Road To Freedom

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• For God and Country
• The Empire Builders
• Tribal Uprisings
• Sepoys on the Move
• British Authority Collapses
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Roll of Honour
• The Trial of the Last Emperor
• English Education
• The Blue Mutiny
• Perishing in Peace
• ‘Rani Ka Hookum’
• Barbarous Britannia
• Return to Swadeshi
• The Delhi Durbar
• Hunger Deaths
• The One-Man Army
• Mamool Raj
• The British Raj in Black and White
• Europeans Take To The Street!
• Pressing On !
• The Battle For A Free Press
• The Battle Lines are Drawn
• Women : Crossing the Threshold
• An Old Man's Dream
• Father of Indian Unrest
• The Monk Who Shook The Nation
• The Battle is Taken to the Legislature!
• Partition of Bengal
• The Great Divide
• The New Spirit of India
• Swadeshi Enterprise
• From Swadeshi to Swaraj
• Gandhi in South Africa
• Heroes and Martyrs
• Revolutionaries Outside India
• Carrot and Stick
• Gandhi in Champaran
• The Gentle Satyagrahi
• Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh
• Jallianwala — The Aftermath
• A People Reject Their Rulers
• The Himalayan Blunder
• Gandhiji Withdraws from Political Activities
• Bardoli
• Saga of Indian Revolutionaries
• A Pinch of Salt!
• Gandhi and Ambedkar
• Leave India to God… or to Anarchy
• Quit India
• The Last War of Independence
• Apostle of Peace
• India Wins Freedom
• The Light Has Gone Out
• Under One Flag

The Great Divide

The Great Divide

By the time the British arrived in India, Muslims had become sons of the soil. They were no longer outsiders. India was their home and they knew no other. Early Muslim 'immigrants' brought to this country a culture of their own. And in the course of three hundred years or so the two great cultures of the Hindus and the Muslims influenced each other in language, literature, music, art and architecture. Muslims took to Hindustani music and adopted the language of the region they lived in. Bengali Muslims, for example, spoke Bengali and dressed in. Bengali fashion. Muslims in the South spoke South Indian languages. Similarly Hindus in North India learnt to write and speak in Urdu. The Mughals had become the ruling dynasty of the country and many Hindu rajas owed allegiance to them. But even in areas where the Mughals did not hold sway and in periods when Mughal rule was ineffective there were Hindu kings who were ably served by Muslim advisers and generals and Muslim rulers who depended on advice from Hindu administrators. Tipu Sultan's trusted Diwan, for example, was a brahmin named Poorniah and Shivaji's personal secretary was a Muslim. When the British gained strength in India, neither Muslim nor Hindu rulers hesitated in seeking British help to overcome their enemies whatever their religious persuasion. Thus the Nizam of Hyderabad sided with the British against Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, and Raghunathrao, a Maratha sought British help to put down fellow Marathas. All this is not to say that there was never any friction between the two communities. Trouble occasionally flared up but died down just as quickly without leaving animosity in its wake. Hindus and Muslims in the period before the arrival of the British lived like loving brothers — abusing and quarrelling but never disowning each other. According to the historian, Bipin Chandra, India before the coming of the British was remarkably free from communalism.

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The Hindu-Muslim equation underwent a qualitative change due to three factors: English education, employment in government services and the British policy of Divide and Rule.
The new system of administration introduced by the British was linked to English education which the Hindus took to and to which Muslims remained indifferent.
Between the founding of Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817 and Aligarh Muslim University, there was a gap of about sixty years. During this period the government was also wary of giving jobs to Muslims whom it held responsible for the events of 1857. Thus education and employment created a gulf between the two communities. As more and more people competed for government jobs, Hindus and Muslims could not but become aware of their separate identities and by the beginning of the 20th century, leaders of both communities began to take steps to safeguard the interests of their own people.
So it was that Sir Syed Ahmed Khan urged his people to keep off agitational politics that could make the administration suspect their loyalty. This gave the government a chance to play one community against the other. Lord Curzon, for instance, went out of his way to point out the advantages Muslims would have with the formation of the new state of East Bengal and Assam. "The province so created", declared the Viceroy in a speech in Dacca, "…would invest the Mohammedans in Eastern Bengal with a unity which they have not enjoyed since the days of the old Musalman Viceroys and Kings…"
Fuller who took over as the Lieutenant-Governor of the newly created East Bengal said with reference to the two sections of the population, Muslims and Hindus, that they were like his two queens, the first being the suo the favoured and the second the duo the neglected.
In 1906, a section of the Muslim community formed the Muslim League to safeguard what the organisers called the Muslim interest. While the Indian National Congress claimed to represent the people of India — Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and all — the Muslim League maintained that the league alone represented Muslim interests. While a few organizations claiming to represent the Hindus or Sikhs did come into existence none of them reached the level of importance of the Muslim League.
Thus, even as India was emerging as a nation at the beginning of this century, forces of disintegration were forming at the same time.