impossible. The door out was heavy, but it locked behind those who passed through it.

The Muslim Story

This series is about the rise of the Hindu right, but that rise cannot be understood without the parallel story of Muslim politics in the same decades. The two grew up together, and each was, in part, a reaction to the other.

For the Muslim elite of northern India, British rule was experienced as a fall. These were the ashraf families described in Part 1: landholders, officials, scholars and courtiers who had served the Mughal state and its successors, and who prized their descent from Arab, Persian, Turkic or Afghan forebears. In 1837 English replaced Persian as the language of administration, and the cultural capital of centuries lost its value almost overnight. After 1857, when the British held Muslims chiefly responsible for the revolt, the decline accelerated. Meanwhile Hindu professional classes, the Bengali bhadralok, the Kayasthas and Khatris of the north, moved quickly into English education and government service. By the late nineteenth century, many ashraf Muslims felt they had gone from ruling India to falling behind their former subjects in a single lifetime.

Their most important leader, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, responded with a program of loyalty and modernization. He founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in 1875 to give Muslims a Western education within an Islamic setting; it became Aligarh Muslim University. But when the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, Sir Syed urged Muslims to stay away from it. Representative government, he feared, would mean rule by the Hindu majority. In a speech at Meerut in 1888 he asked whether, if the British left, “two nations, the Mohammedans and the Hindus,” could sit on the same throne as equals, and answered: “Most certainly not.”

The institutional steps followed quickly. In 1906 a Muslim delegation met the Viceroy at Simla to ask for separate representation, and the All-India Muslim League was founded at Dacca at the end of that year. Separate electorates came in 1909. In 1916, in the Lucknow Pact, even the Congress accepted them, in exchange for Muslim support for self-government. Then, after the First World War, Indian Muslims mobilized in defense of the Ottoman Caliph in the Khilafat movement, and Gandhi, seeking Hindu-Muslim unity, joined it to his own non-cooperation campaign. For two or three years the two communities marched together as never before or since.

The alliance ended badly, and one episode in its collapse became a founding memory of Hindu nationalism. In August 1921, Mappila Muslim tenants in the Malabar district of Kerala rose in revolt against British rule and against the largely Hindu landlords who controlled their land. The rebellion was an agrarian and anti-colonial uprising, but it turned into communal violence against Hindus, including killings and forced conversions. Estimates vary widely: the Arya Samaj claimed about 600 Hindus killed and 2,500 forcibly converted, while the former Viceroy Lord Curzon told Parliament that at least a thousand had been murdered. British repression was ferocious: by official count, more than 2,300 rebels were killed and tens of thousands imprisoned, and in November 1921 dozens of Mappila prisoners suffocated to death in a sealed railway wagon. To Hindu nationalists, Malabar became proof that Hindu-Muslim unity on Muslim terms ended in Hindu blood. To many Kerala historians, it was primarily a peasant revolt. Both memories persist, and Kerala’s government in 1971 recognized its participants as freedom fighters, a decision Hindu nationalists still contest.

In 1924 the new Turkish republic abolished the caliphate, and the Khilafat movement collapsed. Communal riots followed across northern India through the rest of the decade. In 1930 the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal called for a consolidated Muslim state in northwestern India. In 1940, at Lahore, the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah formally demanded independent states for the Muslim-majority regions.

Here the Muslim story intersects directly with the argument of Part 1. Indian Muslims were not a single political bloc, and the demand for Pakistan was, to a striking degree, an ashraf project. Its leaders were landlords, lawyers and professionals, many from Uttar Pradesh, where Muslims were a minority and an elite with the most to lose under majority rule. In the same year as the Lahore Resolution, the All India Momin Conference, which represented the Ansari weavers, the largest of the converted artisan castes, denounced the partition scheme as “impracticable,” “un-Islamic and unnatural,” and thousands of weavers demonstrated against the two-nation theory in Delhi. The influential Deobandi clerics of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind opposed Partition too, as did Maulana Azad within the Congress and the Pashtun leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. In the decisive elections of 1946 the League won the great majority of Muslim seats, but under a restricted franchise, based on property and education, in which most weavers, laborers and poor peasants could not vote. The double barrier described in Part 1, the hierarchy that converts carried into Islam, ran straight through the politics of Partition.

The Architects of Hindutva

The ideology that governs India today was given its name, its definition and its first organizations in the two decades between 1915 and 1940. Its architects were responding to everything described so far: a history written in three acts, a census that showed Hindus as a declining majority, a colonial insult about Hindu weakness, and a Muslim politics that was organizing for separate power.

The Hindu Mahasabha was founded in 1915 as an umbrella body to defend Hindu interests. Its most important thinker was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a revolutionary who had been arrested in 1910 and imprisoned in the Andaman Islands. In prison he wrote the text that named the movement. Essentials of Hindutva, first published in 1923 and later reissued as Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, did something new. It defined Hindu identity not as a religion but as a nation. A Hindu, Savarkar argued, was a person who regarded India as both pitribhumi, the land of his ancestors, and punyabhumi, his holy land. By that definition Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists were Hindus, whatever their beliefs, while Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands lay in Arabia and Palestine, were not, however many generations their families had lived in India. Savarkar himself was not religious. Hindutva, for him, was a civilizational and political identity, and that is precisely why it could reach Hindus who disagreed about everything else.

Savarkar’s reading of the medieval past was the reading Part 1 described. Hindus had lost to the Turks and the Mughals, he argued, because they were divided and weak: split into castes that would not eat, marry or fight together, and burdened by what he later called “perverted virtues,” an excess of tolerance and chivalry toward enemies who showed none. His remedy was unity and strength. Unusually for his time and milieu, he campaigned hard against caste. During his years of confinement at Ratnagiri he organized inter-caste dinners and founded a temple, Patit Pavan Mandir, open to all castes, including those considered untouchable, to the fury of many local Brahmins. He listed seven “shackles” of caste that Hindus had to break, from untouchability to the ban on inter-caste marriage to, as we saw, the ban on taking converts back.

Part 1 argued that caste lost Hindu India its kingdoms but kept its gods. Savarkar saw only the first half of that paradox. He wanted the unity that caste had prevented. He did not reckon with the possibility that caste had also been one of the walls that preserved the faith. That tension, between the political unity Hindutva needs and the social structure most Hindus actually live in, has never been resolved; Part 3 will show how the movement learned to live with it.

In 1937, presiding over the Hindu Mahasabha at Ahmedabad, Savarkar declared that “India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogenous nation,” and that “there are two nations in the main: the Hindus and the Muslims, in India.” He said this three years before the Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution. The two-nation idea was not the property of one side. Sir Syed had voiced a version of it in 1888, Savarkar in 1937, Jinnah in 1940.

The second institution was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in Nagpur in 1925 by a physician, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, in the aftermath of the communal riots of the early 1920s and the Malabar violence. The RSS was not a party. Its founders saw it as a character-building organization that would cure the Hindu weakness Savarkar diagnosed, through daily gatherings of young men for drill, exercise, games and ideological instruction. It was the muscular answer to the colonial insult, institutionalized. Its second leader, M.S. Golwalkar, who took over in 1940, set out its vision of the nation in a 1939 tract, We or Our Nationhood Defined, which cited Germany’s “purging the country of the Semitic Races” as “a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” The RSS later distanced itself from the book. But the passage is part of the record, and an honest account cannot leave it out.

Politics was messier than ideology. The Hindu nationalists despised Gandhi’s non-violence and his outreach to Muslims, and the RSS kept aloof from the Quit India movement of 1942. Yet during those same years the Hindu Mahasabha served in coalition governments alongside the Muslim League in Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province. Ideology set the direction. Opportunity often set the pace.

Congress’s Dilemma

Between the Hindu nationalists and the Muslim League stood the Indian National Congress, the party that led the freedom movement and would govern independent India. Its official creed was inclusive: a single Indian nation of all faiths. Its practical problem was that mass politics in India had to be conducted in a religious idiom, and the idiom most of its audience understood was Hindu.

The tension ran through the movement from the start. Tilak’s festivals mobilized Hindu crowds for nationalism. Vande Mataram became the anthem of the 1905 campaign against the partition of Bengal, even though many Muslims objected to its imagery. Gandhi, the most inclusive of leaders, spoke of Ram Rajya, the ideal kingdom of the god Rama, as his vision of a just India; he meant a moral ideal, but the words were Hindu words. When Gandhi did reach out to Muslims, in the Khilafat alliance of 1919 to 1922, he did so by embracing a Muslim religious cause, the defense of the Caliph, and so brought religion further into politics on both sides. When the cause collapsed, the unity built on it collapsed too.

Jawaharlal Nehru offered a different answer. For Nehru, religion was a private matter and communalism a distraction, a product of middle-class competition and backwardness that economic development and modern education would eventually dissolve. The real divisions in Indian society, in his view, were those of class and poverty. It was an honorable and coherent position, and it underestimated how deep the other divisions ran.

Congress made tactical choices that its opponents never forgot. After the 1937 provincial elections, which Congress won convincingly and the League lost badly, Congress declined to share power with the League in the United Provinces except on terms the League found humiliating. League leaders then compiled reports accusing Congress ministries of discriminating against Muslims. Historians still argue about how much the refusal mattered, but many regard it as a turning point in the League’s journey toward Pakistan.

The deeper dilemma was this. Congress could speak about unity, but it had no vocabulary for the memory itself. It could not acknowledge the Hindu sense of historical wound without seeming to endorse the Hindu nationalist story, and it could not answer the Muslim fear of majority rule without seeming to concede the League’s. So it often said nothing about either. The Muslim League called Congress a Hindu party. The Hindu Mahasabha called Congress a party of Muslim appeasement. Each accusation had just enough truth in it to stick. That silence, the attempt to build a nation by not talking about its deepest wound, would become, after independence, the policy of the Indian state. Part 3 will examine what it cost.

Partition: When Memory Became Experience

Everything in this essay so far has been about how a memory was written, counted and organized. In 1946 and 1947 it stopped being a memory and became something people lived through.

The descent began in Calcutta. To press its demand for Pakistan, the Muslim League called for “Direct Action” on 16 August 1946; Jinnah had warned that India would be either divided or destroyed. The day became the Great Calcutta Killing. In seventy-two hours more than four thousand people, Hindu and Muslim, were killed and some hundred thousand made homeless; some estimates run far higher. The violence leapt from city to countryside. In October, in the Noakhali district of eastern Bengal, Muslim mobs killed Hindus, forcibly converted them and abducted women; Gandhi walked barefoot from village to village for months trying to restore peace. Within weeks, in Bihar, Hindu mobs took revenge on Muslims and killed thousands. Each massacre became the justification for the next.

In March 1947 the violence reached Punjab. In the Rawalpindi district, Muslim mobs attacked Sikh and Hindu villages for days. At the village of Thoa Khalsa, after the men had been overwhelmed, about ninety women jumped into a well rather than fall into the attackers’ hands; only a few survived. Elsewhere, Sikh men killed their own wives, sisters and daughters to save them from capture, and in later years some of them described it, to the historian Urvashi Butalia, as martyrdom. A newspaper report at the time made the connection that this series has traced across seven centuries. The women of Thoa Khalsa, wrote The Statesman, “revived the Rajput tradition of self-immolation when their menfolk were no longer able to protect them.”

Read that sentence again. In 1947 the memory of Chittor, of jauhar, of a community’s honor stored in the bodies of its women, the memory that Part 1 traced from the medieval chronicles through a Sufi poem, a Scottish officer’s romance and Bengali nationalist literature, was no longer a story. It was a well in a Punjabi village.

The border was announced on 17 August 1947, two days after independence. It was drawn district by district on the basis of the census majorities of 1941. In the months that followed, an estimated fifteen million people crossed it in both directions, in one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Estimates of the dead range from two hundred thousand to two million. Trains arrived at stations on both sides filled with corpses. Some seventy-five thousand women, by Butalia’s estimate, were abducted, raped or forcibly married on both sides of the line. Afterwards, the two new states agreed to “recover” abducted women and return them to their families. By 1955 some nine thousand Hindu and Sikh women had been recovered from Pakistan and more than twenty thousand Muslim women from India. Many did not wish to go, having made new lives or fearing rejection at home, and their wishes were often overruled. Women’s bodies, once again, were treated as the property of their communities, this time by two modern states.

Two things about this catastrophe matter especially for the argument of this series. The first is that it was mutual. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims all killed and all died, and women of every community were abducted. Yet each community’s memory became almost entirely one-sided. In India, Partition is remembered chiefly as the suffering of Hindus and Sikhs driven from the west; in Pakistan, as the suffering of Muslims driven from the east. Each side kept its own dead and forgot the other’s.

The second is the map. The provinces that became Pakistan, West Punjab, Sindh, the North-West Frontier and East Bengal, were very largely the regions Part 1 described as Islam’s frontier: the places where, over centuries, Islam had become the faith of the peasant majority, through Sufi shrines and the clearing of forests for the plough. India kept the heartland, the Gangetic plain, where Islam had been, above all, the faith of the rulers, and where Muslims now formed a minority; across the new India as a whole, they were about one in ten. The census that froze religious identity in the 1870s drew the border in 1947, and in drawing it, it took away most of the places where Islam had been a neighbor and left India with most of the places where it had been a king.

What the Raj Left Behind

When the British left in August 1947, they left behind far more than a divided map.

They left a written history: a past arranged in three acts, Hindu, Muslim and British, with a golden age, a fall and a long foreign night, documented by a selective archive of medieval boasts presented as the authentic voice of the age. They left a counted population, in which every Indian had a religion and a caste on record, and in which communities had learned to read census tables as scoreboards and to fear their own decline. They left a politics organized by religion, in personal laws, in separate electorates, in quotas, in the very parties that had competed for the spoils. They left a stereotype of Hindu weakness, and two rival answers to it: Gandhi’s politics of endurance and the RSS’s politics of strength. And they left a partitioned subcontinent, two states born in blood, with around thirty-five million Muslims remaining in India as a minority of about one in ten.

So where do we stand, at the end of Part 2, on the question this series is asking? Is India’s anti-Muslim sentiment real, or manufactured?

For the colonial period the answer shifts. The underlying grievance was not manufactured; Part 1 showed that it was already a thousand years old, recorded by Al-Biruni in the eleventh century. What was manufactured in these two centuries was everything that turned a plural, local memory into a single national story. The three-act history was manufactured. The archive of tyranny was selected. The categories were imposed, the numbers were turned into prophecies, and the incentives rewarded every Indian for organizing as a Hindu or a Muslim. Much of this manufacturing, it must be said plainly, was done by Indians themselves, on both sides, who found in the new story a source of pride, grievance and power. The British supplied the frame. Indians filled it.

And then Partition did something no historian or census officer could have done. It turned the story into experience. Before 1946 the wound of conquest was a matter of chronicles, novels and festivals. After 1947 it was a matter of family memory: a grandmother’s village, an uncle killed on a train, an aunt who never came back. The chosen trauma described in Part 1 now had living witnesses, and they would raise the next generation.

On the evening of 30 January 1948, at a prayer meeting at Birla House in Delhi, Nathuram Godse, who had been active in the RSS in the 1930s and later in the Hindu Mahasabha, shot Mahatma Gandhi three times at close range. The two answers to colonial humiliation, the politics of endurance and the politics of strength, had met in the most terrible way possible.

The new republic would have to decide what to do with all of it: the wound, the memory, the story, the grief of Partition, the minority that remained, and the Hindu nationalist movement, which the government banned in the assassination’s aftermath. That is the subject of Part 3: The Inheritance.

Sources and Further Reading

Author’s Note: This article was conceptualized, researched, and outlined by the author, with generative AI tools utilized to assist in drafting and refining the prose.

Articles in this series:

  1. The Wounded Civilization — Part 1: The Soil and the Encounter
  2. The Wounded Civilization — Part 2: The Narrators
  3. The Wounded Civilization — Part 3: The Inheritance
  4. The Wounded Civilization — Part 4: The Crystallization

Discover more from Numerons

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Related Posts

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top