Indian Secularism by Shabnum Tejani

Author:Shabnum Tejani [Tejani, Shabnum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2021-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

4

The Question of Muslim Autonomy

The Khilafat Movement and the Separation of Sind 1919–1932

As the First World War ended, rumours began to circulate in India that a harsh peace treaty was to be imposed on the defeated. Ottoman empire. If true, such a treaty would endanger the position of the sultan as the khalifa of Islam and the safety of Mecca and the other Holy Places, the Jazirat al-Arab. In 1919 Muslims mobilized in a broad-based popular campaign the likes of which had not been seen before in colonial India. The Khilafat movement aimed to pressurize the victorious Allies to retain intact the boundaries of the Ottoman empire as they had existed in 1914 and to preserve the position of the khalifa as the temporal head of the Islamic world. Mohandas Gandhi was quickly drawn to the movement. His experiences in South Africa had convinced him that a challenge to colonial rule could only succeed if it was based on Hindu–Muslim unity. By supporting the Muslims of India in their concerns for the Khilafat, Gandhi sought to demonstrate his loyalty—and by extension that of the rest of ‘Hindu’ India—to this ideal. In the aftermath of the war, Gandhi also altered the Congress’s structure and membership rules. He turned it from a debating society for the middle classes into an organization with committees in almost every district and the potential for building a mass following. Gandhi saw this as an opportune moment to undertake a parallel anti-colonial campaign. Thus, he gave his commitment to the movement to save the khalifa and launched another—non-violent Non-cooperation—alongside it.

The period 1919–22 is widely understood as the heyday of Hindu–Muslim unity in the anti-colonial movement.1 The leaderships of Congress and the Khilafat movement often overlapped. Strikes, demonstrations, and satyagrahas took place around the country, while ‘Hindu–Musalman ki jai’ (Long live Hindu–Muslim unity) became a familiar cry. Unity, however, was ephemeral. After 1922 a series of differences between the Khilafat and Non-cooperation leaderships intersected with growing popular conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities. Unity was shattered, giving way to a period of ‘communalism’. Scholarship on this period has tended to depict the demise of Hindu–Muslim unity as marking a turning point in the anti-colonial struggle. The bond of fraternity turned out to be an ad hoc coalition of interests with often markedly different aspirations.2 The conflicts had ‘revived old Hindu–Muslim antagonisms’,3 and ‘irrevocably violated’ the ‘Hindu–Muslim understanding’.4 For many, the unravelling of the Non-cooperation and Khilafat coalition reads as a milestone on the path to Partition.5

This chapter focuses on the Khilafat movement in Sind, the only Muslim-majority region in Bombay Presidency. It argues that to understand the end of the Khilafat and Non-cooperation movement as beginning the downward spiral of Hindu–Muslim relations is misleading. At its grassroots the Khilafat movement was made up of myriad alliances which were constantly shifting right from its inception. For some Muslims the movement was a pan-Islamic one whose goal was to retain the position of the Khilafat and the Sultan’s control over the Jazirat al-Arab.

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