Introduction

Towards the end of a rather long day of research in the India Office Collections
at the British Library in London, I stumbled upon a rather unexpected
document. It swam into view in the middle of one of the many microfilms
containing the private papers of Qaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The
handwritten document, with its ink fading, was the record of a special séance
with the spirit of the Qaid-i-Azam (Great Leader) held at 6 pm on 13 March
1955, nearly seven years after his death and eight years after the birth of
Pakistan.1 The séance was conducted by a spiritualist hired by a government
officer, a certain Mr Ibrahim, who was present on the occasion to direct the
questions. The spiritualist began the proceedings by politely offering a seat to
his esteemed guest. The spirit tartly responded that it was already seated, also
reminding him that they had previously met there for another such session.
The spiritualist solicitously enquired about the Qaid’s well-being since on that
occasion the spirit had complained about being ‘in a dark and cold place’, which
it did not like very much. It replied that it was much happier now for it was ‘in a
very good place’ that was ‘brilliantly lighted and had enough flowers’. As a final
courtesy before the proceedings started in right earnest, the spirit was asked if
it wanted to smoke a cigarette since the Qaid-i-Azam in life had been a heavy
smoker. On the basis of an affirmative answer, a cigarette was lit and fixed on
a wire stand for the spirit to smoke while it answered questions. Mr Ibrahim
began, ‘Sir, as a creator and father of Pakistan, won’t you guide the destiny of
the nation now?’ The Qaid’s spirit reacted testily, stating that it was not for it
to guide Pakistan’s destiny any more, even though, it ominously added, it often
saw ‘flashes of evil pictures about Pakistan’. A worried Mr Ibrahim enquired,
‘Don’t you think there is a prosperous future for Pakistan?’ . The spirit responded
icily, ‘I don’t think so. Prosperity of a country depends on the selflessness of
people who control its Destiny. None at all is eager to be selfless there.’ Mr
Ibrahim pressed further. ‘What advice would you give to the present rulers of
Pakistan?’ Prompt came the response — ‘Selflessness, selflessness. That is the
only advice I can give them now.’ The spirit then made a telling remark. ‘It is

1 Qaid-i-Azam Papers, Neg10811, File 1067, Oriental and India Office Collections
(henceforth OIOC), British Library, London.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 2 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

easier to acquire a country, but it is extremely difficult to retain it. That is in a

nutshell the present position of Pakistan to gain which rivers of blood flowed.’
The story of how the transcript of the séance found its way into the archive
would no doubt be fascinating and also raise interesting questions about
procedures involved in the constitution of the archive. But what is striking
about the document, as also of the spiritual testimony contained therein, is the
sense of crisis it communicates about Pakistan not long after its birth. Jinnah’s
death a little over a year after the Partition on 11 September 1948, war with
India over Kashmir, Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination in 1951, inconclusive
deliberations between ‘secularists’, ulama, Islamists, and regional groups over
Pakistan’s Constitution, political instability in East Pakistan, musical chairs
over government formation at the centre – all these finally culminated in the
first declaration of martial law in 1958. Pakistan’s martial law administrators
justified the short shrift given to its sputtering democratic experiment in the
name of preserving the nation’s unity and integrity threatened by venal and
‘rascally’ civilian political elites.2 Successive martial law administrators have
trotted out some of the same reasons to justify the abrogation of democracy
or violently quell threats to national integrity over much of Pakistan’s history.
Yet, such decisive military interventions have not resolved, and indeed
worsened, Pakistan’s post-colonial crisis marked not just by fragility of
democratic institutions, but a vexed relationship between Islam and State,
secessionist and insurgency movements, internecine sectarian conflicts, not to
mention violent death, assassination or forced exile of four former or serving
heads of state. Security analysts, journalists as well as a burgeoning body
of scholars have sought to make sense of Pakistan’s troubled post-colonial
condition.3 It is a trend that has intensified over the past decade as the country’s
internal security environment has deteriorated significantly in the context of a
complex evolving relationship between its regime and Islamic militants, leading
to exaggerated fears that this nuclear armed nation might become the first failed
state of the twenty-first century.

2 See K. J. Newman, ‘Pakistan’s Preventative Autocracy and its Causes’, Pacific Affairs
Vol. 32, No. 1 (March 1959), 18–33; Wayne Ayres Wilcox, ‘The Pakistan Coup d’état
of 1958’, Pacific Affairs Vol. 38, No. 2 (Summer 1965), 142–63.
3 See among others, Anatole Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (New York, 2011); Farzana
Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (New York, 2009); Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords:
Pakistan, its Army and the Wars Within (Oxford, 2008); Stephen Cohen, The Idea of
Pakistan (New Delhi, 2005); Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military
(New York, 2005); Owen Bennett Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Haven, 2002).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 3

Much of this scholarship invariably locates the roots of Pakistan’s precarious

condition in the circumstances surrounding this nation-state’s traumatic
birth in the bloody Partition of British India in August 1947. It is broadly
understood that this nation-state emerged accidentally in the context of a
sharp disjuncture between inchoate aspirations of Indian Muslim masses and
secret politics of their pragmatic and ambivalent political elites who may not
necessarily have even wanted Pakistan. As Pakistan came into being against the
backdrop of the breakdown of negotiations between the British Government,
Indian National Congress and Muslim League (ML) over transfer of power,
it has been assumed that it remained an exceedingly vague idea in both elite
and popular consciousness. Scholars enquiring into the roots of Pakistan’s
post-colonial instability have, therefore, grounded their explanations in the
‘insufficiency’ of its nationalist imagination especially after Benedict Anderson
when emphasis on nationalism’s seeming artificiality or illegitimacy has been
replaced by enquiry into its fecund imaginative dimension.4 In this regard, it
has been pointed out that while the ideology of Pakistani nationalism – the
strident two nation theory – was spectacularly successful in rallying together
the Indian Muslims, it was inadequate in as much as it lacked any programme
around which the nation could coalesce subsequent to its realization. It has also
been noted that while ML rallies resounded with the popular but vague slogan,
‘Pakistan ka Matlab Kya, La Ilaha Il Allah’ (What is the meaning of Pakistan?
There is no god but God), Pakistan was not articulated any further beyond
this emotional slogan. An inchoate anti-Indianism, it is presumed, became
the default mode for this new nation-state after its creation in the absence
of any substantial content or futuristic vision in its national imagination that
particularly solidified following the violence accompanying the Partition. It
is in this vein that the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot conceptualized
Pakistan as a ‘nationalism without a nation’ since it does not possess a ‘positive’
national identity but only a ‘negative’ identity in opposition to India.5 More
recently, the political scientist Farzana Shaikh has extended this argument
by arguing that this lack of positive content or consensus in its nationalist
ideology is indeed the primary reason behind Pakistan’s nearly continuous
post-colonial travails.6

4 The phrase that Pakistan was an ‘insufficiently imagined’ nation-state has been coined
by the writer Salman Rushdie.
5 Christophe Jaffrelot, Pakistan: Nationalism without a Nation (New York, 2002).
6 Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (New York, 2009).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 4 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

This book challenges these fundamental assumptions regarding the

foundations of Pakistani nationalism and questions the current understanding
of its post-colonial identity crisis. It charts a new direction by analysing how
the idea of Pakistan was developed and debated in the public sphere and how
popular enthusiasm was generated for its successful achievement in the last
decade of British rule in India. In this regard, it examines the trajectory of
Pakistan movement in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (now Uttar
Pradesh, U.P., India), whose Muslims played a critical role in this nation-
state’s creation despite their awareness that U.P. itself would not be a part of
Pakistan. U.P. presents a particularly appropriate site for exploring popular
underpinnings of Pakistani nationalism for it is here that the idea of Pakistan
arguably found the earliest, most sustained and overwhelming support, much
before it found traction in the Muslim majority provinces of British India where
it was ultimately realized. My study argues that far from being a vague idea
that accidentally became a nation-state, Pakistan was popularly imagined in
U.P. as a sovereign Islamic State, a New Medina, as it was called by some of its
proponents. In this regard, it was not just envisaged as a refuge for the Indian
Muslims, but as an Islamic utopia that would be the harbinger for renewal
and rise of Islam in the modern world, act as the powerful new leader and
protector of the entire Islamic world and, thus, emerge as a worthy successor to
the defunct Turkish Caliphate as the foremost Islamic power in the twentieth
century. This study specifically foregrounds the critical role played by a section
of the Deobandi ulama in articulating this imagined national community with
an awareness of Pakistan’s global historical significance, a crucial narrative that
has been written out of most accounts of the Partition. Moreover, it highlights
their collaboration with the ML leadership and demonstrates how together
they forged a new political vocabulary fusing ideas of Islamic nationhood and
modern state to fashion the most decisive arguments for creating Pakistan.
As Pakistan became the focus of raucous debates in the public sphere, ML
propagandists were not just keen to defend its economic, political and military
viability, but to portray Pakistan as potentially a far more powerful state than
India and indeed the largest and most powerful Islamic state in the world
replacing Turkey. Over time, in public meetings, through columns of the Urdu
press and widely dispersed popular literature on Pakistan, they publicized its
maps, listed its natural resources and infrastructural assets, highlighted its
strategic location alongside contiguous and powerful Muslim allies in the
Middle East, and celebrated the boundless potential of its inspired population
once it was free from both British and Hindu domination. Moreover, Pakistan

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 5

was hailed as the first step towards a broader solidarity in the Islamic world
culminating in its ultimate political unification under Pakistani leadership.
This celebration of the nation’s ‘geo-body’7 was accompanied by invocation
of the ‘hostage population theory’, which held that ‘hostage’ Hindu and Sikh
minorities inside Pakistan would ensure Hindu India’s good behaviour towards
its own Muslim minority. But while this theory was frequently invoked in U.P.,
what was emphasized above all was Pakistan’s strength as a potential ‘first class
power’ surpassing Turkey, thus enabling it to extend its protective umbrella not
only over Muslims in Hindu India, but over the Islamic world at large in a
setting dominated by western powers.
These secular conceptions of territory were intertwined with theological
conceptions of utopian space by the ulama to theorize Pakistan as an Islamic
State under God’s law that would renew Islam and revive Muslims for the
new era, a move that proved critical in bridging the gap between politics of
the ML elite and aspirations of the Muslim masses. Generally identified in the
existing historiography as opponents of Pakistan, prominent Deobandi ulama
led by Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani (founder of the Jamiatul Ulama-i-
Islam and later acclaimed as Pakistan’s Shaikhul Islam) declared that Pakistan
would recreate the Islamic utopia first fashioned by the Prophet in Medina,
inaugurating an equal brotherhood of Islam by breaking down barriers of race,
class, sect, language and region among Muslims and establishing an example
worthy of emulation by the global ummah. Usmani further prophesized that
just as Medina had provided the base for Islam’s victorious spread in Arabia and
the wide world beyond, Pakistan would become the instrument for the ummah’s
unification and propel its triumphal rise on the global stage as a great power,
besides paving the way for Islam’s return as the ruling power in the subcontinent.
These ideas meshed with the Pan-Islamist ambitions of the ML leadership and
also helped resolve the contradiction between the ideal of Islamic nationhood
whose category of belonging is the global ummah, and the territorial state that
revives the divisive category of national belonging for Muslims. The run up
to the Partition witnessed osmosis of ideas between the ulama and the ML
leadership. Thus, while the ulama borrowed the ML’s vocabulary of the modern
state to project Pakistan as a powerful entity that would make its mark on the
global stage, the ML leadership hailed Pakistan as the new laboratory where
definitive solutions to all the problems of the modern world would be found

7 See Thongchai Winichakul, Mapping Siam: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation

(Honolulu, 1994).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 6 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

within Islam, thus inaugurating a new rhetoric that would find echo in other
parts of the Islamic world.8
These heady ideas about Pakistan as a powerful twentieth century Islamic
state were bitterly but unsuccessfully attacked by opponents. Most prominent
were a section of the Deobandi ulama aligned with the Indian National Congress
led by Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, who himself first utilized the metaphor
of Medina to conceptualize a common nationhood of Hindus and Muslims
in an undivided India. This Muttahida Qaumiyat (composite nationalism/
nationality) of Hindus, Muslims and other Indian communities, he argued,
had an auspicious precedent in the common nationality forged by Muslims and
Jews during the Prophet’s era under the Covenant of Medina.9 Insisting that
Muslims could form a common nationality with Hindus just as they had done
so with the Jews at Medina under the Prophet, Madani summarily dismissed
the ML’s Islamic vision of Pakistan and scorned the ability and intentions of its
non-observant leaders in bringing about its realization. He and his associates
also contested ML’s assessments regarding Pakistan’s viability in terms of its
economy, security, social and political stability, its place in the international
community of nations, and warned of its disastrous ramifications for Indian
Muslims in general and U.P. Muslims in particular. Madani was a respected alim
who had spent over a decade of his life as a renowned teacher of Hadith in the
holy city of Medina. He articulated the metaphor of Medina at a time when
the ML began a protracted public campaign that Hindus and Muslims were
separate nations. His views were pounced upon by ulama allied to the ML such
as the redoubtable Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi, the poet Muhammad Iqbal,
and the Islamist Abul Ala Mawdudi among others, who publicly savaged his
interpretation of the Covenant of Medina, and affirmed the ML’s claim that the
Muslims constituted a separate nation in India. Later, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani,
Thanawi’s disciple, would fashion the vision of Pakistan as the new Medina
against Madani’s vision. The bitter contest over Pakistan led to a major split
in the Jamiatul Ulama-i-Hind ( JUH), the premier organization of the Indian
ulama. Questions regarding problems and prospects of the Partition exercised
the minds of not only English-speaking political elites but also a larger public

8 See Richard Mitchell, The Society of Muslim Brothers (New York, 1993); Brynjar Lia, The
Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement, 1928–1942
(Reading, 1998).
9 See Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, Composite Nationalism and Islam (Muttahida
Qaumiyat aur Islam), translated by Mohammad Anwer Husain and Hasan Imam (New
Delhi, 2005).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 7

inhabiting the vernacular public sphere. Pakistan was thus intensely debated and
vigorously contested within the Indian Muslim community as it was outside.
In highlighting the extensive public debates which fed popular conceptions
regarding Pakistan and the accompanying hopes, apprehensions and questions
that confronted U.P. Muslims who indeed led the struggle for its creation, this
book contends that Pakistan was not always ‘insufficiently imagined’ in the
process of its creation as has been assumed thus far in Partition historiography.

Partition Historiography and the ‘Insufficient’

Imagination of Pakistan
Pakistan, by most accounts, seems to have happened in a fit of collective
South Asian absent-mindedness, the tragic end result of the ‘transfer of power’
negotiations gone awry, hastily midwifed by a cynical, war weary Britain anxious
to get out of the morass of an imploding empire, leaving unsuspecting millions
to face its brutal consequences. The most powerful argument in this regard has
been made by the historian Ayesha Jalal, who began her seminal work with the
question, ‘how did a Pakistan come about which fitted the interests of most
Muslims so poorly?’10 In addressing this puzzle, Jalal analysed the struggle for
Pakistan through M. A. Jinnah’s ‘angle of vision’, primarily taking into account
the actions and imagined political strategy of this ‘sole spokesman’ of the Indian
Muslims in the cause of what she claims was a vaguely defined Pakistan. In
a novel and controversial thesis that has become the new orthodoxy, Jalal
argued that a separate sovereign Pakistan was not Jinnah’s real demand, but
a bargaining counter to acquire for the Muslims, political equality with the
numerically preponderant Hindus in an undivided post-colonial India. Jalal
contended that the British government’s Cabinet Mission Plan, which envisaged
a weak Indian federal centre where Muslims and Hindus would share political
power equally, came close to what Jinnah really wanted. This was rejected by
the Congress leaders, who Jalal implied, were thus the real perpetrators of the
Partition. A fundamental assumption underpinning Jalal’s thesis was that this
was a secret strategy that Jinnah pursued that remained hidden from even his
closest lieutenants, let alone the general public. As regards popular conceptions
of Pakistan, Jalal dismissed them tersely, noting that ‘a host of conflicting shapes
and forms, most of them vague, were given to what remained little more than
a catch-all, an undefined slogan.’11

10 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan
(Cambridge, 1985), 4.
11 Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 8 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

While Jalal’s Cambridge thesis challenged existing common sense about

Pakistan’s creation, the spirited counter-response by her Oxford counterpart
Anita Inder Singh steered the argument towards more conventional Congress
party waters. Contesting Jalal’s thesis, Singh contended that Pakistan, as it
finally emerged in 1947, bore a close resemblance to the demand that was
couched in the ML’s 1940 Lahore Resolution and indeed corresponded to the
logic of the resolution.12 Arguing that Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan was based
on the repudiation of any idea of a united India, Singh charted in great detail
the process by which a determined Jinnah outmanoeuvred a war weary British
establishment and Congress led by ‘tired old men’, as Nehru put it, to successfully
accomplish his goal of partitioning India and carving out a sovereign Pakistan.
Yet, while refuting Jalal’s thesis, Singh nevertheless agreed with her that as far
as ordinary Muslims were concerned Pakistan was an extraordinarily vague
concept and that it ‘meant all things to all Muslims’.13
This view, ironically, has also found support from the subaltern studies scholar
Gyanendra Pandey, a fierce critic of Great Man history and the concurrent
tendency to reduce South Asian history to a teleological biography of the nation
state. Thus, while foregrounding ‘fragmentary’ histories involving ordinary
Hindus and Muslims possessing ‘un-partitioned’ selves, multiple identities,
shared life-worlds, along with a topping of hard-nosed political rationality,
Pandey has noted that ‘the Muslims had fairly widely supported the movement
for Pakistan, though, as was already becoming evident, few had clear ideas about
what that goal meant’.14 The most recent general historical account of the
Partition largely echoes this theme, emphasizing the confusion and uncertainty
that gripped India regarding its future at the end of World War II, with the
only certainty being that Britain would quit India sooner rather than later.15
This line of thinking finds further support if one were to turn to regional
studies of the Pakistan movement, especially those concerning Muslim majority
provinces of British India such as Punjab and Bengal that were partitioned.
These studies point to Pakistan’s late popularity in these provinces, besides
its insufficient and uncertain comprehension amongst its Muslims. In the
case of Punjab, Ian Talbot’s studies have moreover downplayed the role
of religious ideology and popular agency, and instead explained Pakistan’s

12 Anita Inder Singh, Origins of the Partition of India, 1936–1947 (Delhi, 1987).
13 Ibid., 107.
14 Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford, 2006), 135.
15 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London, 2007).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 9

creation primarily in terms of its rural Muslim elites ‘rationally’ switching

loyalties in the treacherous sands of Punjabi politics to a rising ML as Jinnah
gained prominence at the centre, and the Unionist Party hemorrhaged almost
continuously in late-colonial Punjab.16 Neeti Nair’s recent monograph on the
politics of Punjabi Hindus again emphasizes uncertainty about Pakistan as well
as the sheer unexpectedness of the Partition.17 These studies on Punjab have
been complemented by similar studies on Bengal. Thus, Haroon-or-Rashid’s
monograph on Muslim Bengal has again underlined the lack of clarity or
consensus over Pakistan, arguing that its imagination by influential sections
of Bengal ML was very different from that of Jinnah, for they saw it more in
terms of an independent Eastern Pakistan or an undivided and sovereign greater
Bengal.18 For Rashid, the struggle for Pakistan therefore ‘foreshadowed’ the
arrival of Bangladesh in 1971. Joya Chatterji’s subsequent study has affirmed
this thesis besides adding a further dimension by arguing that it was Bengal’s
Hindu bhadralok who were primarily responsible for partitioning the province
by ruling out alternative approaches to Bengal’s unity.19
Given that these partitioned provinces witnessed unprecedented human
displacement ethnographies exploring personal histories of ordinary people,
especially women and refugees caught up in its violence, has constituted the
newest wave of Partition scholarship. Studies by Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon
and Kamla Bhasin have brought to light rape and abduction of women by
men belonging to the ‘Other’ community, their murder by family patriarchs
to save familial and community honour, besides the grossly paternalistic
attitude adopted by Governments of India and Pakistan as they got down to
the task of recovering these abducted women, often against their will, in the
years following the Partition.20 Even as they attempt to recover the agency of
these women in these trying circumstances, these studies ultimately point to

16 Ian Talbot, Punjab and the Raj 1849-1947 (Delhi, 1988); Provincial Politics and the
Pakistan Movement (Karachi, 1988).
17 Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (New Delhi,
2011).
18 Haroon-or-Rashid, The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal Muslim League and Muslim

Politics, 1936–1947 (Dhaka, 1987).

19 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947
(Cambridge, 1994).
20 Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition
(Delhi, 1998); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
(Durham, 2000).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 10 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

the absurdity of the concepts of nationhood or nationality in relation to their

shattered lives. In the same vein, the anthropologist Vazira Zamindar’s sensitive
monograph on Partition refugees has explained the Partition primarily as a
long, post-1947 phenomenon during which post-colonial states of India and
Pakistan actively produced ‘Indians’ and ‘Pakistanis’ by demarcating borders,
establishing passport and visa regimes, and managing forced migrations and
evacuee properties of displaced Muslims and Hindus.21 Zamindar’s provocative
thesis thus implies that 1947 marks the beginning of the process of partitioning
the land and its people and not the end point, as assumed by almost all of
the existing historiography. Recent works by Willem van Schendel and Lucy
Chester have emphasized this point further by highlighting the seeming lack
of comprehension among ‘Indians’ and ‘Pakistanis’ about their national status,
and the confusion on the ground that followed the drawing of the Radcliffe
Line. They underline the massive human tragedies that accompanied this
cartographic exercise in Bengal and Punjab executed by a British lawyer who
had never been to India before, how it never resolved the ‘national problem’ in
South Asia and instead created new ones for those living in the borderlands.22
The anthropological turn has been accompanied by an increasing interest in
Partition literature and cinema, now deemed more suitable than the ‘historian’s
History’ for articulating the pain, suffering, violence and displacement caused by
the Partition.23 It marks an ethical critique of the discipline of History for largely
ignoring the suffering of millions, primarily concerning itself with mapping
the biography of the nation-state in South Asia, endlessly searching for causes
of the Partition by identifying its heroes and villains, apportioning praise and
blame – an endeavour now deemed endlessly futile if not callous and puerile.
What this newest wave in Partition scholarship again emphasizes is the utter
bewilderment and helplessness of the people at what was happening as their
worlds collapsed around them as a result of unfathomable political decisions
taken at the top in the twilight of the Raj.
The picture gets muddied further if one turns to scholarship regarding the

21 Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees,
Boundaries, Histories (New York, 2007).
22 Willem Van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia
(London, 2004); Lucy Chester, Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary
Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester, 2009).
23 Pandey, Routine Violence, (Stanford, 2006); M. U. Memon, An Epic Unwritten: The Penguin

Book of Partition Stories from Urdu (Delhi, 1998); Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation:
Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham and London, 2009).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 11

ideological moorings of the Pakistan movement. While the role of religious

ideology and religious leaders such as the ulama and Sufi pirs in the process
of popular mobilization in Punjab has long been recognized, their appeal has
largely been associated only with the emotional dimension and a vague vision
of Pakistan, lacking any clear territorial grounding.24 Even Jinnah’s appeals to
Islam in the cause of a vaguely defined Pakistan have largely been viewed as
tactical manoeuvers and not based on any firm conviction. Thus, Hamza Alavi,
the Marxist theorist has argued that Muslim salariat leading the struggle for
Pakistan’s creation had secular objectives and their vision of Pakistan had nothing
to do with religious ideals.25 Again, Faisal Devji’s recent intellectual history of
the idea of Pakistan has disregarded the importance of religious beliefs and
piety in Pakistan’s imagination, while at the same time cavalierly dismissing
voices other than those of Jinnah and some Muslim League elites, for whom
Pakistan could become meaningful primarily as an Islamic state.26 Moreover,
while Jinnah and the ‘secular’ ML elite occupy a central space in the Partition
drama, the ulama’s contribution to the Pakistan movement has largely been
ignored. If they make an appearance in Partition historiography they largely
figure as a resolutely determined group implacably opposed to Pakistan. And
here the Deobandi ulama and their premier organization the JUH are especially
singled out as staunch defenders of composite Indian nationalism. Their plea
for protecting the integrity of Muslim sacred geography in the subcontinent
and their eloquent valourization of the land that would be left behind in ‘Hindu’
India – dotted with mosques, shrines, graves of saints and martyrs – as more
sacred to Muslims than the land of Pakistan, has been celebrated on the Indian
side as the most resounding rebuttal of the ML’s two-nation theory.27 On the
other hand, their opposition to Pakistan has been cited to make the case that
Muslim nationalism under the leadership of the Qaid was ‘secular’ in its nature.
If the view from the centre and partitioned provinces of Punjab and Bengal
makes the Partition seem like a rather confused and murky affair, there is some
consensus that the road to 1947 may well have been paved from U.P.. Some

24 David Gilmartin, CSSH.

25 Hamza Alavi, ‘Ethnicity, Muslim Society and the Pakistan Ideology’, in Anita Weiss
(ed.) Islamic Reassertion in Pakistan (Syracuse, 1986), 21–48.
26 Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (London, 2013).
27 Ziaul Hasan Faruqi, The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (London, 1963);
Peter Hardy, Partners in Freedom and True Muslims: The Political Thought of Some Muslim
Scholars in British India 1912-1947 (Lund, 1971). Also see Barbara Metcalf, Husain
Ahmad Madani: The Jihad for Islam and India’s Freedom (Oxford, 2009).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 12 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

of the earliest scholarship in the field, therefore, traced Pakistan’s origins to

local political feuds in this province in the decade preceding the Partition.28
The centerpiece in this regard was the fiasco over ministry making in U.P.
after the 1937 elections, the bitterness it created against the Congress in the
minds of U.P.’s social and political Muslim elite and how in turn they started
a mass campaign to discredit its provincial Congress government as ‘Hindu
Raj’, by raking up controversies over Vande Mataram, Hindi-Urdu, and the
Wardha scheme of education. While historians have furiously argued over
which side – the Congress or the ML – was responsible for this debacle, it is
widely believed that the years of Congress Cabinet Raj were critical in reviving
Jinnah and the ML’s sagging political fortunes and transforming U.P. into an
ML bastion from where the Pakistan movement began its successful journey.
The reasons behind overwhelming support for Pakistan among U.P. Muslims
and the critical role they played in its creation soon became the focus of an
intense debate between the political scientist Paul Brass and the historian
Francis Robinson. Brass attributed Pakistan’s popularity in U.P. to its ashraf
Muslims’ quest for political power through symbol manipulation and myth
creation while claiming to defend the rights and interests of north Indian
Muslims.29 In response, Robinson pushed back against this ‘instrumentalist’
position by arguing that the acute sense of separate religio-political identity
among the U.P. Muslims provided the fundamental rationale and impetus to
the Pakistan movement in the province.30
Robinson further substantiated his case by charting the emergence in colonial
north India of a new self-conscious community of Muslims in late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries, united by an acute awareness of its distinct

28 See the essays in C. H. Phillips and M. D. Wainwright (eds.), The Partition of India:
Policies and Perspectives, 1935-47 (London, 1970). Later works include Deepak Pandey,
‘Congress-Muslim League Relations, 1937–39: The Parting of Ways’, Modern Asian
Studies Vol. 4, No. 12 (1978), 626–52; Sunil Chander, ‘Congress- Raj Conflict and
the Rise of the Muslim League, 1937-39’, Modern Asian Studies Vol. 21, No. 2 (1987),
303–28; Salil Misra, A Narrative of Communal Politics, Uttar Pradesh, 1937–39 (Delhi,
2002).
29 Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge, 1974).
30 Francis Robinson, ‘Nation Formation: The Brass Thesis and Muslim Separatism’, in
Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi, 2000), 156–76. Robinson’s initial
work though had discounted the power of ideas and relied on the Namierite ‘loaves
and fishes of office’ model to explain politics in colonial India. See Francis Robinson,
Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of United Provinces Muslims, 1860-1923
(Cambridge, 1975).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 13

religious and political identity in a predominantly Hindu society marked by

its own revivalisms.31 This Muslim community, led by the ulama after Mughal
collapse, developed in the context of an incipient ‘print capitalism’ involving mass
publication of the Quran and Islamic classics in Urdu translations, new methods
of Muslim mass education through revamped maktabs and madrasas, and the
rise of a new autonomous individual Muslim self that began to directly access
the holy texts.32 Combined with improved transport and communication links
between South Asia and core lands of Islam that facilitated greater movement
of scholars, pilgrims and ideas, these developments intensified trends towards
more orthodox versions of Islam in India besides deepening the Indian Muslim
sense of belonging to the ummah, the global community of Muslims. In the
light of these historical processes, Robinson argued that it was hardly surprising
that South Asian Muslims tended to organize politically on the basis of their
religion, adding that this was the very reason why the Congress party was unable
to gain confidence of the bulk of the Indian Muslims who gravitated towards
the ML.33 Subsequently, Robinson’s thesis was amplified by Farzana Shaikh’s
monograph on the development of ashraf Muslim political culture in colonial
north India. Retraining the focus on Muslim political elites, Shaikh contended
that this culture was ‘based on an unmistakable awareness of the ideal of Muslim
brotherhood, a belief in the superiority of Muslim culture and recognition
31 It must be noted that Robinson drew upon and extended the influential research of
C. A. Bayly that explicated the rise in eighteenth century India of distinct social identities
and ideologies coalescing around Hindu and Muslim elites in north India whose mutual
antagonisms intensified in the context of a fading Mughal Empire, much before the
British began to consolidate themselves in India. Bayly has, therefore, argued that South
Asian nationalisms were not just European derivatives but built upon local patriotisms
with indigenous concepts, symbols, and sentiments. See, C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen
and Bazaars: North India in the Age of Imperial Expansion (Cambridge, 1983); Empire
and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870
(Cambridge, 1996); Origins of Nationality in South Asia (New Delhi, 1998).
32 Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi, 2000), paperback
edition.
33 In making some of these arguments, Robinson again drew upon insights from path
breaking works by Barbara Metcalf on Islamic revival pioneered by reformist ulama
from Deoband, David Lelyveld on the development of ashraf Muslim solidarity at the
Muslim University in Aligarh in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and Gail
Minault on the Khilafat movement in India at the end of World War I. See Barbara
Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton, 1982); David
Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, 1978);
Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in
India (New York, 1982).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 14 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

of the belief that Muslims ought to live under Muslim governments.’34

Pakistan, therefore, appeared inevitable given the incommensurability of these
foundational values of sharif Muslim political culture with those of liberal
democracy (numerically dominated by the Hindus) upon which an undivided
India would presumably have been predicated.
However, if Shaikh pushed the scholarly pendulum in the direction of
theologically ordained Muslim political separatism, Ayesha Jalal responded
strongly by ‘exploding’ the scholarship on ‘communalism’, squarely criticizing
the tendency to assume a unified Muslim approach to politics in the course of
blithely charting a linear process of the rise of Muslim separatism.35 Jalal argued
that neither the Muslim self nor Muslim collective interest in South Asia was
ever pre-determined by Islam since Muslims were divided over a range of issues,
both religious and non-religious. Moreover, Jinnah’s insistence on separate
Muslim nationhood was not ‘an inevitable overture to exclusive statehood’, and
that it was compatible with the confederal idea allowing the ‘possibility of an
all India entity reconstituted on the basis of multiple levels of sovereignty.’36
Jalal, therefore, reiterated that his maximal demand for Pakistan needed to be
seen as a bargaining counter. And as far the place of U.P. in the Partition story
is concerned, Jalal argued that while a separate sovereign Pakistan may have
been the favourite hobby horse of some Punjabis, the idea was never popular
among Muslims from the ‘minority provinces’ such as U.P. who had a more
inclusive worldview.37
Jalal’s indignant thrust can be placed alongside another strand of Partition
scholarship that has highlighted the heroic but tragically unsuccessful efforts of
prominent U.P. Muslims working for a united India. The most visible corpus of
writings in this regard has been produced by Mushirul Hasan, who in his many
books has underscored the contribution of ‘Nationalist Muslims’ to the cause of
an undivided and secular India.38 Hasan has also pushed the historiographical
34 Farzana Shaikh, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial
India 1860–1947 (Cambridge, 1989), 230
35 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since
1850 (New Delhi, 2001).
36 Ibid., 400.
37 Ibid., 394–396.
38 Among his many works, see Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims
since Independence (New Delhi, 1997); India’s Partition: Process, Strategy, Mobilization
(New Delhi, 1993); A Nationalist Conscience: M. A. Ansari, the Congress and the Raj (New
Delhi, 1987); Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1916–1928 (Delhi, 1979).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 15

tiller in a new direction by arguing that the growth of communalism and

ultimately the Partition was not just due to the ML’s communal politics, but
also the result of Congress’s failure to adequately challenge the ML with a
rigorously uncompromising brand of secular politics. However, in line with the
thinking of both ‘elitist’ and ‘subaltern’ historiography, Hasan ultimately locates
the ML’s successful achievement of Pakistan ‘not so much in the realm of ideas’
or popular Muslim upsurge for achieving that desired goal, as in the realm
of high politics. He has therefore called for greater scholarly attention to be
paid to the ‘performance and subsequent resignation of Congress ministries in
1939, the fluid political climate on the eve of and during the [World] War, the
Congress decision to launch the Quit India movement, and the government’s
readiness to modify its political strategy towards the League.’39
Hasan’s insight regarding the impact of Hindu nationalist politics on Muslim
separatism has been lent some substance by William Gould whose monograph
contends that the Congress party in U.P. (including its socialist wing) was
dominated by Hindu nationalists, whose ideology, public posturing and political
practices created conditions that arguably provoked and sustained the Muslim
drive towards Pakistan in the last decade of British rule in India. 40 This
monograph needs to be seen as part of a growing literature on Hindu nationalism
in India that again pushes one towards a more contextual understanding of
Muslim separatist politics, in terms of a reaction to emerging Hindu revivalisms,
thus pushing back against attempts to portray Muslim separatism as an essential
condition or an autochthonous phenomenon.41
Given the difficulties in ‘making narrative sense of 1947’ in spite of rich
scholarly efflorescence in the field, in an influential review essay on the state of
Partition studies to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the event, David Gilmartin
tried to reconcile its divergent viewpoints in order to come up with a more
39 Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence (New
Delhi, 2001), 55–56.
40 William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late-colonial India
(Cambridge, 2004).
41 See among others, Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother
India (Durham, 2010); Christophe Jaffrelot, The Sangh Parivar (New Delhi, 2005); The
Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York, 1996); Manu Goswami, Producing
India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004); Charu Gupta, Sexuality,
Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New
Delhi, 2001); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural
Nationalism (Bloomington, 2001); Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy
and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, 1999).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 16 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

adequate framework for explaining the Partition.42 The key for him lay in
linking ‘High Politics’ of Partition to ‘actions and agency of Muslims in their
varied contexts’, thus, explaining popular influences on momentous political
decisions that came to be taken at Delhi, Shimla, or London. Gilmartin,
therefore, posed the question as to why Muslims with local, multiple identities
coming from diverse contexts provided such overwhelming support to an
‘extraordinarily vague’ idea like Pakistan. In addressing this puzzle, he contended
that Pakistan was understood by most Muslims primarily as a ‘transcendental
symbol of Muslim solidarity’ rather than as a ‘territorial nation state located
in any specific part of India.’43 The two nation theory, in his interpretation
embodied a fundamentally ‘non-territorial vision of nationality’ thus explaining
its overwhelming popularity even among Muslims belonging to the ‘minority
provinces’ that would remain outside Pakistan.44
But if Pakistan was a non-territorial symbol for the Muslims that Jinnah
purported to lead, the question remains as to how, why and when it was
transformed into a demand for a sovereign territorial nation-state. To explain
this problem, Gilmartin fell back on the realm of elite politics arguing that
as Nehruvian Congress nationalism increasingly harped upon territorially
defined nationhood and citizenship, Jinnah too was forced to face up to the
territorial implications of the Pakistan demand in the dying days of the Raj.
It therefore seems evident that if an earlier generation of Partition scholarship
was trapped between Indian nationalist historians hailing the Congress party’s
secular nationalism and Pakistani nationalist historians swearing by the ML’s
two-nation theory, between the divergent emphases of the next two waves of
scholarship over the past three decades, Partition studies remains largely stuck
at the incongruous and unyielding polarities of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and
Saadat Hasan Manto’s eponymous hero, Toba Tek Singh.

Between Jinnah and Toba Tek Singh: Rethinking the Struggle for
Pakistan in Late-Colonial North India
The assumption that Pakistan remained an extraordinarily vague idea begs
the question as to whether Muslims across India simply rallied behind
42 David Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’,
Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 57, No.4 (November 1998), 1068–95.
43 Ibid., 1071; also see David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan
(Berkeley, 1988).
44 Ibid., 1081–82.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 17

potent symbols of their faith be it the Green Flag or cries of Islam in danger,
disregarding the specificities of their local situation. That, in turn, raises a more
important question– about the seeming absence of public debates, discussions,
or contestation over Pakistan, a strange anomaly for a society as famously
‘argumentative’ as India with its vibrant public sphere.45 One should be left in
no doubt that Pakistan became the most pressing political issue confronting
the subcontinent as soon as the ML lobbed its bombshell at Lahore in March
1940. It would be talked about, discussed, debated and fought over in the
popular press, through books and pamphlets, in public meetings and political
conferences held in cities, towns, bazaars and qasbahs across the length and
breadth of India. The Lahore Resolution led to especially fierce controversies in
U.P., for its wording denoting Muslim majority areas in the northwest and the
east as Muslim homelands that were to be ‘autonomous and sovereign’, clearly
placed U.P. (and other Muslim minority provinces) outside Pakistan’s territorial
domain and firmly in the realm of Hindustan. It is precisely this assumption
that U.P. would remain outside Pakistan that informed public debates on the
Partition in this province.
The earliest critiques of Lahore Resolution appeared in the Urdu press within
weeks of its passage. The first such critique titled Hindu India aur Muslim India
par Ek Ahem Tabsira by the JUH alim Maulana Saiyyid Muhammad Sajjad
‘Bihari’ in the weekly Naqeeb angrily questioned how ML could designate
Pakistan as an Islamic state since both Pakistan and Hindustan would remain
composite states with substantial non-Muslim and Muslim minorities
respectively. More, importantly Sajjad assailed ML for its willingness to consign
‘minority provinces’ Muslims to a life of perpetual ‘slavery’ under Hindus in
the name of liberating ‘majority provinces’ Muslims into the brave new world
of Pakistan. This incendiary essay was followed by longer, more exhaustive
critiques of Pakistan by JUH ulama such as Maulana Hifzur Rahman Seoharvi
or the scholar Maulvi Tufail Ahmad Manglori that again debunked the claim
that Pakistan would become an Islamic State. They also darkly warned about
Pakistan’s disastrous practical implications not just for the minority provinces
Muslims but for Indian Muslims in general and the Islamic world at large. The
JUH ulama carried the bulk of the burden of publicly fashioning and articulating
the case against Pakistan since the Congress response remained mostly cursory
given the imprisonment of much of its top leadership during the Quit India
movement and their release at the end of the War in 1945.
45 See Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and
Identity (New York, 2005).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 18 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

However, these nationalist ulama as well as the most ardent supporters of

Pakistan were greatly indebted to someone, who more than anybody during the
1940s shaped the debate on Pakistan imparting it with coherence, discipline and
stability. This was the other constitutional lawyer from Bombay, B. R. Ambedkar.
His enormously influential Thoughts on Pakistan was quoted by both Gandhi and
Jinnah as the authoritative treatise on Pakistan when they met for their famous
series of meetings in Bombay in 1944. If one were to combine Ambedkar’s
treatise with critiques of the ulama, one can see a number of interesting questions
that became the staple for public debate. Would Pakistan be an Islamic state or
would it be cast in the mold of a western liberal democracy? Could Pakistan
maintain financial solvency, or raise revenues for the purposes of administration,
defense and development? What would be the territorial boundaries between
Hindustan and Pakistan? How would Pakistan defend its territorial borders
against a much bigger India? How would Pakistan control its powerful Hindu
and Sikh minorities which dominated education, civil service, trade, commerce
and industry and were against Partition? What would be the fate of Muslim
minorities left behind in Hindustan? Would there be transfers or exchanges of
population between Hindustan and Pakistan for the purpose of achieving national
homogeneity? How might post-colonial Pakistan count as a factor in the realm
of international relations? It is precisely due to public controversies started by
opponents of Pakistan through questions such as these that it did not remain
‘a host of shapes and forms, most of them vague’, but an idea that progressively
assumed clarity, substance and popularity in late-colonial north India.
The ML leadership and its local supporters in U.P. were forced to respond
in this surcharged political atmosphere. ML propaganda first built a detailed
case to convince domestic supporters as well as an international audience that
Pakistan would possess adequate territory and natural resources, a hardworking,
enterprising, and martial population, adequate revenues from taxes and duties,
besides immense potential for developing into a great power. They repeatedly
harped upon how it was already a far more powerful and resourceful state than
modern Turkey and therefore the most obvious candidate for assuming leadership
of the entire ummah. As a top ranking ML leader Khaliquzzaman declared,
‘Pakistan would bring all Muslim countries together into Islamistan – a pan-
Islamic entity’.46 This marked a significant reversal in Indian Muslim discourse
on Turkey, long hailed as the central Muslim power in the world and symbol of

46 Quoted in Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington DC,
2005), 18.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 19

global Muslim solidarity for whose preservation a powerful Khilafat movement

had been organized in India to warn the Raj against anti-Turkish adventurism
in the aftermath of World War I. Moreover, Pakistan was characterized as the
bulwark for Islam against both Hindu and western imperialisms. As Jinnah
himself proclaimed during his visit to the Middle East in December 1946, if
Pakistan was not created ‘the whole of the Middle East and Egypt in particular
would be threatened by Hindu imperialism.’47 The contribution to the Islamic
world was however conceptualized in more ambitious terms that extended beyond
its mere physical defense. Pakistan was hailed as the ‘laboratory of Islam’ that
would creatively blend Islam with Indian Muslim experience of modernity to
take the lead in finding definitive solutions to the problems of the modern world
and in the process inaugurating an Islamic renaissance in the twentieth century.
Shaukat Hayat Khan, son of the Unionist Party leader and Punjab Premier Sir
Sikandar Hayat Khan recalls Jinnah telling him that Pakistan would be the base
where Muslim scientists, doctors, engineers, economists would be trained, and
from where they would spread throughout the entire Middle East to ‘serve their
co-religionists and create an awakening among them.48
Within the subcontinent, ML propaganda claimed that besides liberating the
‘majority provinces’ Muslims it would also guarantee protection for Muslims who
would be left behind in Hindu India. In this regard, it repeatedly stressed the
hostage population theory that held that ‘hostage’ Hindu and Sikh minorities
inside Pakistan would guarantee Hindu India’s good behaviour towards its own
Muslim minority. It also insisted that Pakistan would go to war with Hindu
India to protect Muslims, besides taking matters before international bodies and
world opinion if necessary. Thus, the Sind ML leader Abdullah Haroon drew
a parallel with the situation of Sudetan Germans under Czechoslovakia and
admiringly referred to Hitler’s actions to liberate them.49 Jinnah himself noted
that ‘if Britain in Gladstone’s time could intervene in Armenia in the name of
protection of minorities, why should it not be right for us to do so in the case
of our minorities in Hindustan if they are oppressed?’50 The seriousness with

47 Dispatch No. 2077, 21 December 1946, Memorandum of Conversation between Mr

Jinnah, Head of the Indian Muslim League and Mr Ireland First Secretary of the
American Embassy, Cairo, 845.00, US State Department Papers.
48 Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan, ‘The Commander I Served Under’, in Jamiluddin Ahmad,
Quaid-i-Azam as Seen by His Contemporaries (Lahore, 1966), 42.
49 Indian Annual Register, Vol. 1 (1940), 313; also B. R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan
(Bombay, 1941) to see the widespread use of this metaphor.
50 Ibid. Vol. 2, 286.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 20 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

which the idea of Pakistan was articulated can be discerned from the Qaid’s
warning to ML’s supporters that ‘it would be a great mistake to be carried
away by Congress propaganda that the Pakistan demand was put forward as a
counter for bargaining.’51
As regards the ML’s Islamic credentials, these were first attested to by the
redoubtable Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi who from 1937 onwards made it
clear that this was the sole representative organization of the Indian Muslims as
against the Congress whose membership, he insisted, was haraam (forbidden).
Subsequently, after the 1940 Lahore Resolution, local ML functionaries repeatedly
emphasized that Pakistan would be established as an Islamic state. Jinnah himself
maintained an ambiguity on this question in public as evident from his speeches,
while in private he could go along with such promises. A functionary of the
Jamaat-i-Islami who met Jinnah in the days following the Lahore Resolution
narrates a fascinating incident in this regard. When pressed by this functionary
to clarify on the nature of Pakistan, the Qaid used a telling metaphor to articulate
his position. He told his visitor, ‘I seek to secure the land for the mosque; once
that land belongs to us, then we can decide on how to build the mosque.’52 The
collaboration between ML elite and the ulama developed steadily over time and its
extent can be gauged from the fact that soon after the 1940 Lahore session the U.P.
ML leadership constituted a committee comprised of its representatives as well as
the ulama for the purpose of crafting an Islamic constitution for Pakistan.53 The
committee under the Chairmanship of Syed Sulaiman Nadwi, another reputed
alim belonging to the Nadwatul Ulama of Lucknow, came up with a report that
was to be internally discussed and debated before publication but for reasons never
adequately explained was not published until 1957. However, its significance can
be gauged from the fact that Nadwi was invited by the Pakistan government in
1949 to head the ‘body of experts’ to help the Pakistan Constituent Assembly
frame an Islamic Constitution for the nation, and this report became the basis
for recommendations that he submitted.54
51 Jamiluddin Ahmad, Vol. 1, 206; The Leader, 4 January 1941; Star of India, 4 January
1941.
52 See S. V. R Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jamaat-i-Islami of Pakistan
(Berkeley, 1994), 113.
53 See the ‘Introduction’ by Maulana Abdul Majid Daryabadi in Muhammad Ishaq Sandelvi,
Islam Ka Siyasi Nizam: Jis Mein Islam Ke Siyasi Nizam Ka Asasi Khaka Pesh Kiya Gaya
Hai (Azamgarh, 1957).
54 For an account of the work of this committee, see Leonard Binder, Religion and Politics in
Pakistan (Los Angeles, 1961). Also see Sayyid Sulaiman Nadwi, Fundamental Principles
of the Islamic State (Karachi, 1951).

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 21

The relationship between ML leadership and the ulama became especially

close on the eve of 1945–46 elections that were widely seen as a referendum
on Pakistan. Prominent Deobandi ulama led by Maulana Shabbir Ahmad
Usmani, a protégé of Ashraf Ali Thanawi, came out in open support of the
ML’s demand for Pakistan, which proved critical for its success. Usmani’s
theological justifications for creating Pakistan, his crushing rebuttal of the
theory of Muttahida Qaumiyat (composite nationality) of all Indians, and his
defence of the religiously unobservant ML leadership were all greatly effective
in nullifying claims of the nationalist ulama that Pakistan was un-Islamic or
that ML leadership was neither capable nor desirous of creating an Islamic
Pakistan. What needs to be noted is that the common drive of these ulama
and ML leadership towards Pakistan was predicated on a consensus that an
Islamic Pakistan under God’s law would emerge only gradually on the basis
of their mutual deliberations and negotiations. It is perhaps these continuing
negotiations between Muslim modernists, ulama, Islamists and others or rather
the lack of their resolution that explains the cohabitation, collaboration, as
well as the ongoing struggles between Islamic groups and Pakistan’s political
establishment over the definition of Pakistan’s identity, as well as its evolving
domestic and foreign policy imperatives.
Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial boundaries, far from being vague became
the focus of much debate and discussion and clearly brought out the stakes
in this matter. Gandhi himself raised the issue in a column in The Harijan on
12 July 1942, wherein he distinguished the Pakistan demand from separation
demanded by Andhra from Madras Presidency. As the Mahatma wrote

There can be no comparison between Pakistan and Andhra separation. The

Andhra separation is a redistribution on a linguistic basis. The Andhras do
not claim to be a separate nation having nothing in common with the rest
of India. Pakistan on the other hand is a demand for carving out of India a
portion to be treated as a wholly independent sovereign State. Thus there
seems to be nothing common between the two.55

Responding to Gandhi, Jinnah made clear his own position in a public

statement declaring that ‘he (Gandhi) has himself has put the Muslim demand
in a nutshell.’56 Full sovereignty was thus fundamental to the Pakistan demand
as reiterated by numerous ML leaders in public. Jinnah also made it amply clear
55 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (henceforth CWMG), Vol. 83, 78.
56 Ibid., 120, fn. 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 22 CREATING A NEW MEDINA

that it excluded any loose federation or confederation with Hindu India. The
1944 talks between Jinnah and Gandhi also brought territorial conceptions held
by both the parties into the public eye. The Mahatma held on adamantly to the
Rajagopalachari formula (which itself was clearly derived from Ambedkar’s maps
of Pakistan) claiming that it gave concrete expression to the Lahore Resolution.
Jinnah, on the other hand, reiterated that the ML expected nothing short of six
full provinces which had Muslim majorities. Even if Jinnah publicly rejected
the formula since it conceded only a ‘mutilated, truncated, and moth-eaten
Pakistan’, the battle lines between the two sides over the question of Pakistan’s
territory had become clearly drawn.
Maps of Hindustan and Pakistan with their borders appeared in the
burgeoning literature on Pakistan whether drawn by Ambedkar, whether as part
of the Rajaji formula or those drawn by ML propagandists that reflected the
ML’s inflated demands. The map assumed added significance in popular culture
that was produced and contested during this period. The trade journal Film
India reported an incident in a movie theatre in Bombay in April 1946 during
the screening of a film titled Forty Crores that reveals heightened tensions over
the map in the run-up to the Partition. Written by a Congress sympathizer and
famous writer-lyricist Pandit Indra, this was a film on India’s indivisibility and
unity of its forty crore inhabitants. It included a particular scene in which a map
of India is brought out by the Hindu and Muslim protagonists who then stand
around it and deliver strong dialogues on the theme of Hindu–Muslim unity,
also ‘threatening those who came in the way of such unity.’ As the magazine
noted, during the 4 pm show on 14 April 1946, some ML supporters ‘fired a
few crackers, stood up shouting and one of them ran up to the screen and cut
the screen across with a six inch blade.’57 The significance of the act would not
have been lost on the votaries of a united India or those supporting its partition.

Structure of the book

The book consists of eight chapters besides an Introduction, an Epilogue and
a Conclusion. Chapter 1 explores the divisions that developed in U.P. Muslim
politics in the aftermath of the Government of India Act of 1935 that introduced
a limited democracy in British Indian provinces while maintaining British
control at New Delhi. Chapter 2 examines the contest between the Congress
and Muslim League for the hearts, minds and votes of the U.P. Muslims

57 Film India, Vol. XII, No. 5, May 1946.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 INTRODUCTION 23

following the collapse of attempts at forming coalition government in U.P.

and consequently charts the process of the ML’s rise as the sole representative
organization of the Indian Muslims. In this regard, it explores the developing
relationship between the ML leadership and an important section of the
Deobandi ulama that was critical for the former’s rising prestige in U.P. Chapter
3 examines the public debates that were inaugurated on the issue of Pakistan and
particularly highlights the hitherto underappreciated but seminal role played
by B. R. Ambedkar in defining the terms of this public debate. It also charts
Jinnah and the ML’s response to Ambedkar’s challenge in the context of growing
public clamour for clarifications regarding Pakistan. Chapter 4 specifically
examines the thinking of the U.P. Muslim League leadership on Pakistan and
looks at how the idea of Pakistan was articulated in the localities of U.P. by
them as well as local ML functionaries as they built up support for this ‘ideal
goal’ of the Indian Muslims. Chapter 5 introduces detailed public critiques
of Pakistan made by ‘Nationalist Muslims’ including ulama from Deoband
through pamphlets, columns of the Urdu press, and in public meetings held
across the towns and localities of the province. Chapter 6 tracks the impact
of public debates regarding Pakistan on the general public by analysing a series
of articles sent in by readers on this issue that were published in the Urdu bi-
weekly newspaper Madina in 1942-43. Chapter 7 analyses Maulana Shabbir
Ahmad Usmani’s vision of Pakistan as a new Medina and highlights his critical
contribution to the success of the ML’s election campaign during the 1945–46
elections. Chapter 8 analyses election campaigns of both ML and the Congress
during these elections that were widely seen as a referendum on Pakistan and
demonstrates how they further clarified the stakes involved in Pakistan’s creation.
The Epilogue looks at the aftermath of the Partition in U.P. besides throwing
light on how it affected subsequent politics in India and Pakistan.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107280380.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press