A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport (New and Updated Edition) by Ramachandra Guha

Author:Ramachandra Guha [Guha, Ramachandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Downloaded from GAPPAA.ORG
Published: 2015-03-03T18:30:00+00:00

IN THE THIRD WEEK of March 1940 the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress was held in Ramgarh, in Bihar. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was elected President. With the understanding that comes of years spent in the same prison cell, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of Azad that he was the very ‘soul of dignity and self-respect and restraint. There is not one atom of vulgarity in him.’18 The Maulana was a considerable scholar of Arabic and Persian, an author, a journalist, a devout Muslim and a life-long Congressman. His Presidential Address at Ramgarh has justly been called a ‘piece of magnificent eloquence’.19 It was ‘India’s historic destiny, said Azad, ‘that many human races and religions should flow to her, finding a home in her hospitable soil’. Having come here 1,100 years ago, ‘Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism.’ These centuries of shared history ‘have enriched India with our common achievements. Our languages, our poetry, our literature, our culture, our dress, our manners and customs, the innumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour.’ From this splendid syncretism of cultures only one political solution was possible. ‘These thousand years of our joint life has moulded us into a common nationality. . . . No fantasy or artificial scheming to separate and divide can break this unity.’20

The Congress session ended on 20 March. Two days later the Muslim League met at Lahore and passed a resolution envisaging independent, Muslim-majority states in the north-east and northwest. If and when India became free, the League argued, these states would have direct relations with the Crown. The Muslims, it was now being claimed, were not a minority, but a distinct nation of their own. And future political developments must reflect this.21 As the League’s President put it, with characteristic sarcasm, he wanted no part of a united India in which ‘brother Gandhi has three votes and I have only one’. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s view of ‘the problem in India’ was that it ‘is not of an intercommunal but manifestly of an international character’. It was a ‘dream that Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality. . . . The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literature. They neither intermarry, nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.’ Divergent cultures must necessarily mean separate states. ‘If the British Government are really in earnest and sincere to secure the peace and happiness of the people of this Subcontinent, the only course open to us all is to allow the major nations separate homelands, by dividing India into autonomous national States.’22

The Congress claimed that when the British finally went home they would leave behind a single, culturally cohesive nation. The Muslim League answered that within British India there were at least two nations-in-the-making; one Hindu, the other Muslim. The existence of the cricket Pentangular

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