Culture of Inequality: Changing Hindu-Muslim Relations in Maharashtra by Amod N Damle & Nilu H Damle

Author:Amod N Damle & Nilu H Damle [Damle, Amod N & Damle, Nilu H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780367819422
Google: wN38DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 53731407
Publisher: Routledge Chapman & Hall
Published: 2020-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Balance and rule

In The Indian Musalmans (1871), W.W. Hunter outlined how the policies adopted by the British led to the economic deterioration of the Muslims while allowing the Hindus to prosper. A member of the Indian Civil Service, Hunter was an assistant magistrate and the collector of the district of Birbhum in Bengal. Although Hunter believed that the Muslims considered it their duty to wage war against the Queen, he remained sympathetic to their grievances. Hunter noted that because of the dwindling employment opportunities under the British, the Muslims felt ignored and discriminated against, which nudged them toward religious militancy. Comparing Muslims with Hindus, Hunter identified the reluctance of the Muslims to avail of modern education as the root cause of their backwardness. He observed that the Bengali Muslims deserted government-run schools because such schools employed Hindu teachers, who taught in Bengali instead of Urdu or Arabic. Government-sponsored schools did not provide religious instruction. Neither did they teach Persian and Arabic. Hunter traced the bitterness between the Hindus and Muslims to the antagonism between their polytheistic and monotheistic faiths. Arguing that the Muslims were culturally different than the Hindus, Hunter proposed reforming the education system to serve the needs of the Muslims. The Indian Musalmans suggests that there was a growing awareness among the British of the dangers posed by the worsening condition of the Muslims.

In 1871, Lord Mayo, the fourth viceroy of India, proposed education reforms to attract Muslims into government schools. He believed that by receiving an excellent education, the Muslims could enjoy the same material and social benefits as the Hindus. After Mayo’s assassination, his successor, Northbrook, planned to create distinctive institutions for Muslim education. In 1873, the British administration of Bengal made provisions for reforming the Calcutta Madrasa and for creating new madrasas in Bengal (Ali, 1971).

In 1880, Prime Minister Gladstone appointed Lord Ripon as viceroy of India. Considered one of the most liberal administrators, Ripon attempted to establish local self-governance in India. By instituting self-governance, Ripon aimed at training the Indians to manage their own affairs. According to the reforms, the local municipal council members were to be elected by the people, not by the British government. The Hindus made up most of the population in Punjab, where they had grown wealthier than the Muslims because of their involvement in commerce and industry. As a result, following the Ripon reforms of 1882, Hindus scored significant victories in the municipal council elections in Punjab (Jaffrelot, 2015). In 1901, to prevent the balance of power from tipping in the Hindus’ favour, the British reserved 30 percent of government jobs for the Muslims. Additionally, the British introduced the Punjab Alienation of Land Act in Amritsar, Hoshiarpur, Multan, and Lahore to protect cultivators from predatory moneylending practices. The British wanted to protect the rural population of Punjab because Punjab was a significant source of army recruitment for the British. In Punjab, wealthy merchants had become moneylenders for the entire farming community. When the cultivators defaulted on their debts, their lands passed into the moneylenders’ hands (Chaudhary & Swamy, 2018).

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