Sir Syed Ahmad Khan Lecture by M J Akbar at Aligarh Muslim University - 20th April 2010


Let us begin by examining a term that has claimed pole position in the political discourse of Indian Muslims for a century and more: at what point in their history of more than a thousand years did Indian Muslims become a minority? The question is, clearly, rhetorical because Indian Muslims have never been in a majority.

The last British census, taken in 1941, showed that Muslims constituted 24.3% of the population. Five years later, in 1946, provoked by fears that they and their faith would be destroyed by majority-Hindu aggression after the British left, Indian Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim League, a party that promised a new Muslim nation on the map of the Indian subcontinent, to be called Pakistan. In August 1947, Pakistan, a concept that that had not been considered a serious option even in 1940, became a fact. Its geography was fantastic: its western and eastern halves were separated by more than a thousand miles of hostile India. Its ideology, Islam, was unprecedented, since no nation-state had yet been created on the basis of Islam. The process of nation-formation in the Arab world, for instance, had begun after the First World War, but despite a common religion, language and culture, Arabs had shown no inclination towards a common political territory. The linguistic and cultural chasm between East and West Pakistan proved impossible to bridge; in 1971, a Bengali-Muslim Bangladesh was born.

The partitions of India divided Indian Muslims, who constituted one-third of the world’s Muslims before 1947, even more than they divided India. Hindu-majority India had more Muslims than post-Bangladesh Pakistan. When the first census of the 21st century was taken, in 2001, Muslims were 13.4% of Hindu-Muslim India.

Despite their numbers, Indian Muslims enjoyed a unique history. Muslim dynasties were by far the most powerful element within the complex mosaic of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious feudal structure before the slow aggregation of British rule from the middle of the 18th century. An Arab invader, Muhammad bin Qasim, established the first Muslim dynasty, in 712 in Sind [now in Pakistan], but it faltered and stagnated. Muslim rule in a substantive sense is more correctly dated to 1192, when Muhammad Ghori, at the head of a Turco-Afghan army, defeated the Rajput king Prithviraj at Tarain near Delhi to establish a dominant center of Muslim power in the heartland.

Ghori soon returned to Afghanistan, but his successors, Turco-Afghan generals, set up a Delhi Sultanate that became independent of Afghanistan in 1206. By this time, with astonishing rapidity, they held an empire that stretched from Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the east. Delhi, or its alter ego Agra, remained a Muslim capital for over six centuries. The Khaljis [1288-1320], Tughlaqs [1320-1413], Saiyyids [1414-1451], Lodis [1451-1526], Suris [1540-1556] and Mughals [1526-1540, and 1556-1857] won or lost power in wars that were as bitter as any other, but the fact that succession never went out of the Islamic fold created a comfort zone that seeped down to even those Muslims who had little to gain from that moveable feast called monarchy. There were powerful Muslim domains even during British rule, the most important being the state of Hyderabad. Muslims formed only 11% of Hyderabad’s population; 84% were Hindus. Did Muslims consider themselves a minority as long as their ruler was a Muslim? No.

Minority and majority were, therefore, a measure of empowerment more than a function of numbers. Power translated into positive discrimination in employment, within the bureaucracy, judiciary and military; and it ensured that their aman i awwal [liberty of religion] was beyond threat.

This changed in 1803, when victorious British troops marched into Delhi. The Mughal Emperor, now reduced to an impotent throne in the Red Fort, became a British vassal, and centuries of Muslim confidence began to crumble into a melee of reactions ranging from anger, frustration, bombast, lament and self-pity to insurrection and intellectual enquiry.

Indian Muslims entered an age of insecurity for which they sought a range of answers. Pakistan emerged as the 20th century’s answer to a 19th century defeat. So far, it has merely replaced insecurity with uncertainty.

Both the Mughals and Ottomans also failed to democratize the educational system with the help of new technologies like printing. There was nothing unIslamic about printing. But the calligraphers in the bureaucracy who kept records, and the clergy in the seminary, formed a powerful conservative coalition that resisted instruments of modernity.

Queen Elizabeth granted a royal charter to what became known as the East India Company on the last day of the 16th century. The first British ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe received an audience from Emperor Jahangir in Agra in 1615. Jahangir, used to pearls from the Portuguese, sniffed at Sir Thomas’s pedestrian presents and asked, instead, for an English horse. The embarrassed, but patient, Englishman was finally granted a firman to trade in 1618. The East India Company was only one of many British enterprises – among them Levant, Muscovy, Royal African, Massacussetts Bay and South Sea – engaged in international commerce; but it was by far the most successful. By 1750 its network extended from Basra to Sumatra.

The most important of its possessions was Calcutta, founded in 1690, on the Hooghly river in Bengal. Maya Jasanoff explains why: “From their capital at Murshidabad, the nawabs of Bengal presided over the richest province of the Mughal Empire. Cotton cloth, raw silk, saltpeter, sugar, indigo, and opium – the products of the region seemed inexhaustible, and all the European merchant companies set up factories to trade in them. Traveling downriver from Murshidabad was like traveling across a mixed up map of Europe: there were the Portuguese at Hughli [sic], the Dutch at Chinsura, the Danes at Serampore, the French at Chandernagore, and, of course, the British at Calcutta” [Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East 1750-1850, Vintage, New York]. The Nawabs of Bengal were among the richest Indian princes until ruined by conspiracy and defeat.

The vulnerability of Indian Muslim communities increased in direct proportion to the gradual erosion of their dynasts between 1757 and 1857. As they struggled to find new equations with fellow Indians and the foreign British, they were squeezed on both sides: Hindus, who had the advantage of numbers, and the British, who had the advantage of power. An assertive Hindu elite claimed preference under British rule after centuries of a sense of denial. The British were also wary of any revival by those they had displaced, the Muslim nobility; unsurprisingly, it was marginalised.

The ulema have always had a special place in Muslim societies, not merely as leaders of prayer but as judicial and educational bureaucracy. Ulema is the plural of alim, meaning a wise man. Alim is a derivative of ilm, or knowledge. There are three degrees of knowledge: ain al-yaqin, certainty derived from sight; ilm al yaqin, certainty from inference or reasoning; and haqq al-yaqin, the absolute truth, which is the eternal truth contained in the Quran. As scholars the ulema extended their expertise to the arts and sciences, and their seminaries became schools that stored and disseminated knowledge to Muslims.

The high status given to knowledge in Islam has been transferred to the keeper of knowledge, the cleric-teacher. Imam Abu Abdullah Muhammad Bukhari [810-870], who culled some 7000 sayings and stories about Prophet Muhammad from a mass of about 600,000, reports the Prophet as saying that envy is permitted in only two cases: when a wealthy man disposes of his wealth correctly, and when a person of knowledge applies and teaches it. Another hadith says that he who goes on a search for knowledge is treated as being on jihad. The first great seminaries were established within seven decades of the Prophet’s death.

The Indian clergy energized despondent Muslims across the subcontinent, from Peshawar to Dhaka, and inspired, between 1825 and 1870, what is best described as a people’s war. By the time this insurrection was defeated, it had planted seeds of a fierce anti-West, anti-colonial sentiment that prepared the community for the nationalist movement lead by Gandhi. Gandhi recognized his allies, and wooed Muslims through the ulema.

There was more than one strand in the ideological heritage of 19th century ulema, but the most influential voice belonged to the school of Shah Waliullah, the preeminent theological intellectual of Delhi. His son, Shah Aziz, issued the influential fatwa in 1803 that declared India a “house of war” and his disciple, Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, launched a jihad in 1825. Barelvi’s movement began in the east, in Bihar and Bengal, but he made Balakot in the Malakand division of the North West Frontier his war headquarters: a town that was destined to become famous again as a haven of the Pakistan Taliban. Barelvi’s strength lay in the mobilization of subaltern forces. Donations came from the meanest Muslim homes, ferried by an invisible network of clerics: when peasants ate a meal in Bengal or Bihar they would set aside a handful of uncooked rice as their contribution to the jihad. This long war confirmed in British minds the view that Muslims, when inspired by faith, fought for ideas beyond the conventional dynamic of territory and kingdom; and convinced them that Islam was a faith that inspired permanent war.

When Barelvi’s Jihad failed, and every alternative center of power disappeared from the political map of India, Muslims can looking at other avenues. The three most important were education, economic empowerment and economic/political space.

There were many options available: competition for jobs; the lure of advancement through preferences in language, education and the economy. An unusual provocation for discord was history. Both Hindus and Muslims were tempted by an imagined past. Influential Hindu intellectuals explained centuries of Muslim rule as unrelieved tyranny that had kept a civilized and non-violent people, the Hindus, subservient. Muslim zealots glorified the worst examples of aggression, like the iconoclast and looter Mahmud of Ghazni, and encouraged Muslims to believe that they were superior to Hindus. The upper-caste Hindu resurgence of the 19th century was infected by an undercurrent of anti-Muslim bias, in which Muslims had to be punished for real or imagined sins from the past.

The British did not invent fantasy; Muslims and Hindus were quite capable of deluding themselves. But history became a frontline weapon in the armoury of colonial power, particularly when it could be fired with stealth. The potential of Hindu-Muslim strife was always present below, and occasionally above, the surface. Textbook history is rarely the memory of peace. Chronicles of conflict were mutilated by exaggeration and propaganda. Ordinary people, who had gained little from the rule of their elites, basked in the vicarious pleasures of “triumph” or suffered the “humiliation” of defeat.

While Muslim self-glorification easily encouraged excess, 19th century Hindu intellectuals had a different dilemma: why were the most powerful Hindu princes unable to replace the feeblest Mughal ruler in Delhi? The alibis extended from a rapacious, barbaric, culture-insensitive Islamic temperament (an image easily extended to rape of a beautiful wife and the rape of Mother India), to betrayal. Muslim partisans were equally eager to claim superior genes, and taunt Hindus as cowards. The British did not have much to do, as acrimony gravitated towards hatred, except watch, and, when opportunity presented itself, nudge.

1919: Neocolonization.

The last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was crowned in 1837. He was neither bahadur [brave] nor much of a shah [king]. He became a vassal of the British, who reached Delhi in 1803, although, technically, the British were still his subjects. The façade of empire collapsed in the northern Indian sepoy uprising of 1857 [the Bombay and Madras armies never rebelled]. The sepoys, both Hindus and Muslims, proclaimed Zafar their king. The British dismissed it as a mutiny and, inverting logic, convicted the Emperor of India for “treason” in his own country. Zafar was exiled to Burma. Such generosity was not shown to sepoy prisoners, who were hanged.

But even a Badshah who wobbled was better for Muslims than no Badshah at all. Depression followed defeat in 1857. Delhi and Lucknow, great cities and centers of Muslim high culture, were razed, and looked as desolate as the Muslim community. One of the great men of his time, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), lamented to the Muhammadan Literary Society of Calcutta in 1863, “In our ancient capitals once so well-known, so rich, so great and so flourishing, nothing is now to be seen or heard save a few bones strewn amongst the ruins of the human-like cry of the jackal.”

It was not until June 1858 that resettlement began in Delhi, with Hindus being permitted to return. Muslims had to wait till August 1759 to re-enter the city, and it was not till 1900 that the Muslim population reached 1757 levels. Their great symbols of faith were insulted. The Jama Masjid was turned into a barracks for Sikh soldiers; most of the Fatehpuri mosque was sold to a Hindu merchant, and restored to its traditional Imams only in 1777. The Zeenatul Masjid, perhaps the most beautiful in the city, was converted into a bakery till Lord Curzon gave it back to Muslims. Everything within 448 yards of the Red Fort was demolished to provide a clear range for British guns on fortress ramparts. People who had lost their homes were forbidden from pointing out the spot where their homes once stood. Land and property was confiscated from those unable to prove that they had not been insurgents; the largely Muslim land was transferred to Hindu bankers. The city’s great libraries, imperial as well as theological, whether they belonged to Nawab Ziauddin Khan of Loharu or Shah Waliullah, were looted. Akbarabadi Masjid, whose Imams were descendants of Waliullah, were destroyed, as was the khanqah of Shah Kalimullah. A residential area of the intellectual elite, Kuchah-e Chilau Mohalla, was emptied when some 1400 were butchered. The nobility was uprooted from Jhajjar, Ballabgarh, Farrucknagar and Bahadurgarh. Mughal Delhi was physically ruined, and found a place in the poetry of lament, Shah-e Ashub, mourning the death of Delhi.

There was a time when Sir Sayyid was so depressed by the events of 1857 that he contemplated settling down in Egypt. But he dismissed exile as cowardice and turned to what became his life’s work: a programme of reform and education for Muslims, urging them to acquire the intellectual merits that had made the British victors: a modern scientific temperament, and versatility in the English language. This would restore the glory they had lost with the decline of Mughal power.

Fought to banish fear of the British, and taught the community the virtues of learning from the enemy.

The clergy were not amused by his pro-British tendencies. A fatwa from Deoband accused Sir Sayyid of apostasy.

The complacency of power gave way to the politics of isolation and anxiety among Indian Muslims. There was obvious hostility towards those who had displaced them, and the British reinforced this relationship by treating Muslims as their principal adversaries. They British may have, in response, encouraged Hindu-Muslim rivalry for rewards under the new dispensation, but they can hardly be accused of having created it.

Muslim confidence dropped from a heightened sense of superiority to tortured uncertainty. Numbers, which had seemed irrelevant during the high noon of power, now became the focal point of despair. Demographics began to shape the discourse as post-empire generations sought space and influence. The ideologue of this new arithmetic was Sir Sayyid. His live was devoted to lifting Indian Muslims out of what he called, in a mordant and brilliant phrase, a “fatal shroud of complacent self-esteem”.

The birth of a son in an upper-class [sharif] Muslim household in the first half of the nineteenth century was announced with a proud gunshot – to get the child used to the sound of firearms. A maulvi [cleric] or a senior member of the family would then bend down and whisper the azaan [call to prayer] in the left ear and the kalimah [profession of the faith] in the right. Faith and fire were a birthright. Sayyid Ahmad Khan was born on 17 October 1817 into such a home in Delhi.

His father was a Mughal bureaucrat. He had served briefly as prime minister to Akbar II in 1815, but devoted more of his time to mystic contemplation. His mother was a disciple of the most eminent Islamic scholar of the period, Shah Abdul Aziz. He grew up in a sprawling complex of houses in old Delhi that served as the home of his maternal grandfather, Khwaja Fariduddin Ahmad. Courtesy, consideration, order, education (personally supervised by the family patriarch in the evenings), religious observance, poetry, conversation (another fine art): such were the elements that spanned the sharif horizon. Courtesy was a prime virtue. His mother banished him from home when he was eleven or twelve because he hit an old family retainer. He had to live with an aunt until he sought forgiveness from the servant.

His ustad [tutor] was a maternal uncle who taught him mathematics, classical music, painting, archery and, not least, the serious art of kite-flying; he was author of a treatise on making kites and grinding broken glass into a powder with which the string was treated in order to slash competition in the sky. Sayyid Ahmad recalled another uncle, with even more élan, who would take him to the home of a Hindu friend and patron of ghazals, music and the dance of courtesans. There were also lessons in Arab-Greek medicine from a hakim, or a doctor.

The most useful uncle, though, had a job as Sadr Amin [subordinate judge] with the East India Company, was of more practical use. He helped the Sayyid Ahmad get a job, after his father's death in 1838, as the Persian and Urdu secretary to an English judge in the Commissioner's Office in Agra. Within two years Sayyid passed the relevant examination and was promoted to munsif. In 1846 he arranged for a transfer to Delhi to be with his mother; eight years later he was appointed Sadr Amin at Bijnore, where he witnessed the conflict of 1857 that shook northern India.

His role in that conflagration was unusual; he saved the lives of vulnerable British civilians. It is pertinent that Sayyid Ahmad Khan's family in Delhi paid a heavy price for opposing the British. He was so depressed by the events of 1857 that he contemplated settling down in Egypt before he dismissed that option as cowardice. Instead, he turned to what became his life’s work: a programme of reform and education within his community. The only hope for Indian Muslims, he argued, was to acquire the intellectual merits of the people who had defeated them, a scientific temperament, modern academic culture and versatility in the English language.

He started the Scientific Society in 1864, to translate English educational texts into Urdu, the language of north Indian Muslims. He was irritated by an effort to extend this scheme to Hindi, since it would dilute the focus. In 1866, he launched a bilingual [English and Urdu] weekly newspaper, Aligarh Institute Gazette; later that year he formed The British Indian Association of the North Western Provinces and Oudh [the name of his province then], whose charter included promoting the interests of the British government. He expected the British to reciprocate by helping him set up his dream project, an English-Urdu university.

Six Muslims and four Hindus presented, in 1869, the petition for what eventually became the Aligarh Muslim University. The old bugbear, disputes over Hindi and Urdu, could not stall the project, but Sayyid Ahmad foresaw the damage this might cause in a larger context. On 29 April 1870, during a visit to London, he wrote to his friend Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk that the Urdu-Hindi controversy would make Muslim-Hindu unity impossible. "Muslims will never agree to Hindi, and if Hindus also, following the new move, insist on Hindi, they also will not agree to Urdu. The result will be that the Hindus and Muslims will be completely separated."

The British were the in the Indian equation, and Sayyid Ahmad sought they could even the odds in an unequal confrontation with Hindus. He tried to convince Muslims, traditionally hostile to the British, that the time had come for a rethink even on as emotive an issue as loss of their empire. He argued, possibly with more hope than conviction, that in 1857 "when the blood of the Christians was spilt, there should have also mingled with it that of Mohammedans; and those who shrunk from manifesting such devotedness and sided with the rebels willfully disobeyed the injunctions of religion, besides proving themselves ungrateful to their salt, and thereby incurring the severe displeasure of Government, a fact that is patent to every peasant".

His analysis of 1857 (History of the Bijnor Rebellion, Michigan State University, 1972, Occasional Paper No. 17, South Asia Series) sneered at the era of pre-British Muslim nawabs and Hindu rajas as nothing more than loot, murder, cruelty and rape, and praised the British for ending tyranny, permitting freedom of worship and ending injustice. He became convinced that the security of Hindus and Muslims (including from each other) lay in British rule.

But acceptance of Europe did not mean rejection of Islam. Sayyid Ahmad’s commentary on the holy book, Tafsir al-Quran, promoted the virtue of reform through the letter of doctrine, a tactic not designed to endear him to the ulama. The honour of a knighthood opened him up to the satire of caustic poets like Akbar Allahabadi, who were closer to traditional moorings. Perhaps Sir Sayyid’s formidable beard was also intended to reassure conservatives that his radicalism did not mean that he was embarrassed by conventional symbols of Muslim identity.

He was far ahead of his age in demanding education for girls. In 1869, Sir Sayyid visited England to place his son at Cambridge and study the people he so admired. Six months into his visit, he wrote a letter to the Scientific Society at Aligarh. He had been, he says, introduced to dukes and lords at dinner, met artisans and common folk at other times and concluded that Indian natives were dirty animals when compared to the able and handsome British. What impressed him most about England was the extent to which education had become a mass phenomenon. He mentions a young girl, Elizabeth Matthews, a maid in the house where he was living. In spite of her poverty, he notes, she would buy a half-penny paper called Echo and would delight in Punch if she chanced upon a copy. Cabmen and coachmen would read.

“The Muslims have nothing to fear from the adoption of the new education if they simultaneously hold steadfast to their faith, because Islam is not irrational superstition; it is a rational religion which can march hand in hand with the growth of human knowledge. Any fear to the contrary betrays lack of faith in the truth of Islam,” he wrote to an influential cleric, Maulvi Tasadduq. He asked rhetorically, “Did the early Muslims not take to Greek learning avidly? Did this in any respect undermine their loyalty to Islam?” English was the new Greek.

Sir Sayyid stayed for 17 months in Britain, and developed plans to model his proposed Aligarh institution on Harrow and Cambridge, offering both Islamic and Western education. In 1877 the Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, laid the foundation stone of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, now known as the Aligarh Muslim University. Nicknamed the "Muslim Cambridge", it spurred Sir Sayyid to take his message across the country. The Muhammadan Educational Conference was started in 1886 to promote learning as well as inculcate "national brotherhood".

A famous speech he made at Patna on 27 January 1883 reflects his philosophy at that time: "India is the home of both of us (Hindus and Muslims). We both breathe the air of India and take the water of the holy Ganges and the Jamuna. We both consume the products of the Indian soil. We are living and dying together...My friends, I have repeatedly said and say it again that India is like a bride which has got two lustrous eyes - Hindus and Mussulmans. If they quarrel against each other that beautiful bride will become ugly and if one destroys the other, she will lose one eye."

He stressed civic harmony even when he dwelt on the difference: “Friends, in India there live two prominent nations which are distinguished by the names of Hindus and Mussalmans…To be a Hindu or a Muslim is a matter of internal faith which has nothing to do with mutual relationships and external conditions…Hence leave God’s share to God and concern yourself with the share that is yours…India is the home of both of us. We both breathe the air of India and take the water of the holy Ganges and the Jamuna. We both consume the products of the Indian soil. We are living and dying together. By living so long in India, the blood of both have (sic) changed. The colour of both have become similar. The faces of both, having changed, have become similar. The Muslims have acquired hundreds of customs from the Hindus and the Hindus have also learned hundreds of things from the Mussalmans. We mixed with each other so much that we produced a new language – Urdu, which was neither our language nor theirs. Thus if we ignore that aspect of ours which we owe to God, both of us, on the basis of being common inhabitants of India, actually constitute one nation; and the progress of this country and that of both of us is possible through mutual cooperation, sympathy and love. We shall only destroy ourselves by mutual disunity and animosity and ill will to each other” (quoted in Sources of Indian Tradition, Volume Two, Columbia University Press, 1958).

Such clarity began to blur when, in the winter of 1885, the Indian National Congress was born under the leadership of a distinguished ornithologist, a very unorthodox Scottish civil servant with an unusual conscience.

Allan Octavian Hume was denied promotion to the highest level of the Indian Civil Service, membership of the Viceroy's Council, because of his alleged bias towards the natives. Discrimination may have egged him on to justify such suspicions. In May 1885 he informed the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, that he was, with the help of Indians, starting the Indian National Congress to promote the regeneration of India. On the morning of 28 December 1885, 72 delegates (39 lawyers, 14 journalists and one doctor) gathered in Bombay, with Hume in the chair, to ask for Indian representation in the civil service, through competitive examinations, and legislatures, through elections. The Indian National Congress was born as a united front of all Indians.

The seminary at Deoband, which was set up after 1857 and maintained a distance from the government, welcomed the birth of the Congress. Maulana Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, its sarparast or guide-superintendent, issued a fatwa in which he explained that the Prophet Muhammad, upon emigrating from Mecca, had formed alliances with different groups to combat his enemies. It was therefore acceptable for Muslims to cooperate with Hindus to win concessions from the British.

This could hardly have been good news for the government. The authorities told Hume that he had unleashed forces he would not be able to control. On 30 November 1888 Lord Dufferin called the Congress and Hume seditious in his St Andrews dinner speech at Calcutta. The same evening Sir Auckland Colvin, lieutenant governor of the North-Western Provinces, claimed that the Congress was not a fully representative party; the aims and aspirations of Muslims were different from those of the Congress. Hume described this as a "shameful libel" and attacked the British "doctrine of discord and disunion".

The instant, and vehement, rejection of the Congress by Sir Sayyid suggests a nudge from the authorities. He began to claim that Hindus and Muslims could have no common ground in political matters. He called the election of a Muslim, Badruddin Tyabji, in 1887 as the third Congress president nothing but a clever deception. Tyabji wrote to Sir Sayyid, wondering why he was trying to keep Muslims away from the Congress. Sir Sayyid replied that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations, and therefore he could not justify a platform like the Congress. If the Congress kept to social issues, then Sir Sayyid offered to join it himself; but not if it was a political body. In an article in Pioneer in April 1888, he suggested that the Congress had been created to subjugate Muslims under Hindu rule. The term he used was "the ring of slavery". Later, historians like Ishtiaque Qureshi and S.M.Ikram would describe Sir Sayyid as the prophet and father of Pakistan.

The evolution of the "Muslim movement", as projected by Sir Sayyid, was flawed by one serious misconception. It could not comprehend how a full-fledged democracy would function. Nothing illustrates this better than a speech which Sir Sayyid gave on 16 March 1888, "at the invitation of the Mussalmans of Meerut". His theme was the Congress, which, he now asserted, was the creation of "the Babus of Bengal", who were "tampering with our nation" by inducing Muslims to join the Congress. He condemned those Muslims who had attended the Madras session of the Congress as "nothing more than hired men" (the accusation drew cheers). They were not representative of the Muslim "nation" because they were not landlords, or Nawabs, or Rais (gentry): "I should point out to my nation that the few who went to Madras, went by pressure, or from some temptation, or in order to help their profession, or to gain notoriety, or were bought (cheers). No Rais from here took part in it". The only Muslim there with some credibility, he said, was Badruddin Tyabji, and he had made a mistake.

Sir Sayyid asked, who would rule India if the British left? “Now, suppose that all the English and the whole English army were to leave India, taking with them all their cannon and their splendid weapons and everything, then who would be the rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations - the Mohammedans and the Hindus - could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable.”

Sir Sayyid could not quite grasp a future different from the old social order. "At the same time,” he thundered, “you must remember that although the number of Mohammedans is less than that of the Hindus, and although they contain far fewer people who have received a high English education, yet they must not be thought insignificant or weak...our Mussalman brothers, the Pathans, [could] come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain valleys, and make rivers of blood to flow from their frontier on the north to the extreme end of Bengal." Such analogies would be repeated by the second rung of Muslim League leaders hoping to raise the pitch of their public meetings in the 1930s, some of whom recalled Chingiz Khan in their bravado. Jawaharlal Nehru had to remind them that Chingiz Khan was not a Muslim.

Sir Sayyid stretched his ideas about post-British India further: "But until one nation had conquered the other and made it obedient, peace cannot reign in the land. This conclusion is based on proofs, so absolute that no one can deny it." Some of those proofs were even geographically far-fetched: "Now, suppose that the English are not in India and that one of the nations of India has conquered the other, whether the Hindus the Mohammedans or the Mahommedans the Hindus. At once some other nation of Europe, such as the French, the Germans, the Portuguese, or the Russians will attack India. Their ships of war, covered with iron and loaded with flashing cannon and weapons, will surround her on all sides. At that time who will protect India? Neither Hindus can save nor Mahommedans; neither the Rajputs nor my brave brothers the Pathans." Well, who would protect India if even the mighty Pathans failed? The saviours of India could only be the British: "…the English government should remain for many years - in fact, for ever!"

He dismissed the thought of representative government. "Can you tell me of any case in the world's history in which any foreign nation after conquering another and establishing its empire over it has given representative government to the conquered people? Such a thing has never taken place. It is necessary for those who have conquered us to maintain their Empire on a strong basis...The English have conquered India and all of us along with it. And just as we [the Muslims, once] made the country obedient and our slave, so the English have done with us." He asked Muslims to make no demand for jobs in civil service, because the law of empire demanded that the English only trust Englishmen in authority.

Sir Sayyid brought in the Quran as well: "God has said that no people of other religions can be friends of Mohammedans except the Christians...Now God has made them rulers over us. Therefore we should cultivate friendship with them, and should adopt that method by which their rule may remain permanent and firm in India, and may not pass into the hands of the Bengalis."

He was convinced that in any new dispensation, Muslims would always be outvoted three-to-one since that was the Hindu-Muslim population ratio in undivided India, as if Hindu and Muslim voters were unwavering regiments dictated by the single consideration of their differing attitudes to the divine. His speeches sometimes contradicted each other, but, on balance, he seemed oblivious of the notion that political identity is influenced by a series of subsets, including region, language, economic class, sectarian and even seasonal loyalties.

One cannot glibly blame Sir Sayyid for misreading the complexities of democracy, for nowhere had democracy evolved to its present liberal maturity. Democracy was largely the preserve of the richer class of men (France did not give women the vote till 1945). America, whose Constitution is an ode to liberty and equality, did not extend to most blacks what it believed to be the inalienable rights of white people until the reforms of President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

Votes were not equal in British-Indian democracy, when it arrived on stilts. Legislatures were weighted in favour of those [like Europeans and Anglo-Indians] who could be depended upon to protect the government’s interests. There was no single-standard correlation between population figures and seats in the legislature; everything was up for negotiation leading to bitter arguments between the leaders of communities in a communal democracy.

The vast majority of Indians were left out of the electoral process. The most crucial elections in British India were the last, held between December 1945 and March 1946, since their purpose was not merely to provide provincial Indian administrations but also a Central Assembly that would map out the shape of free India. About 41 million Indians were eligible to vote, or around ten per cent of the population. (Women, incidentally, had the vote.) The results of this limited franchise poll, in which the Muslim League won 460 of the 533 seats reserved for Muslims, were treated as the moral bedrock upon which Pakistan was formed in 1947.

The alliance that Sir Sayyid fostered between the Muslim elite and the British government contributed to an immediate rise in aspirations, the most significant of which was the demand for separate Muslim-majority province in British India. Bengal was both the most populous as well as the most political province of British India. It was the secure base from which the British launched their slow but astonishing expansion. By the end of the nineteenth century, Bengal had an equal number of Hindus and Muslims. The balance was not equal: Muslims were poorer, largely peasants and cultivators, concentrated in the east, virtual serfs of mainly Hindu landlords. Bengali Muslims sought the panacea of separation in the belief that political power would end this discrimination and even the economic balance.

The ideal geography for a separate Muslim province was Bengal. But that could only be possible through partition.
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