@scorpionx @Joe Shearer - Sahiban I was thinking of something. I've had a lot of free time these past few months to read extensively about the creation of Pakistan and the partition of India. I just wanted to ask you if you felt something that I felt while going through all of it.
Whichever book I've grabbed, even if it be from someone teaching at an esteemed academic institution or someone who witnessed these events personally, why does every narrative or academic thesis on the genesis of Pakistan and the partition of India comes across as something that is understood as if it were a lab experiment with controlled parameters and defined outcomes ? Why do people singularly focus on one causation and one causation alone (by and large) to the substantive exclusion of all others when explaining away something as complex as the division of an entire country, the mass movement behind that and the conception and later creation of an entirely new country ?
So far the themes I have come across to explain away the evolution of the Pakistan Movement which finally culminated in the creation of the State of Pakistan, fall, broadly, in the following 4 categories:
(i) it was used as a bargaining chip to demand greater concessions from the center on Muslim issues (Ayesha Jalal*
et al)
(ii) was a very cogently defined movement that sought to create a new Medina (Venkat Dhulipala*)
(iii) was a rallying point for different ideas of what Pakistan ought to represent by people who shared a common belief that Muslims in a United India post Britain would not have a fair share (Akbar S Ahmed*
et al)
(iv) was simply the ambition of one man who used legal and political maneuvering to frighten the Muslims of India into falling for his political agenda (J S Akbar*
et al)
*as I understood their view points to be.
Why can't it be all of them at once ? Why can't we say that in the mind of Quaid-e-Azam it was all of those things happening at the same time ? Why can't it be the idealism that Iqbal talked about that touched Jinnah so profoundly (as evidenced by his emphatically written letters to him and his determined pursuit of finding Iqbal's replies to him and finally getting it all personally published as a booklet) and appeared to have awakened within him some sense and proportion of his Muslim heritage and what paradigms Muslims in ages past had come up with ?
Additionally why can't it also be the realism that a pragmatic lawyer felt when he was fighting for the cause he believed in but was conscious of both his standing as only the 2nd largest party in British India and the impracticality of the uprooting of millions of Muslims from India to Pakistan and millions of Hindus from Pakistan to India ?
Furthermore why can't it at the same time be the appreciation of the common strand - fear for their future in a United India - that pervaded the Muslim masses throughout India and the realization that red herrings like whether Pakistan will be an Islamic State or a Secular State or something completely different are entirely inconsequential and perhaps even counter-productive to the whole struggle that has brought people together from as diverse backgrounds as a renegade Deobandi theologian like Shabbir Ahmed Usmani on one hand to someone as staunchly secular as Justice Munir on the other, simply because of that singular common strand.
Moreover what is wrong with saying that perhaps a personal element was there as well ? That perhaps a man who had fought long and hard for an India envisioned by people like Gokhale because he believed in it was disillusioned by the dragging in of religious symbolism that had occurred when Gandhi Sahib became active in Indian politics and thus he seriously felt embittered at the whole experience and his own personal misgivings about where a United India would lead to if this continued on increasingly convinced him that there ought to be an alternative to it all and perhaps he could do something about it - if not within India than without India.
Does there have to be a singular reason for Nation states to be born ? I've been thinking about this a lot recently and even analogously I ask myself if I were to demand my share of inheritance and break-away from my siblings would it only be because of a single reason or would everything from my misgivings, a personality clash, my dreams of what a home could be and my own careful and considered reflections on a compromise, would all be in play in influencing my decision and bringing it to fruition ? How then can we so callously and dare I say it - arrogantly, assume that something as exponentially more complex as the creation of an entire country, the division of millions of people and the whole evolution of the movement that led to it can be explained away in such overly simplistic terms as it being just a bargaining chip or just blind ambition or just a romanticized notion of an Islamic state ? Why can't it be all of them at once ? Why can't it also be numerous factors in addition to this that were either never talked about so vociferously or did not find as much resonation with the masses so fell in the background ?
Plus I don't know why so many Historians keep throwing about words like an 'empirical approach' or a 'factual approach' to historiography when their own work is riddled with hearsay usually enunciated by a he-said-she-said narrative carefully constructed in line with their thesis. As if M.C.Chagla's proclamation of Jinnah consuming pork and whiskey becomes any more credible than the narrations of his ex-ADC Mohiudeen, the guard at his residence Muneer Ahmed and the butler at the Governor General's house Abdur Rasheed Butler that Jinnah used to cry when he prayed or read the Koran with such deep concentration that he was oblivious to everything else including knocking over things.
I mean where does it stop ? Just because hearsay
A goes in my favor shouldn't make it anymore argumentatively credible than hearsay
B that I dub a mere rumor and conveniently ignore simply because it doesn't fit my narrative - Are there no principles involved....are the words of a
Mr.Y presented as evidence and the words of another
Mr.Z ignored simply because one supports my view point while the other does not ? Does hearsay become a credible narration of events simply on whim ?
The more I study history the more I feel that Napoleon wasn't way off the mark when he said that
'History is but a fable agreed upon' ! Which is to say if we truly scrutinize history on the basis of facts there is precious little that we can say with any degree of certainty.....the rest is anyone's guess - an informed guess perhaps but just a guess nonetheless !
Have you guys felt the same ?
Gosh that was a really long rant !
