Where the Two-Nation Idea Was Born

Where Part One Left Us

If you have not read Part 1, here is everything you need in one page.

India before the British was one civilisation with many governments. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had a genuinely mixed history: real friendship, real bloodshed, and above all a politics that was organised around land and dynasty rather than around religion.

The British conquest changed that in a quiet, structural way. They wrote religion into law, so that your community decided your rights in a courtroom. They created an education gap by shifting to English, which Hindu service castes entered faster than the Muslim elite whose Persian world had just been abolished.

Then came 1857, when Hindus and Muslims fought a joint war and lost. The British studied that defeat carefully and rebuilt the army so that no combined rising could happen again. In 1859 a governor wrote the Roman motto "divide and rule" into an official paper about army recruitment.

For fifteen years after the revolt the British treated Muslims as the chief suspects. Then, from the 1870s, they changed their mind and began to see the Muslim elite as a useful counterweight to a Congress that was mostly Hindu.

And underneath all of it sat the census. From 1871 every Indian had to tick one religion box. Overnight, communities became published, competing numbers: about 73. 7 percent Hindu, about 21. 5 percent Muslim. Religion had become arithmetic.

Part 1 ended in 1885, at the founding of the Indian National Congress. Nobody yet wanted a separate country. In Part 2 we watch that demand being built, one decision at a time.

Search his name online today and you will find him described as the father of Partition. You will also find him described as a great believer in Hindu and Muslim unity. Let us go and read what he actually said.

1Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan: The Man Blamed for Everything

Who he was

Sayyid Ahmad Khan was born in Delhi in 1817 into a family of Mughal court service. He worked for the East India Company as a judge. In 1857, when the revolt broke out, he stayed loyal and personally saved the lives of several British officials at Bijnor. The British rewarded him. Indian nationalists have never forgiven him.

But here is the first thing that gets left out. In 1858, right after the revolt, he wrote a pamphlet called The Causes of the Indian Revolt, and it was not a loyalist thank you note. It told the British bluntly that the rising had happened because they had shut Indians out of the Legislative Council, ignored Indian opinion, interfered with religion and behaved with contempt. He printed it at his own expense and sent it to Parliament. Several officials wanted him punished for it.

In 1875 he founded the Muhammadan Anglo Oriental College at Aligarh, which later became Aligarh Muslim University. Its purpose was simple and, in his view, urgent: Muslims had fallen behind in modern education, and unless they caught up they would be shut out of every profession in the new India.

What he said before 1887

Now read these, because they are almost never quoted by the people who call him the father of Partition.

That is not the language of a separatist. It is the language of a man arguing for a shared country. So what changed?

What changed: the Congress, and the arithmetic

The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885. Its early demand was that Indians should be elected to the legislative councils and should have a say over the budget.

To Sayyid Ahmad Khan, that demand rang an alarm bell. Elections across the whole country meant counting heads. Counting heads meant that the group with 73 percent would win and the group with 21 percent would lose, permanently. He had watched the census reports. He knew the arithmetic that Part 1 described.

So in 1887 at Lucknow, and then in a much longer and more famous speech at Meerut on 16 March 1888, he told Muslims to stay out of the Congress.

The Meerut speech of 1888, read properly

The speech was given at the Nauchandi fair to an audience of seven or eight hundred people, mostly Muslim. It was published in English by the Pioneernewspaper the same year. Here is the sentence that made him famous.

That is the quote. It is real. It is not out of context in the sense of being faked. But now apply Rule 2 and read the rest of the same speech, and three things appear that change what it means.

First: the translation problem

The speech was delivered in Urdu. The word translated as "nation" throughout the Pioneer version isqaum, which in nineteenth century Urdu usually means community or people, not nation in the modern sense of a sovereign state. Sir Sayyid uses the same word for Bengalis, for Pathans and even for the English. The scholar Frances Pritchett, who hosts the standard English text used by universities, flags this at the top of the document.

This matters enormously. "Two communities cannot share power equally" is a claim about representation. "Two nations must have two states" is a claim about sovereignty. The first is what he said. The second is what he is quoted as having said.

Second: two paragraphs earlier he says the opposite

Read that again. In the same speech, he says the two communities drink from the same well and depend on each other, and that creating animosity between them is bad for everyone. He is not calling for separation. He is arguing that elections will create bitterness where none needs to exist.

Earlier still, in paragraph 5, he advises Hindus directly and warns both sides that the agitation against cow slaughter has made things worse, and that "those things that can be done by friendship and affection cannot be done by any pressure or force".

Third: what he actually asked for

Read the end of the speech and the demand becomes clear, and it is not a country. He asks Muslims to do three things: stay out of Congress politics, remain loyal to the British so that power does not pass to the Bengalis, and above all get educated and go into trade.

There is no separate state in this speech. There is no partition. There is no territory. There is not even a Muslim political party, which would not exist for another eighteen years. What there is, is a loyalist argument for staying out of elected politics.

The parts that do not excuse him

Being fair means being fair in both directions, so here is the case against him, at full strength.

• He told Muslims that their religious duty was to be friendly to the British because Christians are "People of the Book", and he quoted the Quran to support it. That is using scripture to justify political loyalty to a foreign ruler.
• He argued openly that Indians had no right to representative government at all, because a conquered people cannot claim it. That argument, if accepted, would have blocked freedom for everybody, Hindu and Muslim alike.
• He wrote to the British in terms that flattered them and he received honours from them. His college was funded and protected with official goodwill. He was not a neutral observer.
• Most seriously, whatever he meant byqaum, he put into circulation the sentence that Hindus and Muslims could not share power equally. Once a sentence is out in the world, the speaker does not control what is done with it. And a great deal was done with it.

Ask an average Indian how many times India was partitioned and the answer is one, in 1947. The correct answer is that the first partition on religious lines happened forty two years earlier, and it is the rehearsal for everything that followed.

2The Forgotten First Partition: Bengal, 1905

Why Bengal

The Bengal Presidency in 1903 was a monster of a province. It contained roughly 78 million people, which was more than the population of any European country at the time, and it stretched from Orissa to Assam. The official argument for splitting it was administrative: it was simply too big for one governor to run.

That argument was not fake. Bengal really was unmanageable. But it was also not the whole reason, and we know that because the British wrote the other reason down.

Bengal was the headquarters of Indian nationalism. Calcutta was the capital of British India. Bengali newspapers, Bengali lawyers, Bengali students and Bengali writers were the loudest critics of the Raj in the whole country. Break Bengal, and you break the centre of resistance.

The sentence they should not have written down

On 7 February 1904, Herbert Risley, the Home Secretary of the Government of India, put the logic on paper in an official note.

Notice the last clause. He is not admitting an unfortunate side effect. He is listing it as an advantage of the plan. Risley, incidentally, was the same official who had led the caste classification work in the census. The man who counted India was now dividing it.

How the line was drawn

Lord Curzon announced the partition on 20 July 1905 and it took effect on 16 October 1905. The new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam had a Muslim majority. What was left, West Bengal joined with Bihar and Orissa, had a Hindu majority and left Bengali speakers as a minority in their own province.

This is the crucial detail. The line was not drawn where a neutral administrator would have drawn it to make two manageable provinces. It was drawn so that religion and province lined up. Curzon toured East Bengal in early 1904 and told Muslim leaders in Dhaka that the new province would give them a unity they had not enjoyed since the days of the old Muslim rulers, and that they would have their own capital and their own opportunities.

For the Muslim gentry of East Bengal this was a genuinely attractive offer, and we should be honest about that. They were poorer than the Hindu landholding and professional classes of Calcutta, they were under represented in every profession, and here was a province where they would be the majority. Nawab Salimullah of Dhaka became the strongest supporter of the partition. He was not a British stooge for wanting it. He was a leader who saw an advantage for his community and took it.

What happened next: the Swadeshi explosion

The Hindu Bengali reaction was volcanic, and it changed Indian politics forever.

• The Swadeshi movement.Boycott British cloth, salt, sugar and schools. Buy Indian. Burn foreign goods in public bonfires. For the first time, an Indian political campaign reached shopkeepers, students and villagers rather than just lawyers writing petitions.
• Rakhi as protest.On 16 October 1905, the day the partition took effect, Rabindranath Tagore asked Hindus and Muslims of Bengal to tie rakhis on each other's wrists as a symbol that the province could not be cut. He also wrote the song Amar Sonar Banglain that period. It is today the national anthem of Bangladesh.
• The rise of the extremists.Petitioning had failed. Boycott had worked. That lesson split the Congress at Surat in 1907 between the Moderates, who wanted to keep asking politely, and the Extremists led by Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal, who wanted to confront.
• Revolutionary violence.Secret societies like Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar grew out of this period. Bombs, assassinations of officials, and the beginning of the tradition that would later produce Bhagat Singh.

The part of Swadeshi that is rarely discussed

The Swadeshi movement is remembered, correctly, as the birth of mass politics in India. It also contained a problem that nobody at the time wanted to look at, and it is worth facing here because the same problem returns in every later chapter of this book.

The movement drew its emotional power from Hindu religious imagery. Its great song,Vande Mataram, came from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Anandamath, in which the motherland is worshipped as a goddess and the plot involves Hindu ascetics fighting Muslim rulers. Swadeshi vows were taken in temples. Boycott pledges were tied to Kali puja. Volunteers were sworn in with religious ritual.

For Hindu Bengal this was natural and moving. For a Muslim peasant in East Bengal it looked like something else: a movement led by the Hindu landlords he already paid rent to, using worship he did not share, asking him to boycott the cheap British cloth he could actually afford, in order to reverse a partition that had just given his community a province of its own.

There were also boycott enforcers who used social pressure and sometimes force on traders who kept selling foreign goods, and a disproportionate number of those small traders were Muslim. Serious communal rioting broke out in parts of East Bengal in 1906 and 1907.

None of this makes the Swadeshi movement a communal movement. Many Muslims joined it, and its leaders repeatedly appealed for unity, and Tagore's rakhi protest was a sincere and beautiful thing. But a nationalism that speaks in the symbols of one religion will always be heard by the other religion as a claim rather than an invitation, however kindly it is meant. That is not a moral judgement on anybody. It is a fact about how symbols work, and it will explain a great deal in Parts 3, 4 and 8.

The annulment, and the lesson each side took away

The agitation worked. On 12 December 1911, at the Delhi Durbar for King George V, the British announced that the partition of Bengal was cancelled. The two Bengals were reunited. In the same announcement they moved the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi, which was a way of punishing Bengal while conceding to it.

Now watch the two lessons, because they run in opposite directions and both are true.

That second lesson is one of the most under appreciated moments in the whole story. The strategy of Sir Sayyid, which was to stay loyal and let the British protect Muslim interests, was publicly proved worthless in 1911. Within a decade, large numbers of Indian Muslims moved from loyalty to agitation. In the short run this pushed themtowardsthe Congress, which is why the period from 1911 to 1922 is the high point of Hindu and Muslim political unity. In the long run it taught the Muslim League a different lesson: if the British will not protect you and the Congress will not guarantee you, you must get a guarantee written into the constitution itself.

Within fourteen months of the Bengal partition, Muslim India acquired a political programme and a political party. Both were born in 1906, and both are the subject of a long running argument about who started them.

3Simla and Dhaka: How the Muslim League Was Born

The Simla Deputation, 1 October 1906

A group of thirty five prominent Muslims, led by the Aga Khan III, was received by the Viceroy Lord Minto at the Viceregal Lodge in Simla. They presented an address, and they asked for four things.

1.Separate electorates.Muslims should vote for Muslim candidates in seats reserved for

2.Representation above their numbers.Their share of seats should not be fixed by population

3.Weightage for "political importance".Their argument was that Muslims should be weighed,

4.Reserved postsin government service and on the bench.

Minto's reply was warm. He assured the deputation that Muslim political rights and interests would be safeguarded in any administrative reorganisation. That assurance is the seed of the 1909 Act.

The "command performance" charge

The phrase comes from a real source. Maulana Mohammad Ali, one of the most important Muslim leaders of the Khilafat period, used the words "command performance" about the Simla Deputation in his presidential address to the Congress session at Kakinada in 1923.

So the phrase is authentic. Is the charge?

What supports it.William Archbold, the English Principal of the Aligarh college, was involved in the correspondence that set up the meeting. Minto's reply was suspiciously prepared and enthusiastic. And the British had, as Part 1 showed, a clear strategic interest in a separate Muslim political voice. It fitted their policy perfectly.

What weakens it.When historians traced the correspondence, the first move came from the Indian side, not the British one. Nawab Mohsin ul Mulk, a close associate of Sir Sayyid and the secretary of the Aligarh college, wrote to Archbold asking him to request that the Viceroy receive a Muslim deputation. Archbold acted as the channel, which is exactly what an English principal with access to Simla would be used for. No document has been produced showing the British ordering the deputation into existence.

And a point of simple logic.The demand did not need to be invented by anybody. Muslim leaders had watched the Bengal agitation, they had read the census, and they could do the arithmetic. A permanent minority in a head counting system will always ask for a guaranteed share. That demand would have appeared with or without Mr Archbold.

The founding of the All India Muslim League, 30 December 1906

Three months later, at Dhaka, the annual meeting of the All India Muhammadan Educational Conference passed a resolution moved by Nawab Salimullah Khan of Dhaka, seconded by Hakim Ajmal Khan, Maulana Muhammad Ali and Maulana Zafar Ali. The All India Muslim League was founded.

Its declared aims tell you a lot. In its earliest form, the League existed to promote loyalty to the British government, to protect and advance the political rights of Indian Muslims, and to prevent hostility towards other communities. That third aim is genuine and is usually forgotten.

Two things about this founding are worth holding on to for later parts.

• It was an elite body.Nawabs, landlords, Aga Khans, college men. It had almost no mass following. In 1937, thirty one years later, it would be crushed in the elections. Its transformation into a mass movement happens between 1937 and 1946, and that is one of the most important stories in this book.
• It did not ask for a country.Not in 1906, not in 1916, not in 1930. The Pakistan demand is thirty four years away. What the League asked for in 1906 was a guaranteed share inside one India.

If you asked me to pick the single most damaging decision in this entire history, I would not choose 1947, or 1940, or 1905. I would choose the Indian Councils Act of 1909.

41909: The Year the Road Forked

What the Act did

The Indian Councils Act of 1909, known as the Morley Minto Reforms after John Morley in London and Lord Minto in India, expanded the legislative councils and allowed a limited number of elected Indian members for the first time.

And it createdseparate electoratesfor Muslims.

Why this was worse than it looked at the time

In 1909 this seemed like a small technical concession to a nervous minority. It was not. It did four things at once.

1.It made religion a legal category for voting.The state now had to maintain a list of who was

2.It removed the reward for compromise.This is the deepest damage. Every functioning multi

3.It froze the community as the unit of politics.Not the district, not the class, not the trade, not

4.It set a precedent that everybody then had to claim.Once one group had a guaranteed

Who is to blame for it?

Let us be even handed, because there is blame in three directions.

The Britishdesigned and enacted it, knowing exactly what it would do. Morley in London had private doubts about the whole scheme of separate representation, but it went through, and Minto in India regarded the securing of Muslim loyalty as a considerable achievement.

The Muslim Leagueasked for it, campaigned for it and defended it for the next forty years. It was a rational demand for a minority that feared permanent defeat. It was also the demand that made a shared political nation structurally impossible.

The Congressopposed it in 1909, and then accepted it seven years later. That is Chapter 5, and it is the part of this story that Congress supporters find hardest to face.

If the road forked in 1909, the next seven years show that a fork is not a wall. This is the period when Hindu and Muslim politics came closest to merging. It is also the period when the Congress made the concession that it could never take back.

5The Years of Unity, and How Congress Joined the Machine

Why Muslim opinion turned against the British

Three things happened in quick succession.

• 1911, the annulment of the Bengal partition.As Chapter 2 explained, Muslim leaders in East Bengal had backed the British and were then abandoned. Loyalty had been shown to be a bad investment.
• 1911 to 1913, the Balkan Wars and the attacks on the Ottoman Empire.The Ottoman Sultan was also the Caliph, the symbolic head of Sunni Islam. Britain and its allies were on the other side. For a great many Indian Muslims this made Britain not a protector but a threat to their faith.
• 1913, the Kanpur mosque incident.The British demolished part of a mosque in Kanpur to widen a road. The shooting of protesters that followed produced fury across Muslim India and radicalised a generation of younger leaders, including Maulana Mohammad Ali and Maulana Azad.

The result was that in 1913 the Muslim League changed its own constitution and adopted self government for India as its goal, and a young Bombay lawyer who was already a rising Congress figure agreed to join it while remaining in the Congress. His name was Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The Lucknow Pact, December 1916

In December 1916 the Congress and the Muslim League held their annual sessions in the same city, Lucknow, and signed a joint agreement. Tilak led for the Congress. Jinnah led for the League. They agreed on a common demand for self government and put it to the British together.

It was, on the surface, the greatest moment of Hindu and Muslim political unity in the whole colonial period. Two parties, one demand, one platform.

And the price the Congress paid for it was this:the Congress formally accepted separate electorates.

Not only accepted. The Pact went further. It agreed that Muslims should have more seats than their population share in provinces where they were a minority, such as the United Provinces, in exchange for accepting fewer than their share in Punjab and Bengal where they were a majority. This is called weightage. The Congress had now signed a document that treated Indians as members of communities with negotiated quotas.

Six years after Lucknow, in 1922, the unity built here would collapse. That story, which runs through the Khilafat movement, the Non Cooperation Movement, Chauri Chaura and the Moplah rising, is Part 3.

This chapter jumps ahead in time on purpose. Each of these moments will be examined properly in later parts. I have put them together here so that you can see the sequence in one place, because the sequence is the finding.

6Who Else Said "Two Nations"? The Uncomfortable List

Here is the record, in date order. Read the dates carefully.

What this table actually shows

Three findings, and I want to state each of them carefully.

Finding one: a Hindu leader proposed partition first, in print, in 1923

Lala Lajpat Rai was not a marginal figure. He was one of the three leaders of the Extremist wing of the Congress, a national hero who would die in 1928 from injuries received in a police lathi charge, the man whose death Bhagat Singh set out to avenge. And in December 1923, in a newspaper, he proposed dividing India into a Muslim India and a non Muslim India, and the following year he proposed dividing Punjab.

He is not usually named as a father of the two nation theory. On the documentary record he proposed the practical partition scheme seventeen years before the Muslim League did.

To be fair to him, his motive was the reverse of Jinnah's. He was arguing from despair about communal violence and from a belief that Hindus and Sikhs in a Muslim majority Punjab would be crushed. He was not building a nation. He was trying to protect one. But a proposal is a proposal, and it was published under his name.

Finding two: Savarkar stated the two nation theory as Hindu Mahasabha policy in 1937, before Jinnah stated it as Muslim League policy in 1940

The words are on the record from his presidential address at Ahmedabad. The Mahasabha under his leadership held that India contained two nations, the Hindus and the Muslims. Jinnah made the equivalent claim the policy of the Muslim League three years later.

Savarkar's defenders make an argument that deserves to be heard, and I will put it at full strength in Part 4 where this belongs. In short, they say he was describing a fact rather than making a demand, that he wanted one undivided country in which Hindus were recognised as the nation and Muslims as a community living within it, and that he opposed Partition to his last day, which is true. The counter argument is that once you concede the premise that there are two nations, you have handed the other side its entire case, and Jinnah quoted exactly this kind of Hindu nationalist statement back at Congress negotiators.

Both of those arguments are serious. I am not settling them here. What is not arguable is the date.

Finding three: the men usually named as the architects were often not asking for what we think

Iqbal in 1930 asked for a consolidated Muslim state in the north west, explicitly discussing it as something that could existwithin the British Empire, and elsewhere in the same address he spoke of Muslim India within India. He died in 1938, two years before the Lahore Resolution. Reading him as the man who demanded Pakistan requires ignoring his own words about what he meant.

Rahmat Ali in 1933 was a student in Cambridge printing a pamphlet at his own expense. The idea was treated as fantasy by the very leaders it was addressed to. He got the name adopted and almost nothing else. He later attacked Jinnah bitterly, felt betrayed by the Pakistan that was actually created, and died in Cambridge in 1951 in poverty.

Where We Have Reached

By the end of 1916 the pieces have moved a long way from where Part 1 left them.

• The arithmetic problem has been named in public, by Sir Sayyid in 1888, and the answer he chose was loyalty to the British rather than bargaining with Indians.
• India has been partitioned once already, in Bengal in 1905, on lines drawn so that religion and province matched, with a British official noting in an internal file that division was one of the merits of the scheme.
• That partition has been reversed by mass agitation, teaching Congress that pressure works and teaching Muslim leaders that loyalty does not.
• Muslim India has a party, founded in 1906, elite and loyalist and tiny, asking for a guaranteed share inside one country.
• And in 1909 the British made religion the legal unit of the vote itself, which removed forever the reward for building alliances across community.
• In 1916 the Congress signed up to that same system at Lucknow, in exchange for a moment of real unity.

What still does not exist in 1916 is any demand for a separate country. Not from Jinnah, who is at this moment the leading voice of unity. Not from the League. Not from anybody.

What exists is a structure. And a structure quietly decides what kind of politics can grow inside it.

In Part 3, a lawyer returns from South Africa, takes over the Congress within four years, and links the national movement to a religious cause in a way that has been argued about ever since.

• Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, speech at Meerut, 16 March 1888, in Sir Syed Ahmed on the Present State of Indian Politics(Allahabad: The Pioneer Press, 1888), pages 29 to 53. Full English text hosted by Professor Frances W. Pritchett, Columbia University, with the note on qaum and nation.
• Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, speech at Lucknow, 28 September 1887, same collection.
• Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Patna speech of January 1883 and Gurdaspur speech of 27 January 1884, as recorded in collections of his speeches.
• Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan,The Causes of the Indian Revolt, 1858.
• Herbert Risley, Home Department note of 7 February 1904, quoted in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay,From Plassey to Partition, and in standard accounts of the Bengal partition.
• Banglapediaentriesonthe Partitionof Bengal 1905 andonthe Simla Deputation,forprovincial populations, dates and participants.
• Maulana Mohammad Ali, presidential address, Indian National Congress, Kakinada session, 1923, for the "command performance" phrase.
• Bimal Prasad's research on the origins of the Simla Deputation, tracing the initiative to Nawab Mohsin ul Mulk's letter to William Archbold.
• Indian Councils Act 1909, text and official summaries of the Morley Minto Reforms.
• Text of the Lucknow Pact, December 1916, and Jinnah's Lucknow presidential address of 1916.
• Muhammad Iqbal, presidential address to the All India Muslim League, Allahabad, 29 December 1930, full text.
• Choudhry Rahmat Ali,Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish Forever?, pamphlet, 28 January 1933, full text.
• V. D. Savarkar, presidential address, Hindu Mahasabha, Ahmedabad, 1937, as published in the Mahasabha proceedings.
• Lala Lajpat Rai, articles in The Tribune, 14 December 1923 and November to December 1924.