Great piece on partition and the category of "religion":
"By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen
million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were
dead. The comparison with the death camps is not so far-fetched as it
may seem. Partition is central to modern identity in the Indian
subcontinent, as the Holocaust is to identity among Jews, branded
painfully onto the regional consciousness by memories of almost
unimaginable violence. The acclaimed Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal
has called Partition “the central historical event in twentieth century
South Asia.” She writes, “A defining moment that is neither beginning
nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of
postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”
(...)
Today, these conquests are usually perceived as having been made by
“Muslims,” but medieval Sanskrit inscriptions don’t identify the Central
Asian invaders by that term. Instead, the newcomers are identified by
linguistic and ethnic affiliation, most typically as
Turushka—Turks—which suggests that they were not seen primarily in terms
of their religious identity. Similarly, although the conquests
themselves were marked by carnage and by the destruction of Hindu and
Buddhist sites, India soon embraced and transformed the new arrivals.
Within a few centuries, a hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization emerged,
along with hybrid languages—notably Deccani and Urdu—which mixed the
Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of India with Turkish, Persian, and Arabic
words.
(...)
many writers persuasively blame the British for the gradual erosion of
these shared traditions. As Alex von Tunzelmann observes in her history
“Indian Summer,” when “the British started to define ‘communities’ based
on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many
Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began
to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.” Indeed, the
British scholar Yasmin Khan, in her acclaimed history “The Great
Partition,” judges that Partition “stands testament to the follies of
empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical
trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that
would otherwise have taken different—and unknowable—paths.
(...)
Other assessments, however, emphasize that Partition, far from emerging
inevitably out of a policy of divide-and-rule, was largely a contingent
development. As late as 1940, it might still have been avoided. Some
earlier work, such as that of the British historian Patrick French, in
“Liberty or Death,” shows how much came down to a clash of personalities
among the politicians of the period, particularly between Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, and Mohandas Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru, the two most prominent leaders of the Hindu-dominated
Congress Party. All three men were Anglicized lawyers who had received
at least part of their education in England. Jinnah and Gandhi were both
Gujarati. Potentially, they could have been close allies. But by the
early nineteen-forties their relationship had grown so poisonous that
they could barely be persuaded to sit in the same room.
(...)
It is easy to understand why Pakistan might feel insecure: India’s
population, its defense budget, and its economy are seven times as large
as Pakistan’s. But the route that Pakistan has taken to defend itself
against Indian demographic and military superiority has been disastrous
for both countries. For more than thirty years, Pakistan’s Army and its
secret service, the I.S.I., have relied on jihadi proxies to carry out
their aims. These groups have been creating as much—if not more—trouble
for Pakistan as they have for the neighbors the I.S.I. hopes to
undermine: Afghanistan and India.
Today, both India and Pakistan remain crippled by the narratives built
around memories of the crimes of Partition, as politicians (particularly
in India) and the military (particularly in Pakistan) continue to stoke
the hatreds of 1947 for their own ends. Nisid Hajari ends his book by
pointing out that the rivalry between India and Pakistan “is getting
more, rather than less, dangerous: the two countries’ nuclear arsenals
are growing, militant groups are becoming more capable, and rabid media
outlets on both sides are shrinking the scope for moderate voices.”
Moreover, Pakistan, nuclear-armed and deeply unstable, is not a threat
only to India; it is now the world’s problem, the epicenter of many of
today’s most alarming security risks. It was out of madrassas in
Pakistan that the Taliban emerged. That regime, which was then the most
retrograde in modern Islamic history, provided sanctuary to Al Qaeda’s
leadership even after 9/11.
It is difficult to disagree with Hajari’s conclusion: “It is well past
time that the heirs to Nehru and Jinnah finally put 1947’s furies to
rest.” But the current picture is not encouraging. In Delhi, a hard-line
right-wing government rejects dialogue with Islamabad. Both countries
find themselves more vulnerable than ever to religious extremism. In a
sense, 1947 has yet to come to an end."
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrymple
many regards
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