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In the summer of 1857, the zamgarh1 Proclamation was issued in the midst of a regional nativist struggle against the East India Company now known as the Sepoy Mutiny. Though it was not an all-out war of independence as per the anachronistic application of nationalist mythology, the proclamation did intend to achieve a Mughal restoration. Allegedly issued by one of the grandsons of Bahadur Shah Zafar, it made a series of appeals, mainly fiscal and political, to rally support against the British for those who would heed their call to arms, while threatening those who refused to submit to their demands.2 Bahadur Shah was the symbol of their anti-British message, proclaimed as the Badshah-iHind3 (Emperor of India) when Sepoys had seized Delhi. Previous Mughal emperors, most notably in the period from Babur to Aurangzeb (1526-1707) had employed this title previous to the Sepoys conferment of this title, while the various monarchs of Britain from Queen Victoria until George VI would continue to use the honorific following it. Contrary to popular opinion, Hindustan and India are two disparate concepts the former constituting a Weberian community of sentiment4 that had many precursory and competing fluid identities in the pre-modern world and the latter a finite country with temporal boundaries, popular sovereignty, and all the trimmings of a modern nation-state.

Pronounced aa-zam-garh, as most appropriately indicates the equivalent for the Hindi vowel in (commonly spelled as Azamgarh in English). I would like to briefly discuss the usage of macron letters in this paper (e.g. ,,). While I employed these characters so as to emphasise a pronunciation of a word closer to that which is found in its language of origin (whether it is Sanskrit, Arabic, Farsi, Hindustani or any other language for that matter), it is very difficult to guarantee the uniform spelling of a particular word considering the immense variety of sources that have been used and the number of eras from which they date. For example, Hindustan can be rendered as Hindustan or Hindustn, and even as Hindostan. The intended meaning is, nevertheless, the same. I apologise if this has caused any confusion. 2 Embree, Ainslee Thomas, Stephen N. Hay, William Theodore De Bary. Sources of Indian Tradition. Volume Two: Modern India and Pakistan. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 177. 3 Hindustani / 4 Ray, Rajat Kanta. The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism. (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2003) ix.

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Hindustan is a more accommodating concept than India could ever be particularly in light of the 1947 partition of India along communal lines. Hindustan, as the Mughals had understood it, more accurately reflects the social, economic, and political demands of the people of South Asia. The great diversity of cultures, ethnicities languages, lifestyles, philosophies, and religions home to the Indian Subcontinent all help make Hindustan a more viable position, given that it can be embraced by the population as a whole, just as the mutineers had done with the term Hindus and Musulmans of Hindustan in 1857.5 In the last five centuries, Hindustan has had a number of differing connotations. The Mughal sovereign Akbars approach to Hindustan was one that was tolerant to all religions. Akbar and Aurangzeb were both Mughal emperors of Hindustan, but Aurangzeb was not as inclusive of Hindus as his great-grandfather had been. The Azamgarh Proclamation that sought to restore Bahadur Shah II to the Mughal Empires former glory follows Akbars model of Hindustan in its allusion to the Hindus and Muslims of Hindustan. Decades later, the Vinayak Damodar Savarkar that authored Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? in 1923 viewed Hindustan in a nationalist and communal light. Seeing Hindustan as the homeland of Hindus, Savarkar demanded that for one to be considered true Indian, a person must consider India as his motherland, fatherland, and holy land. How does this definition vary from all others? Aurangzeb levied the jizyah tax from Hindus, but he nevertheless considered them as both his fellow subjects and as people of Hindustan. What Savarkar has done is excluded Muslims from the concept of Hindustan by placing the requirement of punyabhm (Indias status as a holy land) upon them. There are a number of competing approaches to understanding the phenomena associated with the nation-states of the contemporary world. Among these approaches, I
5

Ibid, 546.

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will limit my discussion to only three of these prevailing views on nationalism: Benedict Andersons imagined communities theory, Ernest Gellners sociological necessity argument, and Max Webers communities of sentiment. Yet, even these theoreticians, are capable of admitting as Anderson does, Nation, nationality, nationalism all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone analyse. In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously.6 In other words, the challenge of explaining three of the most fundamental words associated with nation still proves to be a difficult one. An imagined community, as Benedict Anderson (b. 1936) defines his concept, is "an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."7 The imagined nature of this community does not entail its falsity, but this adjective is used because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the images of their communions.8 As a result, this community, while being real and extant, must use political and cultural institutions to imagine themselves as a coherent group of individuals by sharing a certain set of attitudes and belief systems. Without this creative employment of imagination, such a community would cease to be a nation, and the people within it would regard one another as strangers. Let us apply Andersons theory to a hypothetical example in India. Were it not for Indian nationalism, a group of booksellers in Patna would not be able to identify fishermen in Port Blair as fellow Indians. In a non-nationalist world, these two groups of people
6

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. (New York: Verso, 2003) 3. 7 Ibid, 6. 8 Ibid, 6.

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would consider each other as strangers. It is the Indian nation-state and the ideology of nationalism which has been able to tie such divergent groups such Biharis and the Andaman peoples together as Indians. Though the merchants in the kitab-khana in Patna Market have probably never been to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and will most likely never visit these islands, they know that these islands are a territory of the Republic of India, and will logically conclude that the inhabitants of these islands, whether aboriginal or settler, are Indians. Not only does Anderson argue that the nation is imagined, he asserts that it is limited and sovereign. To quote him, The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.9 India fits Andersons example precisely, as it has more than a billion citizens in its community. Nevertheless, there are boundaries that mark India from Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar. These boundaries may be disputed, but the L.O.C. is very different from the way the Mughal Empires frontier with the Safavid Empire operated. These frontiers were grey areas that were not clearly defined as belonging to one entity or the other. The nation is confined to operating within its own limits (from where it is imagined as being sovereign)10, unlike universalising concepts such as gender, class, and religion. While Anderson focused on the notion of imagined communities, Ernest Gellner (1925-95) was more concerned with the derivation of nationalism in cultural necessities.11 These necessities have their roots in the Industrial Revolution, which demanded a greater
9

Anderson, 7. Ibid, 7. 11 Ibid.

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degree of homogeneity in high culture.12 Furthermore, Gellner holds that, "nationalism is primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent."13 In the way Anderson explains how nationalism fills a niche in making strangers the members of a nation, Ernest Gellner points to how it meet the demands of an increasingly modern society. Several decades before Anderson and Gellner offered their contributions to contemporary discussions on nationalism, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) had offered his own definition of the nation, saying In so far as there is at all a common object lying behind the obviously ambiguous term nation it is apparently located in the field of politics. One might well define the concept of nation in the following way; a nation is a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest in a state of its own; hence, a nation is a community which normally tends to produce a state of its own. It is this understanding of the nation that has served as the inspiration for Rajat Kanta Rays The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism. Weber argues that before there was a nation, there was a community of sentiment.14 Ray identifies Hindustan as being that community of sentiment for Hindus and Muslims alike in a time before this term became communalised in the decades after the Sepoy Mutiny.15 A substantial portion of R.K. Rays book is devoted to the events of 1857 uprising. In one passage, he explains how At the instinctual level of the collective mentality, it was the violent protest of a black subject people against their white oppressorsIt was not, however, the rebels who put the struggle in terms of a war between the racesthough the mutinous crowds and sepoys gave went to the racial antipathy in word as well as deed, this was not the most typical expressions of they clothed the underlying race war in the ideological garb of a struggle
12 13

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) 105. ibid, 1. 14 Ray, ix. 15 ibid, ix.

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between the true religions and the false one. The joint brotherhood of the religions expressed, in so far as they were capable of expressing it, the instinctive feeling that the native subject expressed, in so far as they were capable of expressing it, the instinctive feeling that the native subject race constituted one people against the white Christian rulers.16 Therefore, the Hindus and Muslims of Hindustan rhetoric acts as a nativist precursor to Indian nationalism. It also represents Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khans Two-Nation Theory in one of its earliest phases, an idea that Ray ardently supports. However, this is a more inclusive version of the theory, closer to Khans articulation of it rather than Savarkars Hindutva ideology. Another work that would be extremely useful to our discussion is Partha Chatterjees The Nation and its Fragments. Chatterjees main objection with Benedict Anderson is that If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain modular forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?17 Thus, nationalists of Asia and Africa would have to resort to a fragmentary nationalism rather than a wholesale transfer of nationalist dogma. By adapting the European model to fit locally sourced ideological fragments, the Indian nation was conceived. I argue that Hindustan is one of the most prominent of these pre-national fragments. Not only was the European model modified for Indian consumption, the fragments themselves were modified for accommodation with nationalist theory. It is worth noting that some of these fragments fit better than their counterparts, while still other pieces were cast aside completely. As one of the fragmentary tools that Indian nationalists had at their disposal, the concept of Hindustan was transformed through use of the nationalist
16 17

Ibid, 357. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993) 5.

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imagination. For example, Hindustan became a limited, sovereign entity rather than the imperial domain of the Mughal Empire. Even though Hindustan became a synonym for the Republic of India in common parlance, it still could not emerge as the official name of India in the 1950 Constitution as a result of communalist connotations that became associated with it from the 1920s onward. To this day, Hindustan cannot be accommodated smoothly in discussions of Indian national identity because it is not simply the Indian nation itself, but a pre-national nomenclature that became one of the pieces in conceiving the Indian nation-state. Consequently, this is why Chatterjees fragmentary model best describes Hindustans complicated relation with Indian nationalism during the course of the 20th century. My paper is divided into three chapters. The first of these chapters discusses the concept of Hindustan in pre-modern and early modern India. In this section, I seek to investigate ancient, internally-ascribed nomenclatures for the land that later became known as Hindustan such as Bharatvarsh and Jambudvipa during antiquity, and demonstrate the changing contexts in which terms for outsiders such as yavana and mleccha were used. I will also discuss early Muslim encounters with Al-Hind and the circumstances in which Hindustan was used in the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire. This chapter argues that the coming of Islam consolidated Hindustan as a concept, and had gained such a degree of legitimacy as an idea that outlived the very existence of these two Islamicate regimes. By the close of this first chapter, I will introduce Hindustans relation to the postMughal states of the eighteenth century. This discussion will continue into the second chapter, with emphasis on their interactions of these states with the emerging East India Company regime. Other topics considered in the second chapter include the Sepoy Mutiny

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and the Bahadur Shah IIs identification as the Emperor of Hindustan, the Azamgarh Proclamation, Victorias proclamation as Empress of India at the Delhi Durbar of 1877, the emergence of modern Hinduism and the Indian nationalist and independence movement. By the end of this chapter, I seek to prove how Hindustan came to be understood in an increasingly communal light, whether it was used by the Muslim League or Hindu nationalist groups. My third and final chapter entails India as a present-day nation state from 15 August 1947 onward. Against the backdrop of Pakistan and later Bangladesh after 1947, I aim to compare and contrast India from its pre-modern counterpart Hindustan. I will investigate the use of this new Hindustan in Indian nationalist culture, specifically in Bollywood films, popular songs, and lay histories of the subcontinent. This closing chapter establishes Hindustans confinement to the Republic of India, while nevertheless asserting how the old Hindustan represents a powerful alternative to the Indian nation-state.

Chapter 1: Hindustn in Pre-Modern and Early Modern India

Sindhu and Hindu: Inception of Hindustn Hindustn literally means land18 of the Hindus. However, the definition of Hindus is not simple. Unlike Muslims who are defined by their submission19 to Allah, Christians in their relation to Christ, Buddhists to Buddha, and Jews to the tribe of Judah, Hindus constitute the only one of the five major religions of the world that has a distinct status based purely on geography, and an identity not entirely of their own choosing. Just
18

From Sanskrit stnam and Old Persian sthna, both of which mean place or where one stands. For details, consult Safire, William. The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time: Wit and Wisdom from the Popular On Language. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004) 218. 19 Arabic

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as Hindustn is home to Hindus, Hindus are in-turn defined by this geography. The word Hindu is derived from the Sanskrit Sindhu for the Indus River. Given that Sindhu was a foreign word to the neighbouring Persians who could not pronounce the s sound, it was rendered Hindu. According to Rajat Kanta Ray, An inscription of the Sassanid Emperor Shapur I, datable to 262 CE, refers to Hindustn, land of the Sindhu probably referring thereby to lower Indus country.20 This inscription constitutes the most primitive reference to Hindustn, almost one and three quarters of a millennium ago. In time, Hindu meant to include not only the river Indus but the people who lived around it. Purnic Places: Ancient Alternatives to Hindustn A similar though slightly older counterpart to the term Hindustn is Bhratvarsha. Prior to being known as Bhratavarsha, the subcontinent of India was known in Vedic texts as Himahavarsha or Haimavatavarsha.21 Before the 5th century, India was also occasionally known by its inhabitants as Magadh, given that this was the most powerful of the republics at the time.22 Yet another self-ascribed name for the region was the Kingdom of the Brahmanas, due to their influential role in the Aryanisation of the subcontinent.23 Hindustans Indus-centric nomenclature is analogous to how Mount Meru acted as the centre of Indian cosmology in antiquity. 24 Romila Thapar describes how this mythological mountain was surrounded by the four continents or dvipas, literally islands, separated by oceans. The southern continent was Jambudvipa (literally, the island of the rose-apple tree, and also

20 21

Ray, 55. Sagar, Krishna Chandra. Foreign Influence on Ancient India. (New Delhi, India: Northern Book Centre, 1992) 1. 22 Ibid, 2. 23 Ibid, 2. 24 Thapar, Romila. The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. (Penguin Academics: New Delhi, India, 2002) 38.

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referred to by the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka in his inscriptions) and within this, the area to the south of the Himalaya, was Bharavarsha, named after the ruler Bharata.25 While Jambudvipa referred to many areas which now fall within the nation-state of India (e.g. Magadh, Bengal, the Deccan), it was neither a country nor a political entity. If Jambudvipa was an ancient precursor to the Indian Subcontinent, then Bhratvarsha was a region within that subcontinent.26 The Bhratas, a legendary family the Mahabharata is eponymous for, hailed from what is now Haryna.27 Varsha refers to continents or realms in the Puranas, so it is synonymous with dvipa28. Furthermore, it is King Bharata, the son of Dushyanta in the Mahabharata, that Bharatavarsha (The Realm of Bhrat) is named after.29 It is worth noting here that the Indus River does not pass through Haryna, though this region is part of the Indo-Gangetic plain watered by the Yamuna River. Only after Hindustn began to connote broader swaths of land in the Indian subcontinent did Haryna become part of both Bhrata and Hindustn. Bhratvarsha came to include references to lands outside Haryna in much the same way that Hindustns meaning expanded beyond Sindh; the only difference is that Hindustn was an external label that evolved into an Indic form of identity while Bhratavarsha was internally applied within an Indic culture. The Purnas help elucidate the division of the world into different parts while complicating cartographies for this time in history with the proposition of various, often times conflicting cosmological schemes. While one scheme divided the world into four parts, another has determined that there are seven divisions of the world (Bhuvana), stipulating that
25 26

Ibid, 38-39. Ibid, 38-39. 27 Haryana. Microsoft Student 2009. [DVD]. (Redwood, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2009). 28 Dvipa is also used in the Puranic texts. 29 Sagar, 1.

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Jambudvipa is the first and foremost which is divided into nine sub-parts called varshas Of the nine Varshas, Ilvritta is the main sub-part. South of Ilvritta and beyond Himalayas is situated Bharatavarsha. Bharatavarsha is again subdivided into nine parts, viz. (1) Indravipa, (2) Kasaru (or Kaseruman), (3) Nmraparva (or Tmravarna or Tmpraparni or Tmradvipa), (4) Gabhistiman, (5) Ngadvipa, (6) Smya (or Krthhatia, (7) Gandharva or Sinhala (Ceylon), (8) Varuna, and (9) Kumrdvipa or Kumaridvipa. The last one is India proper. It is said to extend from Kumari (i.e. Kanykumri) in South to the source of the Gangas in the North. 30 Accordingly, it is Bharatvarsha that acts as the collection of many domains that are now considered as Indian or Indic in their geography. Bharatavarsha would also act as the domains of the emperor Bhrata, the son of Shakuntala in the famous play by Kalidsa. As a product of the Gupta Empire, the Bhratavarsha in the Abhijnakuntalam (Sanskrit Recognition of Shakuntala) also symbolically describes the imperial realms of this essentially segmentary state. The complexities of geography in the ancient world allowed for Bhrata to be substituted for Jambdvipa. J.B. Harley in his History of Cartography notes, There was a high degree of consensus to the names of the northern and southern dvipas (continents) Kuru or Uttarakuru and Jambdvipa (though Bharata was also often used for the latter) but the names of the eastern and western continents differed widely in the Hindu and Buddhist Traditions.31 In a scheme of four continents that represented the four different directs (north, south, east, and west) Jambudvipa or Bharata was the southern one. Centuries before the US State Department articulated the term South Asia, the Purnas described Bhrata as being a southern realm on their cosmological scheme of the world. What sets this scheme apart from many of its contemporaries is that it does not perceive distant realms as less glorious than their own revered home region (whether Jambudvipa or Bharatavara)As Eck observes as we move outward from Rose- Apple Island into the terra incognitae of the outer islands, the world is not imagined to be shadowy and dangerous, but on the contrary in more and more sublime. The outer islands

30 31

Ibid, 3. Harley, J.B. and Woodward, David. The History of Cartography, Volume 2, Book 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies. (New York: University of Chicago Press, 2002) 336.

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are not thought of as heavens, since the heavens rise in the vertical dimension of the Brahmanda, but life is idealised beyond the horizon.32 The implications of these fluid attitudes demonstrate how malleably the world could have been construed in the cartographies of the Purnic Era. Bharatavarsha might have been a holy land, a sacred land where pilgrimages brought various linguistic communities, but the domains of the earth were not juxtaposed against one another in a hierarchy, as they were in China with the ethnocentric notion of the land of Qin being a Middle Heaven. In other words, Indias holiness to the religious communities that were to be consolidated as Hindus in the 18th and 19th centuries did not take away from the sacred aura that other realms may have had. Bhrat, and not Jambdvipa, still continues to be used today by the Government of India as an official, self-ascribed name for the country. The Indian Constitution affirms India, that is Bharat, shall be a union of states.33 Unlike universalising forces such as religion, nationalism has confined the nation to the temporal borders of the nation-state. In Hindu mythology, it is perfectly acceptable to have the world divided into four and possibly seven parts, and for this name to be flexible. However, nationalism cannot afford to make that compromise or offer that flexibility, due to the temporal nature of this ideology. The Puranas, Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, and similar mythological books construe the world in terms of epic time, while nationalist mythology demands the use of novel time. Epic time features a phenomenon that Anderson calls simultaneity, where the past and is novel time occur at the same time.34 Novel time, on the other hand, is standardised, measured, and much more predictable. The random, unpredictable nature of epic time finds use in the stabilisation of the values of religious
32 33

Ibid, 336. Government of India. The Constitution of India. (New Delhi, India: Create Space, 2009) 2. 34 Anderson, 24.

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texts such as the Puranas, whereas the regulated nature of novel time allows it to be an indispensable source to the nation-state (with India being no exception). Even though the word Bhrat in the Devanagari script35 appears on all Indian stamps, coins, and banknotes, it is not the same Bhratvarsha of the Purnas. Insiders and Outsiders: Hindu, as Opposed to Yavana and Mleccha The term Hindu is a much newer term than yvana (literally Ionian) and mleccha (literally barbarian). Hindus did not refer to or even think of themselves as Hindus in antiquity.36 Of these three italicised words mentioned above, it is only the latter two terms that are mentioned in the Mhbhrata (even though the Mahabharata is presently identified as a Hindu text). While Hindustan was used by Persians to describe the peoples of first Sindh and eventually the larger Indian subcontinent in late antiquity, yavana and mleccha were used by Aryanised peoples against other ethno-linguistic groups. Thus, a collection of Brahmanical varnas and jtis that stretched from the Arabian Sea in the west to the Bay of Bengal in the east could not collectively figure themselves into one coherent unit, but they could contrast themselves against those they viewed to be inferior and less pure.37 This does not mean that Hindus thought of themselves as Hindustnis; but they were not mlecchas and not yavanas, while they relegated their own positive identities as a combination of this default system of nomenclature and their own locally based identities (e.g. Magadhas, Kosalas, Angas, Kurus, et cetera). The concept of the yavanas is not unique to India. The Sanskrit word Yavana is derived from Ionia, much in the same way as the Old Persian Yauna, Hebrew Yawan,
35 36

Hindi Ray, 55. 37 Ibid, 55.

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Arabic Yunan, and the Chinese Ye-me.38 Ionia constituted the central portion of the west coast of Asia Minor, acquiring its name from Greeks who had migrated from the Greek mainland to Anatolia at around 1000 BC.39 It took several centuries for Ionia to become an integral component of the Hellenic world, and Alexanders military campaigns were the catalyst for Ionian to become synonymous for Greek and the West to Arabs, Hebrews, Persians, Chinese, and Indians alike. Closely related to the term yavana is the label yona; the form word is Sanskritised version of the latter, which more directly resembles the original Greek. In a tablet from Girnar in what is now Gujarat, Antiochus I (r. 324-262 / 261 BCE) is described as Antiyako yona rjayaye vpi, in the context of raja Piyadasi (now known to be Asoka the Great).40 An 1838 issue of the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India observes that the principal fact which arrests attention in this very curious proclamation, is it allusion to ANTIOCHUS, the Yona (Sanskrit Yavana) or Greek, kingAnd were there still any doubt at all in my mind, it would be replaced by the testimony of the Cuttack version, which introduces between Antiyake and Yona the word nma making the precise sense the Yona raja by name Antiochus.41 It is logical for Antiochus, the son of Seleucus I and a contemporary of Asoka (r. 269-232 BCE) to be referred to as a yona raja or Ionian king, if Yona is substituted for Greek or foreigners. While the Macedonians were never regarded as genuine Hellenes by the ancient Greeks however much they might have intermarried with Greek colonists,42 by Antiochus time, Macedonian dynasties such as the Seleucids played a prominent role in the proliferation of Hellenistic civilisation. Thus, Antiochus who would have otherwise
38 39

Ball, Warwick. Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire. (New York: Routlege, 2001) 126. Sacks, et al. A Dictionary of the Ancient World.. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 144. 40 Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China, and Australasia. Vol. XXVII New Series. September December 1838. (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co, 1838) 208. 41 Ibid, 209. 42 Harrison, James Albert. The Story of Greece. (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1892) 486.

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been called a barbarian by the Greek had he lived a few decades earlier, is being identified as an Ionian, as a Greek in Mauryan pillars due to Alexanders cataclysmic conquests in the late 4th century before the Common Era. Greeks were not the only ones to apply labels such as barbaros, the word that became the basis for the English noun barbarian. The Sanskrit equivalent of barbaros was mleccha. Mleccha was used by Aryans to refer to the uncouth, incomprehensible speech they heard places beyond the Hindu Kush43; this is very similar to the Greek impression of non-Greeks: all that could be heard from the barbaros were the sounds barbar-bar because they were not applying what they saw as the proper sounds of the Greek language.44 At the same time, the Aryanised elites began to speak Sanskrit according the rules perfected by the grammarian Panini (c. 400 BCE). These elites regarded their language as sasktabh (literally refined speech), which was spoken during the late ancient and early medieval periods.45 As people who did not speak according to the tenets of Sanskrits refined speech, the mlecchas of Northwestern India were seen as ritually impure and people who had no place within the caste system.46 With the arrival of Islam on to the Indian scene, the expression mleccha increasingly referred to Muslims.47 In a much later context, yavana continued to be used in the Satya Pir texts of Bengal.48 In the same way that Satya Pir has been labelled as syncretic,49 yavana is
43

Hoiberg, Dale and Ramchandani, Indu. Students Britannica India, Volume 1-5. Volume 4: Miraj to Shastri. (New Delhi, India: Enyclopaedia Britannica (India) Private Limited) 8. 44 Herodotus and Grene, David, trans. The History. (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) 35 45 Ali, Daud. Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 172. 46 Hoiberg and Ramchandani, 8. 47 Gilmartin, David and Bruce B. Lawrence. Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Identities in Islamicate South Asia. (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 2000) 31. 48 Ibid, 31. 49 To call Satya Pir a syncretic phenomenon would be an overstatement, though Given the ambiguity of this double reading (between Vishnu and Allah), it is easy to see why this tradition is given the label of syncretic. Consistently through the more than two hundred pages of this text describing scores of

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translated from these texts as Muslim.50 Considering that Islam emerged out of Arabia in the years following the Prophet Muhammads death in 632, and that Arabia is west of India (much in the same way that Ionia is west of India, though not as far), it is understandable why yavana is translated as such. Nevertheless, yavana is a non-specific term that operates on the controlling premise that someone whose ways are not of the traditional Hindu (the term is occasionally used adjectivally, but never nominally) has taken control of the countryside, and that in itself poses a threat to the stability of a common brahmanical culture, especially in the unsettled reaches of Bengal.51 Thus, it is not the Hindu that is being juxtaposed against the Muslim as Orientalists and religious nationalists might otherwise interpret; it is the Brahmanic Bengalis that are contrasted against non-Brahmanical foreigners. For these foreigners to be Muslims is merely coincidental. From Hindustan of the Sassanians to Al-Hind of the Saracens When the first inscriptions referring to land known as Hindustan were produced in 262 CE, the land now known as Iran in modern parlance, from where Shapur I (r. 240 / 42 270/72) administered the Sassanian Empire, was called Persia. A relatively new yet significant influence in Persian society at the time was the establishment of Zoroastrianism as the official religion of the state, under Shapurs father Ardashir.52 Just four years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, his second successor, the caliph Umar set his eyes on conquering the region they knew as Fars.53 Persia, the home of several of the major
adventures, Satya Pir demonstrates an Islamic orientation towards divinity and world powerhe is intent on establishing that in the world (Gilmartin, 31). With Satya meaning truth in Sanskrit and pr the equivalent of guide Farsi, it also becomes easy to oversimiplify Satya Pir as the mixing of Hinduism and Islam. The problem that this assertion creates is it essentialise these two religions in a time where identities were still more fluid than they are today. 50 Ibid, 31. 51 Ibid, 31. 52 Persia." Microsoft Student 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008. 53 The Arabs could not pronounce the sound that is endemic to the letter p, and in this particular case the f sound was substituted for it. By the time that Persian began to be written in the Arabic alphabet, the letter was added for this sound, where it remained the basis for Farsi, Kashmiri, Urdu, and a host of other languages today.

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empires in antiquity, was now a part of an Arabian Muslim empire, based first in Madnah, then in Kufa, but by the time of the Umayyad sultans, it was centred in Damascus in what is now Syria. In Islamicate Persia, Zoroastrianism went from being the state-sponsored religion in the early seventh century with a prevalent majority to retaining a scant minority as opposed to a predominantly Muslim population by the advent of the second millennium of the Common Era (the mass conversion of Persians towards the Shia persuasion did not occur until the emergence of the Safavids slightly more than five centuries later); many Zoroastrians even fled to India, where the live today, primarily in Bombay. Nevertheless, Zoroastrianism, like Judaism, Christianity, and Sabeanism was regarded to be a scriptural religion, and its adherents like those of the three religions were regarded as People of the Book, that were entitled to a dhimmi (protected) status so long as they paid the jizyah and abided by the Pact of Umar. What did all these monumental changes in the socio-political landscape entail for the Subcontinent directly? While being a dhimmi offered the chance to retain Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian beliefs under the Islamic state, pagan religions (which would include the Brahmanical systems of India now understood as Hinduism) faced in theory a much harsher set of choices when their homes fell now within the realm of a man who was seen to be Gods vicegerent on Earth, the caliph: conversion or death.54 India however remained blissfully ignorant of these new realities that were created for such peoples as the Persians, Egyptians, Levantines, and Berbers. The subcontinent, at least theoretically from point of view of the Orthodox ulama, was part of the Dar al-Harb (the Abode of War, which represented lands waiting to be brought under the realm of the caliph and the Islamic sharah) while Persia had already been brought under the mantle of
54

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 105.

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Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam. Within this expansive house, however, regional concerns continued to dominate. While the concept of an ummah (the Islamic community) has been around since the classical period of Islam, Pan-Islamism is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even though India was part of a theoretical Abode of War, this did not mean that there were constant incursions into the land known as Al-Hind. There were, however, attempts very early on by Muslim sovereigns to acquire lands in India. Umars successor, Uthman55 (r. 644-56), was the first such person to take on this venture, as documented in the Futuhu-l Buldan of Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Jabir al-Biladuri: When Usman, son of Akkan [sic] became Khalif, he appointed Abdullah son of Kuraiz, to (the government of) Irk, and wrote to him an order to send a person to the confines of Hind in order to a send a person to the confines of Hind in order to acquire to knowledge and bring back information. He accordingly deputed Hakim, son of Jaballa al Abdi.56 Hakim ibn Jaballah al-Abdi was essentially a spy sent from Iraq to report on the conditions on India. Uthman needed logistical information from this jsoos in order to determine on whether Hind was ripe for plunder, conquest, and incorporation into his caliphate. As for when Hakim came back from Hind, he was sent to the Khalif, who questioned him about the state of those regions. He replied that he knew them because he examined them. The caliph then told him to describe them. He said Water is scarce, the fruits are poor, and the robbers are bold; if few troops are sent there will be slain, if many, they will starve. Usman asked him whether he

55

Arabic .This word is pronounced as Uthman in the original Arabic. The ,despite having a sound that lies somewhere th and s can be rendered as both th and s, particularly in transliterating from languages such as Persian and Turkish, and subsequently Hindustani (Hindi / Urdu) which adapted the s pronunciation from Farsi in more modern times. To illustrate my point, in Farsi and Hindustani, his name is Usman, while in Turkish it is pronounced Osman (because the has been rendered as o rather than a guttural u. Please note the Uthman, Uthman, Othman, Osman, and Usman can be used interchangeably when drawing from various sources from various time periods, and that all these transliterations refer to the third Sunni caliph unless otherwise noted. 56 Elliot, Sir Henry Miers. The History of India, As Told by Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period. (London: Trber and Co., 1867) 116.

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spoke accurately or hyperbolically [Lit. in rhyme]. He said that he spoke according to his knowledge. The Khalif abstained from sending any expedition there.57 The dismal report maintained the status quo by effectively keeping India out of the caliphate. Hind is conceived as a land of bandits and highwaymen with inadequate crops to maintain efficient supply lines for the caliphs army, and while this may be true of the northwest frontiers of Hindustan, it does not consider the interior. Hakims description used such profoundly negative terms that even his master Uthman had to confirm whether or not this was an exaggeration. To the spy, it was not, and while Uthman accepted this survey of Indias state, present-day historians beg to differ. R.K. Ray argues that The spy maintainedhard fact. He was of course unaware at the time of a vast subcontinent watered by perennial rivers. 58 Noting that the Usman ibn Affans spy was impervious to the complexities of Indias geography, Ray observes how it would take another seven centuries for Islam as a political power to reach the Ganges delta.59 While the chronological gap between Hakims audience with the Ameer ulMumineen60 on the conditions present in Hind and the eventual Islamic incursions into the Gangetic valley is a long one that spans hundreds of years, Muslims were making considerable inroads into the north-western most part of South Asia by the close of the seventh century. Only a few decades after the Islamic calendar began with Muhammads hijrah from Mecca to Madinah in 622, Arabs faced some of their strongest resistance to date in the region known as eastern Sistan (arguably the most difficult portion of the Sassanian domains to absorb into the caliphate), where the Afghan provinces Helmand and

57 58

Ibid, 116. Ray, 75. 59 Ibid, 75. 60 Arabic . Literally meaning Commander of the Faithful, and in this case, this phrase refers to Usman ibn Affan

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Qandahr lie today.61 Hugh Kennedy describes the implications of the Muslim experience with people of this region, who were neither Zoroastrian nor Buddhist but worshippers of a god named Zn (probably an adaptation of Shiva, as the Italian Orientalist Guiseppe Tucci has suggested62): A Muslim force had raided the area as early as 653-4, when the Arab commander had allegedly poured scorn on the image of the god, breaking off one of his arms and taking out his eyes. He returned them to the local governor, saying that he had wished to show only that the idol had no power for good or evil. The god, however, survived this insult and was still venerated in the eleventh century, symbolizing the fierce resistance of the people of these barren hills to outside interference. The early Muslims were well aware that this area was a potential route to India, with all its riches, but the Zunbls and their relatives, the Kabulshhs of Kabul and their people, mounted a spirited and long-lasting resistance to the Arabs, making it impossible for Muslim armies to reach northern India.63 Thus, while Hakims faulty intelligence on Hind may have discouraged a Muslim invasion into Hindustan, the Zun-worshippers of southwest Afghanistan physically stopped such a foray from taking place. Only three years after the Arabs began fighting the Zunbls along the Helmand River, the Fitna64 broke out in the Islamic heartlands. The immediate catalyst for this revolt was the assassination of Usmn, and what it essentially entailed was a struggle over his succession. Nevertheless, the relative stability of the Islamic lands in the late 7th and early 8th centuries allowed for increased expansion along the frontier, which included Hindustan. By the time of Muhammad bin Qasim, who in 711 conquered Sind, the Umayyads had taken over the lower Indus valley.65 Ibn Qsim, a distinguished Arab general, was nephew
61

Kennedy, Hugh. The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In. (New York: Da Capo Press, 2007) 195.

62

Wink, Andre. Al-Hind: Al-Hind, the Making of the Indo-Islamic World: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam 7th -11th Centuries. (New York: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002) 118. 63 Kennedy, 195. 64 Arabic ,this comes from the word for purification from iron ore. That is why theological discourse of fitna refers to a trial by faith that has similar etymological derivation to trial by fire. What the Fitna in this historical context refers to the First Islamic War (665-661), though in religious circles, it is simultaneously considered a trial of faith, since it acted as a test of Islamic unity. 65 Kennedy, 307.

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of Al-Hajjj b. Yusuf, the first Umayyad governor to preside over both the Arab and Ajami66 portions of what once was the Sassanian Empire. To reiterate, Hindustn, which in 262 meant Sind for the Sassanians, had fallen into Saracen hands. This still does not explain why the Arabs had gone any further into Hind. Hugh Kennedy maintains: The area from Multn south to the mouth of the river was to be the limits of Muslim settlement on the Indian subcontinent. It was separated from the rest of India (Hind) by the deserts that now divide Pakistan from India to the east of the Indus. The north of Multn, the Punjab was outside Muslim control until the early eleventh century, when the Ghaznavids from eastern Afghanistan extended Muslim rule further to the north and east.67 Checked by the Zunbils and Rajputs in what are now Afghanistn and Rajasthn respectively, it was difficult from the Arabs to advance beyond their existing holdings on the frontiers of Hind. Though Muhammad ibn Qasim has been portrayed in a polemical fashion by Hindus and Muslims alike, it is worth noting that Ibn Qasim was no mindless butcher. When he was disgraced and removed following the death of his patron al-Hajjaj, it may well be that the people of Hind wept,68 considering that Hindu and Buddhists establishments were respected as if they were the churches of the Christians, the synagogues of the Jews or the fire temples of the Magians [Zoroastrians] and the even though the jizya, the standard poll-tax on all infidels was imposed yet brahmans and Buddhist monks were allowed to collect alms, and temples to received donations.69 Qasims legacy in the Sindh reflects the incorporation of Hindus within the realms of dhimmi status. Not only does this illustrate a more tolerant side of the Umayyad conqueror, but it also shows how fluid the category of dhimmi could become, particularly in the land of Hindustan. Moreover, it was the exposure of Muslims to Buddhists and Hindus in places

66 67

Arabic meaning non-Arab Kennedy, 307 68 Keay, John. India: A History. (New York: Grove Press, 2001) 185. 69 Ibid, 185.

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such as Brahmanabad that allowed for more a pragmatic application of theology to include adherents of these Dharmic faiths within the framework of the Islamic state.70 Terror, Travels, and Trading in Al-Hind Over the next three centuries after the Muslim conquest of Khorasan, Afghanistan went under an immense transformation, in which Buddhism and Zunbilism were replaced by Islam as the majority religion of the Afghans. While Islam proliferated socially and politically, Hindu kings in Afghanistan began to withdraw further into the Indian Subcontinent. Andr Wink observes that The Hindu Shahis, having thus been pushed eastward from Kabul to the Panjab by the Hindus, could still reassert themselves as the greatest of the kings of Hind.71 Despite the fact that the Kbulshhs were now founding themselves off the frontier of Hindustan, they were drawing themselves into the interior of Hind rather than being pushed out of it. Kabul was a frontier of Hind, but the Indus River Valley was the core. Accordingly, a seemingly obvious military disadvantage such as retreat can be converted into a boastful moniker that tactfully pronounces ones identity. Essentially, the coming of Islam was the determining factor in the consolidation of a Hindustani geography. Long gone were the days of Arab conquest. From now, it would be Turkic Muslims that would bring the Islamic religion into the interior of the Indian Subcontinent.72 Unlike the Umayyads, who ran their capital from Damascus, the Abbasids were more easternoriented and administered their empire from Baghdad. The latter caliphate became increasingly reliant on strong Turkish tribesman, the majority of which had embraced the
70 71

Kennedy, 306. Wink, Andr. 126. Al-Hind: Early Medieval Indi and the Expansion of Islam, 7th 11th Centuries. (New York: Brill Academic Publications, 2002) 126.. 72 Oldenburg, Philip. India: History. Microsoft Student 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008

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shahdah, who would be responsible for protecting it against rebellion.73 Within a matter of time, as the caliphs of Baghdad grew ever the more dissolute, these Turks began to reverse the relations with their Arab masters. In 962, while the Seljuqs were still emerging in the Middle East, a new Turkic state had formed in Afghanistan: Ghazni.74 Ghazni was the region from where the Kushnas had ruled from the first century until about 230 after Christ. Like the Kushnas, the Ghaznavids were Central Asian warriors with an appetite for loot and plunder. However, Mahmud of Ghazni, the most powerful of the Ghaznavid kings, did not come to India to stay. Though he raided as far east as present-day Uttar Pradesh, the only territory he attempted to administer was the western Punjab, which he formally annexed before dying in 1030.75 On his military expeditions into Hindustan, the great Muslim intellectual Al-Biruni (973-1050) wrote a scathing account: Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country [Hind] and performed these wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all dimensions and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate hatred towards all Muslims. This is the reason, too, why Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us and have fled to places which our hand cannot yet reach, to Kashmir, Benares, and other places. And there the antagonism between them and all foreigners receives more and more nourishment from both from political and religious sources.76 Al-Birunis statement about the hatred of Muslims needs to be questioned, however. In fact, most Indian records refer to the Turk, rather than the Muslim, as the Other of the Hindu. The Ghazni Empire crumbled a little more than a century after Mahmuds death;

73 74

Adler, et al. World Civilisations: Volume I: To 1700. (New York: Wadswort Publishing, 2007) 200. Duiker, et al. World History to 1500. (Wadsworth, Cengage Learning: Boston, 2010) 251. 75 Oldenburg, Philip. India: History. 76 Embree, Ainslee T. Sources of Indian Tradition. Volume One: From the Beginning to 1800. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 438.

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the very capital that Mahmud Ghaznavi so meticulously built up with Hindustani loot was destroyed by Afghan tribal warfare.77 In 1175, one of the successors to the now dismembered Ghaznavid Empire, Muhammad of Ghur, began his own series of raids into and northern India. As opposed to Mahmud, Shihabuddin Muhammad Ghori had come to conquer and not simply to plunder.78 For the next eleven years, Ghori overran Sind and Punjab, though he was unable to subdue Gujart.79 Muhammad left his territories in Hindustan in charge of his obedient slave and friend Qutubuddin Aibak, who went on to establish the Delhi Sultanate in 1206.80 More than a century after Qutubuddin Aibak had passed away, it was the sultan (Muhammad bin Tughlaq)81 in Delhi who the legendary explorer Ibn Battuta82 (1304-69) in his Rihlah (Travels) called the Emperor of Hindustan.83 The Bdshah-e-Hindustan thus has its earliest roots in the principal Muslim state in early medieval India: the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). In an age well before nationalism and the nation-state, Delhi was identified not only as a part of Hindustan, but as its political locus. Ibn Battuta makes constant reference to a land he calls Hindustan, not only with sovereigns such as the sultan of Delhi, but people, languages, trees, and almost anything a country can be identified with in an age prior to modernity. His usage of the term
77 78

Oldenburg, Philip. India: History. Ibid. 79 Muhammad of Ghor. Microsoft Student 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008 80 Chopra, et al. A Comprehensive History of Medieval India: Part II. Translated and Edited by Rev. Samuel Lee (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2003) 16. 81 Ibn Battuta identifies him as Muhammad Shah, which was Tughlaqs official title as sultan. Muhammad Shah I, who reigned from 1325 to 1351, is the only ruler of the Delhi Sultanate to match the descriptions provided in the Rihlahs chapter on Hindustan. This monarch was the first of the Tughlaqs, the third major dynasty that assumed power over the Delhi Sultanate (the first two being the Mamluks, of which Qutubuddin Aibak hailed from, and the Khiljis). 82 Also spelled Ibn Batttah. In the original Arabic, 83 Ibn Battuta. The Travels of Ibn Battuta in the Near East, Asia, and Africa. (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 2003) 101.

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demonstrates that use of the word had become common by the time of the Moroccan travellers adventures (1325-54). He not only reflected on Indias contemporary situation, but also sought to legitimise his positions by referring to what he considered the history of Hindustan. This history was found in collections of the utterances of Prophet Muhammad (the hadth84), which by Battutas time had been compiled and collected voluminously in places as far in between as Cairo, Damascus, and Bukhara. Alluding to the past, the medieval Muslim explorer reports how Even before the rise of Islam the prophet Sulaymn... [came] to a mountain in Sind from where he could view India but was intimidated by its darkness and turned his back on it. It is said that the prophet Sulaymn ascended this mountain and from its summit looked down on al-Hind which was then in darkness (fa nazar il ar al-hind wa hya mazlama). He went back without entering the country, and the mountain was named after him.85 Andr Wink astutely sees how this passage reflects that Muslims throughout the Indian subcontinent tend to relate Indian Islam to the very beginnings of Indian history, and in the hadth collections the prophet Muhammad himself is credited with aspiration of conquering India.86 Whether or not the Islamic prophet Sulaymn (Solomon) had been to Sind is clearly beyond the point. The imagery of darkness reflects jahiliya (the ignorance that Muslims associated with pre-Islamic Arabia), and it is contrasted against the light of Islam. The Islamic heartlands are portrayed in terms of being bright in the most spiritual of senses, while Al-Hind is awaiting what men like Ibn Battuta viewed as the inevitable enlightenment of Islam by the conquest. To have Sulayman rather than Muhammad in this narration makes this argument stronger and more plausible (given that Muhammad is not known to have visited India in his lifetime), because the Islamic theological understanding
84

The saying, action, or tacit approval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Using the Arabic script, this word is spelled . While in Arabic it is pronounced hadith, in Farsi, Turkish, and Urdu (among many other languages, particularly the ones used in South Asia), this word is rendered hadees, as it contains the same discussed in footnote 61. Thus, for the purposes of this paper, hadith and hadees will be used interchangeably. 85 Wink, Al-Hind: Volume 1, 193. 86 Ibid, 192-93.

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of men known as prophets87 entails that all these disciples of God are Muslims88. To reiterate, the geography of Hindustan and the narrative of Islam had become mutually integrated. For a Muslim who lived more than millennium and a half prior to Muhammads prophethood to have been reported to have visited the frontier of Al-Hind, further legitimised in the minds of their fellow co-religionists, Battuta included, actions such as Muhammad ibn Qasims conquest of Sind, Mahmud Ghaznavis plundering of the temple at Somnath, and Qutubuddin Aibaks election as sultan by his Turkic noble comrades in Delhi. Hadees like these did not only legitimised conquest, but conversion as well. The growing number of Indian Muslims would have a stronger claim to a higher social status (whether working as merchants, zamindars, ulema, political potentates, or any other field for that matter) considering that their embracing of the kalimah was prophesised by none other than Muhammad himself, and even by Solomon before him. Hindustan was not only a land where religious identities were being transferred and gradually solidified; it was a place where commercial commodities were exchanged at the same time. Moreover, the trade of material goods acted as a venue for the spread of Islam, particularly south of the Deccan on the Malabar Coast. Considering that Kerala was home to the oldest Muslim community in South Asia, dating as far back as the seventh century,89 it is worth noting that Specific regions brought forth some of the most illustrious merchant families active in the Indian Ocean, as well as successfully exporting their distinct strands of

87 88

Arabic Esposito, John L. What Everybody Needs to Know about Islam. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 12. 89 Qureshi, M. Naeem. Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918-1924. (New York: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999) 445.

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Sufism. The Hadhramaut region of the Yemen, for instance, has a particularly strong association with the mercantile and religious activities in Malabar as well as insular Southeast Asia.90 Furthermore the inhabitants of the Malabar region who adopted the Islamic creed, known as Mappilas, had little in common with their co-religionists to the north. More closely associated with the trading patterns of the Indian Ocean basin, the Mapillas embraced the Shafii jurisdiction of Islam (which is also practised in Yemen, Somalia, the Maldives, in Malaysia, and the Indonesian archipelago), unlike the predominantly Hanafi regions that lay to the north of the Deccan Plateau.91 Nevertheless, the Malabar Coast was part of AlHind, as identified by the Akhbar al-Sin wal-Hind from the mid-9th century.92 Bazaar and bhakti93 went hand in hand, as the buying and selling of material goods also became a place to import and export forms of religious devotion. Offering food for the stomach and the soul alike, there was a sufficient amount of space left for accommodation of pre-Islamic practises, such as matrilineal nomenclature, which is generally more popular within the traditional Dravidian community.94 Even though the Mapillas were among the first peoples of the Indian subcontinent to adopt Islam, Andr Winks writes how It seems to have taken several centuries before these coastal Muslims emerged from their obscure conditions and superseded the Jewish and Christian groups which in some areas, like Malabar, had played comparable roles in overseas trade.95 Moreover, only after seven centuries of evolution of this complex maritime society did Ibn Battuta become the first person able to document the far-flung Muslim culture of the coastal regions of al-Hind rigorously.96
90

Feener, R. Michael and Terenjit Sevea. Islamic Connections: Muslims Societies in South and Southeast Asia. (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009) 37. 91 Wink, Al-Hind: Volume 1, 69-70. 92 Feener and Sevea, 29. 93 In the generic sense. 94 Feener and Sevea, 36. 95 Wink, Al-Hind: Volume 2, 268 96 Ibid, 268.

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While the Muslim population in the Indian subcontinent was burgeoning in this period, whether in the Indo-Gangetic plains of the north or the trading posts of the Deccan, the domain of Hindustan was itself expanding. By the early thirteenth century, Orissa had become so well integrated into the neighbouring region of Bengals economy (and the geographical classification of Hindustan by implication) that its ruler was considered to be the most powerful of the rais of Hindustan.97 If Hindustan meant Sind in the mid 3rd century for the Sassanids, it had now grown to include much of the present day nation-state of India, including the Deccan Plateau, Eastern and Western Ghats, and the Malabar Coast. The centre of Hindustan had shifted east from the Indus River to Delhi with the emergence of the Delhi Sultanate as a regional power, and with it, the expansion of the Delhi Sultanate allowed for the territorial growth of Hindustan. While the Mamluks, the first major dynasty of the Delhi sultanate remained confined to the north, it was the Khilji dynasty (1290-1320) that proceeded with the extension of this political entity across the most of the subcontinent.98 The decision by Muhammad Tughlaq to move his capital from Delhi to the more centrally located Daulatabad (which lies in what is now Maharashtra) in an effort to assert a more permanent rule over his southern lands illustrates how the concept of Hindustan so powerfully permeated the interior.99 The sultans city of wealth, however, was not to be as Tughlaq met a series of challenges from the amirs of the Deccan, who revolted in 1341 while an outbreak of cholera or perhaps smallpox consumed the southern peninsula100. Daulatabad itself was to be incorporated into the Bahmani and eventually the Bijapur
97 98

Ibid, 262. Delhi Sultanate Microsoft Student 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008. 99 Oldenburg, Philip. India: History. 100 Haig, Sir Thomas Wolesley. Historic Landmarks of the Deccan. (Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1907) 29.

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Sultanates. Nevertheless, simply because Hindustan expanded with the growth of Delhi Sultanate did not mean that Hindustans realms shrank with territorial decline of Delhis hukmat101 during the latter Tughluqs (who had to bear with the 1398 sacking of Delhi by Timur-e-lang102), the Sayyids, and Lodis. In addition to the Bahmanis, Bengal, Gujarat, and Vijayanagar103 emerged as breakaway successor states, independent of Delhi as sovereigns in their own right. The founders of the Vijayanagar Empire, Harihara and Bukka, sometimes presented their regime as an extension of the Delhi Sultanate, and thus of Hindustan. Political actors such as Harihara and Bukka not only prolonged the concept of Hindustan beyond its core in the north, but enhanced it as well, setting the stage for the Hindustan of the Mughal Empire. The Bburnma and the Beginnings of Mughal Hindustn The emperor Bbur (r. 1526-30) was the first of the Timurid dynasts to reign in India. Descended from Timur-e-lang on his fathers side and Chengez Khan on his mothers, he established what is popularly known as the Mughal Empire.104 As interesting as Baburs origins are, his three arguably most momentous legacies105 the Mughal Empire (lasting for almost two centuries until the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 as a viable political entity, and for another century and half, as an enduring fiction that coped with the rise of
101 102

Rule Also known as Tamerlane 103 Though Vijayanagar was ruled by Hindu rajas who broke off from the Muslim-ruled Delhi sultanate, the communal treatment of this phenomenon does not do justice to the historical realities of the period. The establishment of Vijayanagar in 1336, is somewhat comparable to the Khusra Khan episode some sixteen years earlier, in that it has been given an overly religious colouring and mishandles contemporary sources such as the Tughlaq-nama, and the Tarikh Firuz Shahi. Thomas Hardy identifies this Orientalist-driven contention as follows: Islam was in danger in Hindustan from a resurgent Hindu rj. For a more extensive discussion on the reign of terror that took place in 1320, please see Hardy, Thomas. Historians of Medieval India. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenow , 1982) 125-26. 104 In present-day Farsi, Mongolia is known as . Literally, this means land of the Mongols, even though the Moghulistan of Baburs time it referred to areas further west of modern Mongolia, particularly Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang. 105 Rushdie, Salman, introduction to The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur Prince, and Emperor. (New York: Random House, Inc., 2002) vii.

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post-Mughal states and the East India Companys stranglehold over Hindustan), the Bbr Masjid in Ayodhya (demolished in on 6 December 1992 by Hindu nationalists in one of the great crises of modern India), and the Bburnma,106 which has enchanted readers to this day with its account of his life as a warrior-prince in Central Asia and Afghanistan and emperor in Hindustn. In all fairness, Baburs treatment of Hindustn in the Baburnama is a mixed one. Babur was shocked with what he saw as extreme disparities from Kbul: Hindustan lies in the first, second, and third climes, with none of it in the fourth clime. It is a strange country. Compared to ours, it is another world. Its mountains, forests, and wildernesses, its village and provinces, animals and plants, peoples and languages, even its rain and winds are altogether different107 For the person who established the empire which was most successfully able to manipulate the concept of Hindustn to its advantage, Babur demonstrates that while he could be an effective ruler of Hindustn, he was not from Hindustn, which was literally alien to him.

From Akbar to Aurangzeb: the Apogee of Mughal Hindustn It is Baburs grandson Akbar (r. 1556-1605) that is often regarded as the true founder of the Mughal Empire.108 In fact, Akbar is the most illustrious of the Mughal kings in that he is the real conqueror of Hindustan.109 Through an astute combination of tolerance, generosity and force, Akbar was able to win the allegiance of the Rjpts and assert hegemony over the entirety of North India.110 Not only would he wed two Rajput
106

Rushdie refers to the three best things that Babur is remembered for. To the novelist, they are (1) the story of Baburs death, (2) the Babri Masjid, and (3) the Baburnama. 107 Babur, Emperor of Hindustan. The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur Prince, and Emperor. (New York: Random House, Inc., 2002) 332. 108 Oldenburg, Philip. India: History. 109 Agrawal, Ashwini. Studies in Mughal History. (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983) 29. 110 Akbar. Microsoft Student 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008.

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princesses, but he also pioneered a new faith known as Din-Ilahi (the Divine Faith) by marrying Islam with Brahmanism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism.111 As a religion, DiniIlahi was an outright failure, winning few notable converts beyond the sovereign and his devoted servant Abul-Fazl (1551-1602), but it represented how willing Akbar was to commit himself to intellectual experimentation as emperor of Hindustan. Furthermore, DinIlahi was much more successful in its assertion of the semi- divine nature of the Mughal monarch, which, like the word Hindustan itself, was a concept pioneered by the Persians.112 What the Mughals were able to do is take these two initially foreign concepts and adapt them so brilliantly to India that Hindustan became a self-ascribed label and the Persian model of kingship became an Indian one. Abul Fazls articulation of this theory of kingship lies in the n-i-Akbar, the third volume of the Akbarnama, the official chronicle of Akbars reign as emperor. Chronicler and court historian Abul-Fazl articulated his theory of kingship as follows, No dignity is higher in the eyes of God than royalty, and those who are wise drink from its auspicious mountain. A sufficient proof of this, for those who require one, is the fact that royalty is a remedy for the spirit of rebellion, and the reason why subjects obey. Even the meaning of the word pdshh [emperor] shows this; for pd signifies stability and possession. If royalty did not exist, the storm of strife would never subside, nor selfish ambitions disappear.113 In a tactful, insightful, and well-thought out approach, Abul-Fazl has given his justification of absolute monarchy. In this passage, he not only demonstrated his influences from the pre-Islamic Persians such as the Sassanians, but by Sh conceptions of the imamate and the Platonic theory of the philosopher-king as well.114 In a text that is in Farsi, the word pdshh is examined for its etymology. In the way that that the Sha revere their imams
111 112

Ibid. Spear, Percival. The History of India, Volume 2. (New York: Penguin, 1990) 37. 113 Abul-Fazl. Ain-i-Akbari from Sources in Indian Tradition: Volume 1. Trans. Ainslee T. Embree et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 425-26. 114 Embree, 425.

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with a demigod status,115 the king acquires his authority from God Himself. While the king is not divine, the divine source of his power necessitates that obedience to the monarch is obedience to God. Likewise, disobedience to the monarch is disobedience to God. The use of logic also finds its way into the n-i-Akbar, as Abul-Fazl makes it clear that Silly and short-sighted men cannot distinguish a true king from a selfish ruler.116 Thus, a wise person who uses reason will be able to determine who a true king. Fulfilling a social contract, the monarch is expected serve his people by ruling a fair and equitable manner, while expecting complete submission from his subjects in reciprocation. In the same way that Plato distrusts the masses, Abul-Fazl calls for an enlightened despot that has parallels in the philosopher-king of antiquity. Though Akbar was by no means a democratic leader, adherence to Abul-Fazls model of the ideal king is what allowed the appeal of Hindustan and the Mughal emperor to outlive the empire. Whether it was in the use of divinely sanctioned power, political acumen, religious tolerance, imperial magnanimity, or even the use of brute force, Akbar had a created an imperial cult of personality that would thrive irrespective of the Din Ilahis status as a theological phenomenon. With an empire that stretched from Afghanistan to the Bay of Bengal, from the Himalayas to the Godvari, Akbar was able to command a greater degree of legitimacy and hegemony over North and Central India than the Mauryans before him and the British after him.117 It cannot be stressed enough how Akbar did not desire merely to be the latest in a series of Indo-Muslim kings, but to elevate himself to the status of accepted ruler of all

115

Mutahhari, Murtaza. The Reciprocal Services between Islam and Iran. (Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran: Tawhid Printing House, 2000) 122. 116 Embree, 426. 117 Wolpert, 129.

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Hindustan.118 Establishing the apogee of the Mughal conceptualisation of Hindustan, Akbar managed to rule with relatively little opposition, virtually unchallenged after 1581.119 Akbars successors Jahangir (r. 1605-27) and Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58) presided over significant territorial acquisitions in the Deccan.120 It was under the latter of these two that the shift towards orthodoxy made itself apparent. Though there was not a systematic persecution of Hindus under Shah Jahan, the pilgrimage tax on Hindus was re-introduced in his time.121 Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) continued this trend by imposing the jizyah that Akbar had strongly felt was contrary to the will of God. Indeed, his great-grandfather Akbar may very well have been considered a heretic in the mind of Alamgir I,122 given the latters more fundamentalist approach to Islam. In spite of the somewhat reactionary approach of the Mughal state towards its Hindu population under Aurangzeb, the concept of Hindustan persisted. The monarchs that followed him, however, were never able to restore the Shhn-e-Moghul to its former glory. In fact, J.F. Richards dates the ending point for his volume on the Mughal Empire at 1720 noting how by this date, the essential structure of centralised empire was disintegrated beyond repair.123 While there are some of the later Mughals are worthy of note, their significance pales in comparison with the emperors from Babur to Aurangzeb. An oft-recited ditty from the mid-18th century describes Shah lam II (r. 1760-1806): Az Delhi to Palam Badshahi Shah Alam meaning From Delhi to Palam is the realm of Shah

118 119

Spear, 31. Ibid, 36. 120 Mughal Empire. Microsoft Student 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008. 121 Chand, Hukm. History of Medieval India. (New Delhi: Anmol Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2005) 21. 122 An abbreviated version Aurangzebs royal title. 123 Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) xv.

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Alam.124 Considering that Palam is where Delhis airport is now located, the political realities of Shah Alams day did not allow him to be considered the ruler of Awadh, much less so Hindustan. The lesser Mughals cannot truly be considered emperors, in the sense that most of Hindustan did not fall under their actual control. Nevertheless, the understanding of the Mughal king as Emperor of Hindustan continued to endure all the way into the 19th century when the rebels of 1857 invoked the term to further their cause against the Company Raj. Concepts can far exceed the lifetimes of the individuals that author them. The Mughal Empire remained a useful fiction that resonated with the diverse peoples of Hindustan long after its administrative functions had ceased. Likewise, Hindustan has outlived the Classical Period into which it was born and the Sassanian Empire of which it was a product of. Adapting to the Islamic interactions with India, both peaceful and violent, by land and by sea, with contributions from travellers and thinkers alike, the term Hindustan developed into the self-ascribed term of choice in describing the Indian subcontinent. No longer was it merely the Indus River Valley, the Sind, or even simply Northern India. The Hindustan of the 1700s was a proto-India that housed people of various backgrounds, faiths and languages. This pre-national geographical region was not yet communalised, as being Hindu or Muslim had no particular bearing on ones status as a Hindustani. The term Hindu was yet to be consolidated, and the boundaries of Hindustan were still in flux, but not as much as they had been centuries before. Even Hindustan as a community of sentiment was still in its nascence, reaching maturity only in the decades surrounding the Sepoy Mutiny.
124

Bakshi, S.R., et al. Delhi Through the Ages, Volume 1. (New Delhi: Anmol Publications Pvt. Ltd., 1995)

73.

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Chapter 2: From a Felt Community towards a National Community

On the 3rd of March 1707 at the age of 88, the aged Aurangzeb breathed his last.125 In the wake of his death, a series of rebellions took place across Hindustan, sparking the creation of smaller kingdoms and principalities by Hindu and Muslim adventurers and the formation of larger independent states by the governors of the imperial provinces. These new entities are known as the post-Mughal states, the first of them to emerge in Hyderabad
125

Chaurisia, Radhey Shyam. History of Modern India, 1707 A.D. to 2000 A.D. (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002) 1.

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in 1712.126 Despite the fact that the Mughal Empire would formally last for another a century and a half until its dissolution at the behest of the British, Aurangzebs death marked the apogee of Mughal expansion. As an overdetermined phenomenon, the decline and eventual collapse of the Mughal Empire can be attributed to a number of factors such as an overstretched empire, a series of weak successors,127 the degeneration of Mughal nobility, court factions, a defective law of succession, the rise of the Marathas, the demoralisation of the Mughal army, the failure of the Mughal sultanate to create a more comprehensively composite political society, the Afghan invasions by Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Durrani, intellectual bankruptcy, widespread corruption, the neglect of naval power, and agrarian discontentment.128 Though Mughal hegemony in Hindustan had steadily disintegrated throughout the 18th century, Hindustan continued to live on, in its varying usage by such diverse actors as the post-Mughal states, Hindustani artistic and literary elites, the East India Company, the rebels of 1857, British imperial administrators, and Indian nationalists alike. It cannot be emphasised enough how Hindustan had gone from a description of a conquered land by its Muslim conquerors into an increasingly selfascribed label that both Hindus and Muslims took pride in. Furthermore, as a cultural phenomenon, Hindustan reached its apex in precisely this lateMughal period.
126

Oldenburg, Philip. India: History. Microsoft Student 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008 127 The Mughal Empire was too dependent on an imperial cult of personality that this may have in fact have hastened the decline of their rule over India. The upstanding character of the emperor meant that the empire was strong, but a weaker emperor meant for a weaker empire both literally and figuratively. While strong emperors such as Akbar and Aurangzeb were able to use an imperial personality successfully (the latter of these two was less inclusive in his approach to his Hindu and Shia subjects, though nevertheless a s powerful ruler), the weakness and debauchery of latter rulers also made their empire susceptible to invasion. For example, the looting of Delhi in 1739 happened under the watch of Muhammad Shah (r. 1719-48) nicknamed Rangeela (the colourful) due to his excessive dalliances with sharaab and shabaab (wine and women). 128 Chaurisia, 2-12

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C.A. Bayly summarises the transformations that Hindustan underwent from the sixteen to eighteenth centuries as follows: Beginning as a geographical description usd by Muslim invaders to designate the conquered territory across the river Indus, Hindustan came to mean first an imperial territory inhabited by Indians, mostly Hindus. Late, it began to signify our cultural realm of Hindustan common to Hindus and Muslims as the literati and administrators of the northern Indian empire came to identify increasingly with their abode.129 Baylys line of reasoning can be demonstrated fairly well in the example of Babur, who in the previous chapter of this paper had seen Hindustan in an overwhelmingly negative light. Babur saw himself as a foreigner, and not a Hindustani. Humyn continued this trend, spending much of his reign in exile. Akbar had brought to an end to this approach with adoption of policies that are mistakenly seen as cross-communal, especially when Hindus and Muslims had not yet been consolidated into the communities that they are today. Hindustan contained the cultural material of proto-nationhood, and Akbars inclusive version of Hindustan with its royal cult of devotion was a pre-national form of patriotism.130 Though Aurangzeb had attempted to stop this in his proliferation of a more Orthodox version of Islam that alienated Hindus and heterodox Muslims, he failed to stop a culture of devotion131 to Hindustan in intellectual elites across the subcontinent. Baburs lack of appreciation for Hindustan persisted,132 but this perception continued to shrink as time went as a growing proportion of the cultural and political elites of north India, Muslim as well as Hindu, increasingly saw themselves as Hindustanis.
129

Bayly, C.A. Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) 38 130 ibid, 38 131 Literally desh-bhakti, as it is known to today in Hindi / Urdu. This patriotism is of pre-national form of patriotism, like the one in Elizabethan England where the word patriotism has its roots. 132 Bayly observes that While many Muslim writers and literati continued to denounce India as hot, dirty, and full of black idolaters one Persian sufi [Shah Muhammad Hazin in reference to Benares] even declared that it was a dunghill poetic paeans in praise of Hindustan proliferated. Vide Bayly 38. What Bayly fails to mention is that even the mystic Hazin still acknowledged all Brahmins in Benares were Ram. Please consult Malik, Jamal. Perspective of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History, 1760-1860. (New York: Brill Publications, 2000) 100 for details.

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In Aurangzebs own time, the Tuhfat al-Hind (1690)133 was published. Setting out to establish the key elements in the education of a well-brought up Mughal prince134, this text, along with a number of its contemporaries135 demonstrated a sympathetic account of Hindustani traditions in music, art, and poetry which blend elite and popular, Indian and foreign, Hindu, and Muslim forms. Comparable works of Indian cultural anthropology proliferated as Mughal grandees patronised Hindu artisans, musicians, and dancers, seeking to broaden their bases of support in the community.136 Though the authoring of works such as Mirza Khans Tuhfat al-Hind may have started as an attempt to bring about popular appeal, the continued pro-Hindustani sentiment over the next several decades shows how it was, as Bayly puts it endowed with emotional meaning.137 This emotion138 would grow to be so strong that the legendary Hindustani poet Mirza Ghlib (1797-1869) would pen in his Persian letters that Benares was the Mecca of India.139 The use of this analogy describes not merely how Benares was sacred to Hindus, but Ghalibs own emotional attachment to Hindustan through equating it to the holiest site in Islam. Awadhs Role in the Proliferation of Hindustani Culture

From meaning gift, thus this work means The Gift of India. The date is an approximation. Bayly has dated it 1690, while Joep Bor considers 1675 as more appropriate. Please consult Bor, Joep. Three Important Essays on Hindustani Music. http://web.mac.com/wvdm/JIMS/Issue_36-37_files/2_bor.pdf (accessed 08 January 2010). 134 Alam, Muzaffar and Sanjay Subrahmanayam. The Making of a Munshi. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Volume 24, Number 2, 2004, 61 135 Tuhfat al-Hind is undoubtedly one of the most famous examples of such sympathetic accounts, but it was certainly not alone. Other examples include the Rg Darpan.published by Faqir Allah in 1666 and Dara Shikohs translation of the Upanishads. 136 Bayly, 39. 137 Ibid, 39. 138 In the 1700s, we see the emergence of a more sullen portrayal of Hindustan. C.A. Bayly notes how In the eighteenth century, the theme was more often represented in a more melancholy tone: ashob sheher, elegies to the fading beauty of Hindustan, the decay of its cities, and the pollution of the land (39). Amidst the backdrop of a declining Mughal Empire and a rising East India Company, this gloomy vision of Hindustan neither has the adventurous tone of Babur nor the grandeur of Akbar, but a sad one that is rather mournful and longs for a return to the heyday of the Greater Mughal kings. 139 Malik, Jamal. Perspective of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History, 1760-1860. (New York: Brill Publications, 2000) 100.
133

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Mirza Ghalib was part of much broader cultural phenomenon that took place between the Mughal and colonial periods. While the political centre of Hindustan was in Delhi, its cultural centre undoubtedly resided in Lucknow. It was here in the capital of Awadh that Urdu poets such as Mr Taq Mr (1724-1810) and Sauda (1713-1718) competed to outdo one in another in their praise of Hindustan decades before Ghalib. The eighteenth century, however, was not merely a time to celebrate ones Hindustani identity. As Mir Taqi Mir and Sauda demonstrate through their Shahr-Ashobs (poems which lament Delhi sacking at the hands of Nadir Shah in 1739), this was a period of great calamity for the people of Hindustan.140 Both these poets originally lived in Delhi, but spent the latter part of their lives in Lucknow, demonstrating the cultural shift to Awadh that took place on a grander scale.141 Despite these shared traits, these men were bitter rivals in their mushairas. Mir Taqi Mir was from a humble upbringing, his poetry somber and melancholic, while Sauda was from an affluent background with his verses vibrant and exultant. In one Urdu qita, Mir Taqi Mir lamented, Why asks about our whereabouts, O denizens of the East, Know we are poor, why taunt us and tease? Delhi which was once considered the worlds crown and pride, Where only the chosen few once did reside, Which has been razed and ruined by the cruel skies, We belong to the same city, now a wasted pile.142 Mir was speaking of the city which once was so proudly the capital of the Mughal Empire. The great emotion in this poem demonstrates his attachment to Delhi, which like the Shahan-e-Mughal, was now merely a shadow of its former self. While this is not a
140

Kanda, K.C. Masterpieces of Urdu poetry: Text, Translation, and Transliteration. (New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2005) 13. 141 Ibid, 13 and 23. 142 Ibid, 29.

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nationalist set of verses, it relects a pre-national patriotic sense of duty to mourn over his citys fall from grace. Lucknows rise is tied to Delhis fall. Mir Taqi Mirs shahr ashobs illustrate the scope of that legacy in the most literal sense, as some of Urdus finest poetry was written in a period when Mughal hegemony in India had already ceased to exist. While Mirs competitor Sauda is generally portrayed in a more vivacious light, he too could not help but despair over Delhis plight in the eighteenth century. In the Weerani-e-Shahjanbad, Muhammad Rafi Sauda writes: If I tell the tale of Delhis devastation, Even a simpleton will feel struck with consternation. If someone for evening prayers visits the holy mosque, Hell find it dark and lonesome, without a flame or spark Not a single house is there where jackals do not bawl.143 Sauda goes on to say, Who knows whose evil eye has swallowed up this park Whose steps have profaned its soft, scented paths; Where once grew the firs and pines brambles stand at guard, Only crows and kites over this garden loo, Where once the nightingales frolicked with the buds and bloom144 The order of everything in the city of Delhi has now been reversed. Where there was once life, there is now death. Light and company have now been replaced with darkness and loneliness. Pleasant birds such as the bulbul145 have been replaced with more sinister ones that are associated with death, such as the crow (a scavenger) and kite (a bird of prey). Not even the plants that now inhabit its landscape are appealing to the senses. Sauda describes a place that truly has been cursed (afflicted with what he describes as the nazar, the evil eye) with verses that illustrate not only the depravity of the situation but the intensity of his
143 144

Ibid, 17. Ibid, 17. 145 The nightingale, to which many Hindustani odes have been compiled in its praise.

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sentiment for it. In another set of verses, Sauda admits You were not, O Delhi, deserving of this plight.146 In a time when adherence to such things as tehzeeb and adab mattered so much to the people of Awadh, Delhi has faced the ultimate shame. As Sauda would have it, the city has been erased from earth like a fulsome lie. The honour and dignity which got it the respect of inhabitants across the world has now been taken away. Like the women in his poem, the city has symbolically been reduced to a state of begging, a most shameful act. The people of Delhi cannot and will not do what the gentlemen of Lucknow because the former is on the decline and the latter in its ascendancy. Nevertheless, because Delhi and Lucknow are part of shared community of sentiment, the poets of Lucknow must mourn for their brothers to the west, just as if they were giving them a janzah. As pitiable as the state of Delhi was following the raids of Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdalli, Delhi did not die. Even if the Peacock Throne was gone, there was still an ongoing, although significantly diminished Mughal courtly culture. As opposed to Mir Taqi Mir and Sauda before him, Mirza Ghalib came from the region now known as Uttar Pradesh and settled in Delhi. Ghalib lived in a much later period than Sauda and Mir, but most of his life still fell within the Mughal era. It was only in his final years that he witnessed the turbulence of the Great Mutiny and its brutal suppression. While he still lived in a period prior to the emergence of Indian nationalism, he had great sentiment for the land of Hindustan. In his poem entitled Hindustan, Ghalib says Hindustan ki bhi ajab sar zameen hai, Jis mein wafa-o-mehr-o-mahabbat ka hai wafoor which in its English meaning affirms how Wondrous is the Indian soil, fruitful, and fertile, Faith, kindliness and love, bloom on every side.
146

Kanda, 19.

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As the East is the source of the sun and light, India is the ancient home of sincerity undefiled. It was here the seed was sown, here it fructified, And from here the fruit spread to distant shores and isles. India was the crown of grace on floral pillars raised, Ah the bliss of union sweet with beauties flower-faced.147 This poem offers a most enchanted outlook on India. If one did not know of Ghalibs background or that the words used are associated with a very high register of Urdu, it would be very difficult to tell that the author of these verses is a Muslim. What is clear is that the author is a Hindustani who has deep respect for his felt community, Hindustan. He is not a nationalist, but he offers his wafa and mohabbat, his loyalty and love to this community.

The Charting of Hindustan by the Company Rj With the Mughals increasingly relegated to imagination and symbolism by the late 1700s, the geographical labelling of the core region of Hindustan would undergo no further transformations until the 1947 partition. According to British historian Henry George Keene (1825-1915), The country to which the term Hindustan is strictly and properly applied may be roughly described as a rhomboid, bounded on the north-west by the rivers Indus and Satlej, on the south-west by the Indian Ocean, on the south-east by the Narbadda148 [sic] and the Son149, and on the north-east by the Himalaya Mounts and the river Ghagra150. In the times of the emperors, it comprised the provinces of Sirhind (or Lahore), Rajputana, Gujrat, Malwa, Audh (including Rohilkhand, strictly Rohelkhand, the country of the Roheas, or Rohillas of the Histories), Agra, Allahabad, or Dehli [sic].151
147 148

Ibid, 59. Narmada river, which runs through Madhya Pradesh. 149 The Savan river, which runs through Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. 150 Ghaghara River, also known as the Karnali, which runs through Tibet, Nepal, and India.
151

Keene, Henry George. The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan. (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1897) 2

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In this passage from The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan, Keene outlined the geographical region Hindustan, which consisted of what is now Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and the northern part of Madhya Pradesh. His description is also a testament how the Hindustan of 1800 had shrunk from the Hindustan of 1700, which also included present-day Gujarat, Rajasthan, and both Indian and Pakistani Punjab.152 Nevertheless, Keenes identification of Hindustan was not the only one. Keene himself had identified his definition as a strict and proper one. Hindustan was still regarded as the Almost two hundred years prior to Keenes historical study of the 18th century, English geographer James Rennell (1742-1830) engaged himself in the framing of India during his tenure as surveyor general of Bengal for the East India Company.153 According to anthropologist Matthew H. Edney, Rennells maps provided the definitive image of India for the British and European public. It is in his highly influential maps that we find the establishment of India as a meaningful, if still ambiguous, geographical entity. The ambiguity of the region is most obvious in the various names that Rennell used to refer to the region that his maps framed. The titles of the maps and the memoirs all used Hindustan.154 As Edney points out, Hindustan was not a self-evident region, so Rennell began both of his memoirs with an explanation of its extent. Hindustan land of the Hindus was originally coined by the early marauders to refer to the northern plains they conquered. Many Europeans adopted this usage. But the plains were also the historic core of Mughal power, so that Hindustan was used by some Europeans as a synonym for the empire.155 However, Hindustan did not mean land of the Hindus; it was the land of the Indus. In Rennels own time, the modern consolidated and unified sense of Hinduism was not yet in
152

Keenes definition of a Hindustan proper has persisted to this day; Marshall Hodgson simplifies Hindustan proper as the Gangetic plain in his description of the territories of Akbars empire in 1567. Please see Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilisation. Volume 3: The Gunpowder Empires in Modern Times. 153 Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 11. 154 Ibid, 11. 155 Ibid, 11.

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place. In fact, people who would known as Hindus today, would not identify themselves as Hindus, but rather as devotees to a particular deity such as Durga, Shiva, Vishnu, or with a particular class / caste orientation, or a certain geographical sub-region within what is now India. Furthermore, there was the case of the Hindustani Muslims,156 who though a minority were still a significant segment of the Hindustani population. Edney explains how Europeans came to equate Hindustan with the entire Indian Subcontinent: Because Hindus dominate South Asia, and furthermore, because the Mughal empire had by 1700 been extended almost to Cape Comorin, many Europeans took the entire subcontinent to constitute Hindustan. Rennel did not select one of these three conceptions as being the proper onel instead he conflated them. The titles of his memoirs explicitly equated Hindustan with the Mughal Empire Memoire of a Map of Hindoostan; or the Mogul[s] Empire whereas the maps themselves were of the entire subcontinent. But within the memoirs themselves, Rennel usually referred to the whole subcontinent as India.157 The interchangeable usage of Hindustan with India and the Mughal Empire by James Rennel in the 1780s is a testament not only to Hindustans resilience, but to the ability of the Mughals to live on in the imagination. Even if their temporal power had waned, the Mughals were still regarded as the rulers of Hindustan, so much so that Rennells failure to identify the East India Company as the contemporary ruler of Bengal implied that Bengal was still a Mughal suba and that there had been a legitimate delegation of Mughal authority to the British.158 Thus, while Mughal suzerainty over places such as Bengal was a fiction, it was a useful fiction nonetheless. At this point, the men of the Company Bahadur did not see it fit to rule in their own name. In order to legitimise their own cause, they made Shah Alam II cede the diwani (revenue collection and civil justice) to them in the August of 1765, which was

156

In Burton Steins history of India, for his section on the Mughal Empire he identifies Hindustani Muslims in the following passage: By 1580, Akbar had formed a corps of amirs numbering two, hundred, with Iranian and Turanian amirs almost equally represented, while Rajputs and Hindustani Muslims constituted a minor sixth of their number. Vide Stein, Burton and David Arnold. A History of India. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) 163. 157 Edney, 11. 158 Ibid, 11-12.

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previously held by the Nawab of Bengal.159 The Nawab also held nazamat (military control and criminal justice), which was relinquished early that February. Although Hindustans construction as all of India had its origins in geographical ambiguities, the indirect rule of the English East India Company can also see its equation of Hindustan to India. The Mughal Empire of this period was a shadow of its former self, but the Timurid heads of this entity remained as Emperors of Hindustan, allowed the British to operate in their name. As the de-facto rulers over much of Hindustan, the East India Company made creative use of Mughal emperors such as Shah Alam to justify their operations in India, much in the same way that the rebels of 1857 were able to gain validation for their insurrections several decades later. Greater and Lesser Hindustan The varying usages of Hindustan at different historical periods and under different socio-cultural contexts has complicated discourse of this term, whether in the medieval period or in modernity. While Hindustan could be used to mean all of India (the Greater Hindustan), there was also a narrower, more refined sense of Hindustan (which Keene referred to as a Hindustan proper). C.A. Bayly mentions how, The idea that the former Mughal Empire was equivalent to all-India, sara Hindustan, continued to recur even in the generation of Indian servants of the British colonial power. Yet this usage overlapped with a more restrictive geographical usage of the term, equivalent to the heartland of the Hindustani-speaking north India from the boundaries of the Punjab to Bengal. This idea of Hindustan as I have suggested had began to acquire a sentimental force of its own. It coexisted with other conceptions of patria, either overlapping with them, distinguishing itself from them or including them.160 Consequently, Hindustan accommodated different parts of South Asia in different ways and degrees. With the collapse of the Mughal Empire into a checkerboard of post-Mughal
159

Thorpe, Showick and Edgar Thorpe. The Pearson General Studies Manual 2009. (Delhi, India: Dorling Kindersley India Pvt. Ltd., 2009) 95. 160 Bayly, 41.

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states, this accommodation was not a uniform one. What Hindustan meant to a person in Awadh or Bihar was different what it meant to a person in Punjab or Bengal, whereas those who lived in the Deccan Plateau understood Hindustan differently from a northern Indian. In 1895, George Walter Macgeorge identified what he saw as two components of the continent of India: Hindustan of the north and the Deccan of the South. MacGeorge writes: Geographically the country [India] is divided into two well-marked natural divisions, differing entirely from each other in physical characteristics, respectively name Hindustan and the Deccan. Hindustan, comprising the whole northern and northwestern portion of the main continent, from the delta of the Ganges to the delta of the Indus, is characteristically a great alluvial plain of only moderate elevation, stretched out immediately at the feet of the Himalayan Mountains. The Deccan, is characteristically an elevated and more or less undulating plateau or tableland, occupying the greater portion of the whole southern extension, below Hindustan, of the Indian peninsula. Hindustan includes a large portion of Bengal proper, the upper Provinces of the north-west, the Punjab, Scinde [Sindh], Rajputana, and Guzerat [Gujarat], and extend southwards as far as the main chain of the Vindyian mountains, a chain stretching from the head of the Bay or Gulf of Cambay in a general north-easterly direction, with gradually diminishing altitude as far as the great southern bend of the Ganges at Rajmahal in Bengal.161 MacGeorges description of Hindustan matches what Keene referred to as a Hindustan proper. MacGeorge, who was a engineer that worked for the railway system in British India, contrasted the Hindustani north with Deccan in terms of physical geography. In terms of an ethno-linguistic geography, Hindustan corresponds to a Hindustani culture, whereas the Deccan (with the exception of Marahashtra which speaks an Indo-European language, although its culture is nevertheless distinct from much of the north) is more closely associated with a Carnatic, Dravidian culture. In its most limited sense, Hindustan consists of Delhi, the United Provinces, and Bihar. Bayly identifies Awadh as being fully incorporated into this Lesser Hindustan,

161

MacGeorge, G.W. Ways and Works in India: Being an Account of the Public Works in that Country rom the Earliest Times up to the Present Day. (Delhi, India: Westminster Archibald Constable and Company, 1894) 295.

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though he qualifies this by noting how Awadh itself as a concept had acquired symbolic meaning and even a degree of popular legitimation in the eighteenth century.162 Rajasthan, or Rajputana as it was known in the Mughal and colonial periods, speaks a variant of Hindustani, and thus fits more closely with the core Hindustani heartland than Punjab or Bengal would. Bengal, Kashmir, and Punjab are part of a Hindustan in the sense that they are north Indian and speak Indo-European language, as are Sindh and Gujarat. Regions of central India such as Maharashtra, Orissa, and Nagpur (which would eventually be merged into the Central Provinces in 1861, the fore-runner of Madhya Pradesh) are more difficult to pinpoint as being part of the Hindustani north precisely because they have commonalities with both the Hindustani north and the Deccan. Furthermore, the Vindhya range cuts right through Madhya Pradesh, and significant populations of Munda and Dravidian peoples live in Orissa (though Oriya, which is spoken by most of the people of this state, is an Indo-Iranian language). Similarly, Assam is another periphery of Hindustan as North India. Mysore, Hyderabad, Travancore, and other Carnatic centres of culture are parter of the Greater Hindustan, the Hindustan in the all-India sense, as first the British and later Indian nationalists would come to understand it. Rm Mohun Roy and the Rise of a Hindustni Nationality The British conceptualisation of Hindustan was further consolidated in the 19th century. As Matthew Edney observes, this was a time in which the modern image of India had come about, as opposed to Rennell [who] had to take great care in defining what he understood to be the regions which constituted Hindustan / India. A century or more later, such care was no longer necessary. The geographical rhetoric of British India was so effective that India had become a real entity for both British imperialists and Indian nationalists alike. Both groups held India to be a single, coherent, self-referential geographical entity coincident with the
162

Bayly, 41.

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bounds of the South Asian subcontinent and the extent of British power but which nonetheless predated British hegemony.163 To the British, the solidification of Hindustan on the map (both literally and figuratively) served as a verification to their imperial glory. To the Indian nationalist, it presented a different set of challenges. Among the first of the Indian nationalists emerged from Bengal in the early 1800s was Ram Mohun Roy (1774-1833). Roy was a gifted political and spiritual thinker who was able to span the Islamic and British periods in India with his profound knowledge of Farsi, Arabic, Sanskrit, Hindustani and English in addition to his native Bengali. Though known by later generations as the Father of Modern India, the unitarian Hindu Roy was a virtually friendless man in his own lifetime as a result of his misunderstood efforts that emerged from his desire to reform the people of Hindustan. A few of his major contributions include the Brahmo Samaj movement, his successful struggle against sati, and a monotheistic rendering of the Kena, Isa, Katha, and Mundaka Upanishads.164 In a manuscript entitled Questions and Answers on the Judicial System of India, Roy writes: Q. What books do the Mahommedan layers follow as authorities? A. The majority of the Mussulmans of Hindustan follow the doctrines of Abu Hanifah and his disciples165 This usage can be valid only if Hindustan is substituted for pre-partition India. Even though there are a considerable number Muslims in the Deccan that ascribe to the Shafii madhab, the overwhelming majority of all Muslims across the subcontinent are Hanafis because the largest Muslim populations of India lie in Hindustan proper, who are primarily Sunni Muslims of the Hanafite persuasion. Thus, in the early 19th century, Ram Mohun Roy used Hindustan as a synonym for what is presently regarded as South Asia.
163

Edney, 15. Hay, Stephen. Sources of Indian Tradition. Volume Two: Modern India and Pakistan. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 16. 165 Roy, Raja Ram Mohun. The English Works of Raja Ram Mohun Roy: Vol. II. ed. Eshan Chunder Bose. (Calcutta: Bhowanipore Aruna Press, 1887) 553
164

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Roy was a part of the emerging phenomenon of Indian nationalism. However, he was decades ahead of his time, in the sense that popular nationalism did not emerge until the late 1880s, as demonstrated by the lower middle class constituency of Bal Ganghadar Tilak (1856-1920) . Furthermore, his strand of Indian nationalism is not the same as that of Nehru, Gandhi, Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, or Veer Savarkar. Rammohun Roys Brahmo Samaj movement, which was effective in the abolition of sati in 1829, was an attempt to reconcile Hindu scripture of the past with Western values of the present.166 However, as a religion Brahmo Samaj was not so successful, and while the movement contributed to the rise of Hinduism in its modern sense, a growing number of Indian intellectuals based their nationalism on secular values that they learned in Western schools.167 Thus, the Indian nationalism that emerged in the decades after the Mutiny was profoundly, though not fundamentally different from the nationalism that Roy promoted a generation earlier, in the sense that Roy was neither able to gain the appeal of the masses of his day nor was he calling for the independence of India.168 As a person that bridged the late Mughal and colonial periods, Roys intellectual experiments set about the undercurrents of a renaissance that did not rely on revolutionary change but propagated [for Indians] the greatness and glory of their past culture and religion.169 Hindustan as a Community of Sentiments and Sensibilities
166

Bulliet, et al. The Earth and its Peoples: Since 1500. (New York: Wadsworth Publishing, 2006) 612. Ibid, 613. 168 Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan did advocate Indian independence either. It can also be added that Rammohun Roys nationalism, with its liberal understanding of Hinduism, was still steeped in a monotheistic interpretation of Hinduism nevertheless. In other words, Roy did not advocate a secular approach to nationalism, just as Gandhian nationalism would decades later (though Gandhis understanding of Hinduism is of a more reactionary version than is Ram Mohan Roys). 169 Narain, Dhirendra. Research in Sociology: Abstracts of M.A. and Ph.D. Dissertations Completed in the Department of Sociology, University of Bombay. (New Delhi: Indian Council of Social Science Research, 1989) 289
167

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Hindi and Urdu are the official languages of India and Pakistan respectively. Collectively, Hindi and Urdu are known as Hindustani, and despite the efforts of Indian and Pakistani governments to filter the words of Perso-Arabic and Sanskrit origins in Hindi and Urdu, these two manifestations of the original Hindustani language have much in common with one another. In the nineteenth century, Hindustani became a community of sensibility as reflected in the proliferation of poetic biography, tazkirahs. Its use broadened out from the imperial army170 and camp to the courts of regional rulers. Popular and elite forms enriched each other, diffused among ordinary people by the sayings of sufi masters and Hindu sectarian leaders.171 The language was honed and perfected at the Delhi flower market and death celebrations172 of Shah Madar Sharif (d. 1436)173, the patron saint, the patron saint of rural Awadh, as much as in the elite poetry readings.174 Persian, which was the language of the Mughal court, and of the Delhi Sultanate before, was now being eclipsed by Hindustani as the lingua franca, and while even the great Ghalib took a much greater degree of his contributions to Farsi poetry, he is better remembered for his ghazals in Urdu.175 To call Hindustani a national language of Hindustan (as European

170

It is from the lower ranks of Mughal army that the phenomenon of Urdu as a language first emerges. To this day, Urdu in Persian means both camp and the Urdu language. 171 Much in the same way as Din Ilah connected the people of Hindustan to each other through the emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth, the nineteenth century demonstrates a pre-national coalescing of Hindus and Muslims around the concept of Hindustan and the Hindustani language. Emperors of this time, whether it was Shah Alam II (r. 1760-1806), Akbar Shah II (r. 1806-37), or Bahadur Shah II (r. 1837-58), were merely pensioners in Delhi. Rather than being connected through the cult of the emperor, the various peoples of North India, whether they were Hindu or Muslim, upper or lower class, urban or rural had a common language which they could call their own: Hindustani. They also had a heartland which was their home: Hindustan. 172 Both Hindus and Muslims participated in these rituals. A passage from Jafar Sharifs Islam in India in observes one such ritual in Muharram involving The Malang [who] are said to be disciples of Jamanjati, a disciple of Zinda Shah Madar. The term is usually applied to any unattached religious beggars who smokes drugs to excess, dresses in nothing but a loin-cloth, keeps fire always near him, and wears his hair very long tied into a knot behind. They are by religion half Hindus and half Musulmns. Vide Sharif, Jafar and G.A. Herklots. Islam in India or the Qnn-i-Islm: The Customs of the Musulmns of India. (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1999) 172. 173 Asiatic Society of Bengal. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Volume 65, Part 1. (Calcutta, India: Asiatic Society, 1896) 195. 174 Bayly, 40. 175 Thackson, Wheeler McIntosh. A Millenium of Classical Persian Poetry: A Guide to the Reading and Understanding of Persian Poetry from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. (Bethesda, Maryland: Ibex Publishers, Inc., 2000) 98.

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observers such as Gilchrist176 and Garcin de Tassy177 had done in the early 1800s), however, would be an overstatement.178 Still, Bayly reminds the reader What they were seeing, however, was the development of an ecumenical speech which also expressed a latent sense of Hindustani identity. For Hindustan the north Indian ecumene, or cultural homeland was the domain of communication as much as the heart of an imperial system.179 This suggests that Hindustan was not a nation-state, but rather a community of sentiment that precedes the nation-state in accordance with Max Webers understanding. Nationalism had not yet been actualised, but there was a cross-communal attachment to Hindustan as a pre-national homeland that housed the language of Hindus and Muslims alike across much of northern India. With a Mughal empire that was virtually gone from the map and emperors that held merely symbolic posts, Hindustan was the glue that connected the various communities that lived in it together. The same people, whose ancestors had previously been subjects to emperors such as Akbar and Jahangir, retained a common language. This realisation that Hindustan constituted a common linguistic community would prove useful to Indian nationalists in the 1910s, with the emergence of Gandhis Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-22) and the simultaneous Khilafat Movement (1919-24). These movements were able to use popular language that appealed to the masses, allowing nationalism to transcended beyond the Indian middle class into various villages and subaltern communities across India. Rajat Kanta Ray explicitly identifies Hindustan as a felt community. Describing Nadir Shahs sacking of Delhi in 1739, he narrates how

176 177

John Bothwick Gilchrist (1759-1841), a noted British Indologist. A French Orientalist (1794-1878), who devoted himself to the study of Hindustani language (Malik 130). 178 Bayly, 40. 179 Ibid, 40.

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News of the happening s in Delhi reverberated throughout India and aroused the patriotic sentiment of powers far from friendly towards the captive Mughal court. Baji Rao, the Peshwa of the hostile Marathas, had been emerged in operations against the Portuguese and the Bhonsle prince of Berar at the time of the battle of Karnal. News of the victory of the Iranians alarmed him. When he received the next newsletter intimating the plunder of the capital and the massacre of its inhabitants, he was overwhelmed, Our domestic quarrel with Raghoojee Bhonslay is now insignificant he said the war with the Portuguese is as naught, there is now but one enemy in Hindustan. 180 While the epistle called for unity in opposition against foreign occupation, this was not nationalism in the modern sense. Nevertheless, Hindustanis were regarded as the natives of Hindustan, rather than the Persians and Portuguese who were acknowledged as foreigners, providing a valuable sentimental prerequisite that Indian nationalists would tap into in the 20th century. The notion of a common enemy that Baji Rao alluded to in 1739 found even greater resonance decades later during the military campaigns of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan. During the Second Anglo-Mysore War in 1780, when the Marathas allied with the British against Mysore, Tipu reminded the Marathas that they had but one shared enemy: the British. Rajat Ray notes how Mysore alone joined Poona and its confederates in Malwa in the operations against the English. Haider Ali, in the words of his son Tipu Sultan responded to the appeal for his assistance by the Poona infidels, as the English were far worse. They had extended their domain by intrigue and chicane and had even obliged the Saiyids and ulama of Bengal to eat the flesh of swine. Haidar Ali accordingly marched with Tipu upon Madras, prudently considering, that although it is declared Heretics are impure, yet that it was more advisable to afford than refuse his assistance to the infidels belonging to the country (because the supremacy of the English was the source of evil to al Gods cultures.181 While Ray makes it clear that this was not the language of nationalism, but legitimist rhetoric that justified a military alliance, Tipu was astute in perceiving the danger that the British posed to the native rulers of Hindustan. Years later, Tipu Sultan of Mysore in a letter to Ottoman sultan Selim III wrote that the English were determined to subdue the
180 181

Ray, 176. Ibid, 313.

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whole of Hindustan and to subvert the Muslim religion and went on to describe the antiMuslim deeds of the Marathas as well as his own plans to help the custodian of Mecca to fight the Wahhabis.182 Like the rebels of 1857 after him, he equated his nativist struggle against foreign occupation with a religious one of good against evil. zamgarh and the Aged Emperor of Hindustn Tipu realised that the British constituted the greatest threat to the peoples of Hindustan. While he was not a nationalist, he has often been cast in a nationalistic light. Like Tipus struggles against the East India Company from 1767 (when the first AngloMysore War began under his father Haider Ali) to 1799 (when Tipu Sahib had died defending his capital Seringapatam), the rebels of 1857 are also portrayed as Indian nationalists even though they lived in an age prior to Indian nationalism. Nevertheless, the mutineers were bound together in a felt community they understood as Hindustan. On Saturday, the 23rd of April 1857, the Great Rebellion began when 85 sepoys refused to load their rifles, only to be immediately incarcerated and removed from public sight. For their refusal to participate, they were court-marshalled on the 9th of May, only to be a liberated a day later by their fellow Indians while the British officers were away at church. For forty of the British, that Sunday would not only be their Sabbath but their sojourn to God Himself, given that the sepoys began to exact their revenge by eliminating anyone who stood in their way. The armed rebels began to march north towards Delhi, which quickly fell to the mutineers on account of popular support in the city. The rebels proclaimed Bahdur Shah II (r. 1837-57), one of the few people who could boast a direct lineage to the glory days of the Mughal dynasty as Emperor of India.
182

Karpat, Kemal H. The Politicisation of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State. (New York: Oxford, 2001) 51.

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Though Bahadur Shah only reluctantly agreed to cast his lot with Sepoy mutineers183, he has the good fortune of being associated with one of the most progressive elements of the Sepoy Mutiny: the Azamgarh Proclamation. Allegedly issued by one of Bahadurs grandsons, the Azamgarh Proclamation used religious and economic incentives to gain support for the struggle against the British.184 Even if it was merely a matter of rhetoric, the idea that someone descended from Akbar the Great could post this document added to it a veneer of legitimacy. Diverging from the more Orthodox approaches to Islamic creed, it proclaimed that Natives, whether Hindoos or Mohammedans, who fall fighting against the English, are sure to go to heaven; and those killed fighting for the English, will doubtless, go to hell.185 Orthodox Islam emphasises the importance of tawhd, which is a form of monotheism that nears Orthodox Judaism in the sense that it is not as accommodating as Christianity and is a predominantly Trinitarian doctrine. The Quran refers to the concept of shirk (often translated as idolatry, though this a short-hand reference for making partners with God whether it is in His Lordship, worship, names, attributes, and legislation) when it reads, Indeed, Allah does not forgive association with Him, but He forgives what is less than that for whom He wills. And he who associates others with Allah has certainly fabricated a tremendous sin.186
183

At first, Bahadur Shah may have been less than willing to join the rebels of 1857, though he nonetheless shared a strong emotional attachment to the concept of Hindustan, so much so that he began to personally identify with it and was willing to die for it. This was not nationalism, but rather a rather pre-national feeling of patriotism that continued from previous decades of Hindu and Muslim intellectuals had articulated in previous decades. K.C. Kanda writes how When someone taunted him [Bahadur Shah II] by saying Damdame mein dam nahin, khair mango jaan ki, Ai Zafar, thandi hui shamsheer Hindustan ki. Your fort is crumbling down, pray for your life, The Indian sword, O Zafar, has lost its sheen and might, Zafar replied back: Ghazion mein boo rahegi jab talak imaan ki, Tab tau London tak chalegi tegh Hindustan ki. So long as the soldiers retain their faith and pride, The Indian sword will not relent till it humbles Londons might. See Kanda, K.C. Bahadur Shah Zafar: And His Contemporaries. (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers (P) Ltd., 2007) 3. 184 Hay, Stephen, ed. Sources of Indian Tradition. Volume Two: Modern India and Pakistan. (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) 177. 185 Bahadur Shah. The Azamgarh Proclamation in Sources of Indian Tradition. Stephen Hay, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) 179. 186 An-Nisa 4:48 (Quran, Abdullah Yusuf Ali trans.)

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Furthermore, the Prophet Muhammad is known to have engaged in iconoclasm when he destroyed the idols surrounding the Kaaba in Mecca in 630. Most Hindus worship idols, and thus would considered as mushrikeen (idolaters), making it unfathomable to an orthodox Islamic jurist to consider that they might go to Heaven in light of the Quran and the Prophets example. As opposed to injunctions based upon the Quran and the sunnah, the Azamgarh proclamation identifies a new concept of faith beyond what could have proscribed in 7th century Arabia. This faith is a proto-nationalism, a loyalty to serve the Emperor of India against the faithless forces of imperialism. It is not that the British are being called infidels because they treat Christ as divine, but that they have denied the people of Hindustan the right to rule as sovereigns over their own land. This land is considered to be a home for Hindus and Muslims alike. So long as a Hindu proved to be devoted to the emperor, he shall be forgiven even for what the Quran deems unforgivable. Likewise, even if Muslim serving the British was faithful only to Allah in his worship, the proclamation rules him an infidel because of his infidelity to the resistance. Furthermore, the Azamgarh proclamation identified the Sepoy Mutiny as a jihad.187 Rather than Muhammads skirmishes with pagan Arabs in the Madinite phase of his prophethood, this was a conflict against imperialism where Muslims and pagans allied against a common European foe around the banner of the Hindus and Musulmans of Hindustan, with Bahadur Shah II as their symbolic head. Was the Azamgarh Proclamation a nationalist manifesto? No, it was not. The Azamgarh Proclamation was the culmination of an emotional attitude to Hindustan that
187

Bahadur Shah. The Azamgarh Proclamation in Sources of Indian Tradition. Stephen Hay, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) 178.

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began in the heyday of the Mughal Empire, continued in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries amidst the rise and fall of the post-Mughal states, and bore some of its strongest fruit in the midst of a nativist insurrection. The rebels saw their homeland and their religious and cultural values under threat from the utilitarian policies of the East India Company, and while they did not have nationalism to inspire them as to who was a patriot and who was a traitor, they borrowed from older, more religious terms for the sake of legitimacy, because this was the ideological framework from which pre-nationalistic peoples had to work with. Someone who served to advance their cause was a believer, while someone who stood as an obstacle to the advancement of their objective was an infidel. Though the lofty promises of the Azamgarh Proclamation were never implemented, a significant number of native Indians were drawn to the effort against colonialism. There were native princes who did have legitimate grievances with East India Company after their power and wealth was stripped from them. The mutiny offered these disenfranchised individuals a chance to reclaim their former glory and countless others the chance to strive for their day in the sun, as the edict from Azamgarh proclaimed that under the Badshahi government..the postswhich the English enjoy at present..will be given together with jagheers [landed estates], khilluts [ceremonial dress] imams [tax-free lands, and influenceTherefore all the natives in the British service out to be alive to their religion and interest, and abjuring their loyalty to the English, side with the Badshahi government and obtain salaries of 200 or 300 rupees per month for the present, and be entitled to high posts in future.188 Considering these promised rewards, it became very tempting to join the Badshahi cause. On the contrary, it was not these people, but the Indians who decided to help the British, who would be handsomely rewarded. For example, the Nizm of Hyderabd went on to be endowed with official status as Faithful Ally to the British Empire, and one of his
188

Ibid, 159.

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successors, sif Jah VII (r. 1911-67) was recognised by Time Magazine in 1937 as being the wealthiest man in the world. 189 Despite the early successes of the mutineers in the spring and summer months of 1857, a reinforced British army quelled the rebellion, first in Delhi in September and Lucknow the following March.190 With the fall of Oudh, the rebel forces in North India began to scatter.191 For the next year, British forces were engaged with an increasingly shrinking rebel army, finally able to capture their most skilful opponent, Nana Sahibs general Tatya Topi. With Topis execution in April 1859, the Sepoy Rebellion came to an end, and with it, the fiction that had been the Mughal Empire for more than a century.192 Nevertheless, even though Bahadur Shah Zafar was exiled to Burma and Mughal dynasty had ceased to exist, the concept the Mughals had so successfully utilised during the height of their empire Hindustan was not only to live on, but prosper in colonial India. Victoria, Empress of Hindustan In 1858, Bahadur Shah was captured by the British. When the aged emperor was accused of being ungrateful to the East India Company, Times correspondent William Howard Russell pointed out, We [the British], it is true, have now the same right and the same charter for our dominions that the Mahomedan founders of the house of Delhi had for the sovereignty they claimed over Hindostan but we did not come into India, as they did, at the head of great armies, with the avowed intention of subjugating the country. We crept in as humble barterers, whose existence depended on the bounty and favour of the lieutenants of the kings of Delhi; and the generosity which we showed to Shah Alum [II] was but a small acknowledgement of the favours his ancestors had conferred to our race.193
189

Cohen, Time. Kingship and Colonialism in Indias Deccan, 1850-1948. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 1. 190 Heitzman, James. Sepoy Rebellion. Microsoft Student 2008 [DVD]. 191 Ibid. 192 Ibid.

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In essence, Russell had summarised the Companys regime in India; they came not as conquerors but as tradesmen who emerged as the de-facto rulers over much of India. While W.H. Russell defended British imperialism, he still had reservations about how the Company conquered Hindustan, deeming it to be not as honourable as the Mughal invasion.194 The difference between the Mughal conquests of Hindustan was that it was an outright military struggle, and that the Company had to use the Mughals to gain some sort of legitimacy over its subjects. For this reason, the East India Company deliberately allowed the Mughals to remain as a useful fiction that justified their existence. When that fiction was applied to undermine the Companys existence in the Rebellion of 1857, the Mughals had to be removed from the picture. With the Mughals gone, the British added a new dimension to the understanding of Hindustan. This process, however, did not happen over night. In fact, the transition from Bahadur Shah IIs tenure as Badshah-i-Hind to Victorias reign as Empress of Hindustan took a staggering eighteen years. In this time, the rebellion was thoroughly and brutally suppressed, the East India Company was abolished, and direct rule was established over the territories that the EIC previously held. There was still the case of the Princely States of India, which remained autonomous though not independent of British rule. The combined territories that the British directly and indirectly administered constituted the British Indian Empire, another name for the British Raj. In 1858, Queen Victoria placed the duties Indian policy with the newly established office of secretary of state for India.195 From now until
193

Russell, Sir William Howard. My Diary in India, in the Year 1858-59, Volume 2. (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860) 50. 194 Both the British and the Mughals had fought wars of conquest and sought to legitimise themselves. Even though the Mughals came as conquerors, they still sought to legitimise by using the concept of Hindustan to their advantage. Russells point is relevant in considering a comparison in the formation of the Mughal and British holdings in India. Babars empire is dated from the first Battle of Panipat in 1526, while the E 195 Bentley, Jerry H. and Herbert F. Ziegler. Traditions and Encounters (New York: McGraw Hill, 2000). 855.

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1947, a viceroy196 would represent Britains royal authority in India, which he administered through an elite Indian civil service that was predominantly if not completely staffed by Englishmen.197 During the December of 1861, the Queen of Great Britain suffered a personal tragedy. Her husband, Albert, who also happened to be her first cousin and prince to the small German principality of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha198 passed away at the age of 42.199 Victoria never really recovered from Alberts death, but by the late 1860s, she assumed a gradual return to politics and public life. Although she was known in her youth as Queen of the Whigs, she increasingly began to identify herself with Benjamin Disraeli, the leader of the Conservative Party, preferring him over William Ewart Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal Party.200 The ascendancy of Disraeli and the Conservatives in 1874 set the stage for a momentous event in the history of Hindustan two years later. On 25th March 1876, the Vakil-i-Hindustan reported Mr. Disraeli, the Prime Minister said in Parliament that her Majesty would get the title Empress of Hindustan. This is such cheering news, that all the natives would not be ample enough, and the glory of the Queen on receiving the title would be insufficient. We natives are delighted that the Queen should receive a title from our country, which is now the most honoured of all her colonies. This honour will be the boast of our people. We are sorry that Mr. Gladstone objected to this title, but as his objections were unfounded and weak, they were not admitted. We hope that the Prime Minsiters proposals will notbe checked by such objections. Mr. Gladstone says that if the Queen receives this title it will affect the status of native princes. We consider no change of native titles necessary. It would have been necessary if our princes were not honoured as those of other country. The Queen has a right to the title, and it ought to be conferred upon her.201
196

The viceroy who also assumed the role of Governor-General, an office created in 1773 for Warren Hastings (r. 1773-85). 197 Bentley and Ziegler. Traditions and Encounters 855. 198 Victoria was the last of Hanoverian monarchs in England. Following her death and succession by Edward VII (r. 1901-10), Saxe-Coburg Gotha became be Britains royal house. In the middle of George Vs reign, it was renamed as the House of Windsor, which is the British royal family name today. 199 Arnstein, Walter L. Victoria (Queen). Microsoft Student 2008 [DVD]. 200 Ibid. 201 Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. Journal of the Society of Arts. Volume XXV: from November 17, 1876 to November 16, 1877. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1877)

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It was not unreasonable for Gladstone to object to this title; just a decade earlier he was calling for Irish home rule, though Victoria thought this was an attempt to undermine the British empire.202 As a royal mouthpiece, the Vakil-i-Hindustan (literally the representative of Hindustan) praised the move to confer the title Empress of India on Victoria, using significantly flamboyant and hyperbolic language. Furthermore, the queens relation to the rulers of the Princely States indicates a continuation of a Mughal trend: Queen Victoria was the greatest monarch, but she was open to having lesser rulers, so long as they recognised her supremacy. While Gladstone thought this move would affect the native princes adversely, Disraeli saw it as a confirmation of British hegemony in India. This hegemony has broad, though non-coincidental parallels to Mughal emperors such as Akbar and Aurangzeb, as the imperial tradition of the British is heavily indebted to policies that were started under the Mughals: while there was a great deal of change after the Great Rebellion, there was also a great amount of continuity.203 The British not only continued Mughal policies such as the zamindari system (though it was substantially revised by the Permanent Settlement of 1793) and the use of Persian on their coinage, but they retained the very use of Hindustan, and saw themselves as its rulers. In 1876, the Mughal Empire had long been gone. India was now the crown jewel in Britains empire. Less than two decades earlier, a nativist revolt had failed to bring an end to a century of colonial rule. As a result of this failed insurrection, one of the greatest fictions that the world had ever known (the rule of the Mughals in the late eighteenth and
412 202 Arnstein, Walter L. Victoria (Queen). Microsoft Student 2008 [DVD]. 203 Victorias instatement as Empress of Hindustan could also be seen as an exchange of a royal crown for an imperial crown, as famously depicted in a political cartoon in Punch magazine dated 15 April 1876. Vide Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G. In Upwards of 100 Cartoons From the Collection of Mr. Punch. (London: Punch Office, 1878) 85.

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nineteenth centuries), had come to an end. A new force would come and challenge the might of the British Empire in India: nationalism, emerging in the 1880s. This ideology forever changed the way that Hindustan was thought of. Within the following decades, Hindustan was sought in nationalist, and at many times, in communalised terms. The felt community had come to an end. Now Hindustan would be a national community.

Chapter 3: Hindustn at a Crossroads

In the decades after the mutiny, the spirit of nationalism spread across the Westerneducated bourgeoisie in the Indian Subcontinent204. This force changed not only how
204

Among the more prominent classes of Indians to adopt nationalism at this point were the bhadralok of Bengal and various native government bureaucrats serving the British Raj known as babus.

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Indians saw themselves but how they saw Hindustan. In the late 19th century, Hindustan was not yet communalised in the way that religious nationalists would make it out to be. Even the man who articulated the Two Nation Theory,205 Sir Syed Ahmed Khn, said that Every inhabitant of India, no matter what personal belief, can be called Hindu by virtue of his belonging to Hindustan.206 This phrasing of all Hindustanis as Hindus, regardless of their religious association, can be attributed to a speech he made at the Indian Association of Lahore in 1884, where Sir Sayyid said, By the word qawm, I mean both Hindus and Muslims. That is the way in which I define the word nation (qawm). In my opinion, it matters not whatever be their religious belief, because we cannot see anything of it; but what we see is that all of us, whether Hindus or Muslims, live on one soil, are governed by one and the same ruler, have the same sources of our benefits, and equally share the hardships of a famine. The se are the various reasons why I designate both the nationalities (qawmu) that inhabit India by the term (ayk lafz) Hindu that is the nation (qawm) which lives in India.207 Khan, even though he did not support the Indian National Congress208, was an Indian nationalist in his own right. He represents a key milestone in the transformation from Hindustan as a felt community to an articulation of it as a national one. Unfortunately, S.A. Khans interchangeable usage of qaum (literally community) for the words nation and nationality complicates efforts to understand his philosophy to this day for his supporters and detractors alike.209 Unlike the 1830s, when Ram Mohun Roy was part of a scant minority of individuals who invented and embraced a rudimentary Indian nationalism, Sir Syed Ahmed
205 206

This theory identified Hindus and Muslims as separate national communities. Chitkara, M.G. Converts Do Not Make a Nation. (New Delhi: A.P.H. Publishing Company,1998) 57. 207 Malik, Hafeez. 1970. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khans Contribution to the Development of Muslim Nationalism in India. Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 138: http://www.jstor.org/stable/311608 (accessed 15 January 2011). 208 In the aftermath of the Mutiny and the consequences it spelled for Hindustan, it is understandable why Khan would denounce the activities of Indian National Congress. While he did not support the Congress Party, which it is nascence demanded dominion status at the very most, Khan was one of the eminent articulators of Indian nationalist theory. Remaining loyal to the British crown throughout his life, Syed Ahmed Khan was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1888. 209 Malik, 138

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Khan was part of much broader wave of nationalist sentiment in the late 19th century. Ayesha Jalal examines how The Lucknow-based newspaper Anjuman-i-Hind admitted that formerly Muslims came to India from a feeling of covetousness and desire for wealth, plundered Hindu temples, smashed idols and departed. But now that generation ha[d] passed away; all Mahomedans have become as one; children have been born to them; their dear ones lied buried there, and here their survivors reside. These Muslims were closely tied to Hindustan than to any of the pertaining princely rulers with whom they shared a common religion. Even in the event of a civil war, the Muslims of Hindustan would not look upon those of Persia and Arabia as their kinsmen. The two castes, Muslims and Hindu, had adopted each other customs, not because they regarded the opposite creed as superior to their own but because religion, like most other things, is guided by custom. If only the leaders could lay aside their prejudices and concentrate on matters of common education instead of religion, the face of India would be changed for the better.210 The Anjuman-i-Hind had thus observed the consolidation of an Indian Muslim identity, noting that the Muslims of Hindustan had grown so different from the Muslims of other regions of the world that they had in essence more in common with the other religious communities of Hindustan. The two castes are really, to use Khans words two nations, or two national communities. They were not separate countries (i.e. India and Pakistan), but they still wear separate attire, go to different places of worship, have certain subtleties in their language (Muslims with more Perso-Arabic vocabulary, Hindus with more Sanskrit imports), and celebrate different holidays. Nevertheless, in spite of all these divergences between the Hindustani Hindu and the Hindustani Muslim identity, there was still an attachment to the land of Hindustan, which if was emphasised could lead to a crosscommunal feeling of mutual harmony. As opposed to Syed Ahmed Khan, who was willing to acknowledge Muslims as Hindus in the broader linguistic sense, there were those with alternative, more constrictive

210

Jalal, Ayesha. Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asia Islam since 1850. (New York: Routle dge, 2000) 79.

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definitions than the one he had to offer. Bankim Chandra Chatterj (1838-94) tried to wrestle with the question of Hindu identity, and he concluded that A Hindu cannot be merely a native of Hindustan (Bankim Rachnavali 1969:228) for there are Muslims in India who are not Hindu. Therefore one ought initially to assume that a Hindu is a person who professes that Hindu religion (228). Bankim shows how many different and opposing forms of Hinduism may exist like Vaishnavism, Shakto-ism and Tantrism. Religion is not the same as the indigenous term dharma: To the Hindu, his relations to God andto man his spiritual life and his temporal life form one compact and harmonious wholeAll life to him was religion.211 From this text, it appears as if Bankim can at least acknowledge that Muslims can be natives of Hindustan. However, a closer reading of Chatterjis work particularly his classic novel Anandamath indicates that Muslims were the archetypal invaders, jabans212 who set the stage for the emergence of colonial rule in Hindustan. Bankim Chandra Chatterjis reactionary approach to Hindu nationalism was further elaborated by Veer Savarkar. Savarkar draws heavily upon Orientalist strands of thought by presenting Hindus and Muslims as fundamentally different and opposing communities. At the first glance, it appears that Savarkar echoes the likes of Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, except in pro-Hindu terms. Of these two men, Savarkars communalism is still closer to that of Jinnahs. Furthermore, though Hindutva and the Two Nation Theory resemble one another at the very onset, Khans notion of separate communities was far more ambivalent than Savarkars Hindu nationalist ideology. Like the Orientalists, V.D. Savarkar is extremely selective in his approach towards history. He even spells Hindustan with an h (Hindusthan is how Savarkar renders it), so as to differentiate it from other -stans that Muslims would employ. The added h implies an emphasis on Hindutva or Hinduness, given his
211

Gort, Jerald D., Henry Jansen, and H.M. Vroom. Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation: Multifaith Ideals and Realities.(New York: Rodopi, 2002) 44. 212 From the Sanskrit term yavanas we have identified in the first chapter of this paper.

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desire to equate words like Hindusthan with Sanskrit terms such as devasthan (temple). Ultimately, this alternate spelling of Hindustan demonstrates Savarkars obsession with a pure, untainted, Hindu India. While Savarkar called for an India with an overtly Hindu identity, he did not advocate Hindu theocracy.213 Varshney makes this point about Hindutvadis clear: Hindu nationalists are religious nationalists, not religious fundamentalists. Both groups may share an aversion to a certain kind of secularist (in the case of Savarkar, this means Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi), and both may attack groups perceived as recalcitrant. The similarities, however, end there.214 Just as Herzls Judenstaat (literally Jews State) did not demand of a Jewish state that had laws based on the Talmud, Savarkar wants Hindus to lead the state, but Dharmic law is not what he desires. It is simply enough that the state is for Hindus, through and through. Savarkar is a Hindu atheist and a Hindu nationalist, and certainly not a Hindu fundamentalist. What does this mean for the Muslims? Muslims are not being asked to leave, but they would in essence become second-class citizens. Considering that Savarkars model of an Indian nation defines it as overtly Hindu one, religious minorities such as Indias large Muslim population would be forced to bear the stigma of being non-Hindus. Savarkar insists that a true Indian must hold Hindustan as his or her holy land: A Hindu is he who looks upon the land that extends from Sindu to Sindu from the
213

This is not to imply that Gandhis rmarjya was a theocracy either, as it is a Gandhian utopia that merely utilises Hindu rhetoric. Interestingly enough, both Hindutva and ramarajya are compatible with secular political systems even though they utilize religious labels. Furthermore, while Gandhi was a devout Hindu, neither did he expect nor did he demand that others follow his pious lifestyle. Nevertheless, the usage of Hindu religious imagery did draw the ire of a considerable segment of Indias non-Hindu population. As a practical example, a Muslim does not believe in Ram, thus making it difficult for him or her to identify with Ramarajya, let alone Hindutva. It is this predicament that I wanted to draw attention to. 214 Varshney, Ashutosh. Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. (New York: Yale University Press, 2002) 70.

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Indus to the Seas as the the land of his forefather his Fatherland (Pitrubhu), who inherits the blood of that race whose first discernible source coudld be traced to the Vedic Saptasindhusand above all, addresses this land, this Sindhustan, as his Holy Land (Punyabhu), as the land of his prophets and seers, of his godmen and gurus, the land of piety and pilgrimage.215 A Muslim might be able to recognise India as homeland and fatherland, but not as holy land in the way that Savarkar demands. Even though India is home to many Sufi shrines and sacred mosques, the holiest area in all of Islam, is the Kaaba, which is located in Saudi Arabia. Islam has its origins in Arabia, not in India. Its prophet, Muhammad, is an Arab, not an Indian, even though there are a number of influential Indian Muslim Sufi saints and aalims. The Quran is an Arabic text, not a Sanskrit one. A Muslim might insist on India being holy to him so as to appease the Hindutvavadis, but this creates an immense degree of alienation between this Muslim and his co-religionists. Ultimately, Savarkars Hindutva ideology carries with it a number of dangerous dispositions that are often labelled as fascism. The emphasis on Hindu identity is too strong to create a comfortable environment of cohesion between Hindus and Muslims. In fact, according to Amalendu Misra, Savarkar regarded Hindu-Muslim synthesis in the religious and cultural realm as an impossible undertaking and any prospect of their peaceful cohabitation in future as unreal. However, Savarkar developed this attitude at a much later stage in his career in the 1930s, when Muslim demand for a separate polity gained momentum.216 Misras quote, however, provides an excuse for Savarkars views. V.D. Savarkar had embraced Hindutva long before Jinnah became an advocate of Pakistan (1937). The year in which Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? was published (1923) clearly illustrates that Savarkar adoption of communalist views took place at least fourteen years prior to Jinnahs advocacy of a separate Muslim polity. Thus, Savarkar could not have possibly become a
215 216

Ibid, 115-16. Misra, Amalendu. Identity and Religion: Foundations of Anti-Islamism in India. (New York: Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2004) 16.

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sectarian thinker as a reaction to the Pakistan movement. Though Savarkar ultimately condemned partition, the uneasiness that his works propagated set the stage for the communal atmosphere in the coming years. While Hindu nationalism was growing in popularity, an overwhelming majority of Hindus rejected it. In fact, it was the Congress Party and its approach to Hindustan that was by far the most successful in shaping the agenda of the struggle for Indian independence. At the forefront of the Indian National Congress from 1916 onward were two men: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), the spiritual and political leaders of the Congress Party. Sankar Ghose notes how the former, Gandhi[,] asked the British to quit India. But before starting the quit India movement Gandhi wrote to Jinnah that the Muslims depended on nobody but ourselves for the achievement of our goal. Gandhi then said that the British should be removed in order to restore the original Hindustan and that only thereafter the rival claims could be adjusted so that we may have one Hindustan or many Pakistans. Later, however Gandhi declared Free India will be no Hindu Raj. It will be Indian Raj.217 Accordingly, Gandhi saw Hindustan as one, and while he would eventually accept Pakistan as a political reality, this was not his intention. His use of religious symbolism, such as Ramarajya, satyagraha, and ahimsa, nevertheless upset Muslims particularly Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah, though he was a secular Muslim, could not identify with the use of such imagery, particularly because it originated from a religion other than his own. Furthermore, it can be argued that Jinnahs distaste with the use of Dharmic terms acted as contributing factor in his ideological transformation and eventual affiliation with the Pakistan movement. Jawaharlal Nehru had a similar but even more practical outlook on Hindustan. During Nehrus imprisonment from 1942 to 1946 in Ahmednagar, Nehru penned the Discovery of India. In it, he wrote
217

Ghose, Sankar. Mahatma Gandhi. (New Delhi, India: Allied Publishers Limited, 1991) 316.

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In recent years a great deal has been said on the future of India, and especially on the partition or unity of India and yet the astonishing fact remains that those who propose Pakistan or partition have consistently refused to define what they mean or to consider the implications of such a division. They move on the emotional plane only, as also many of those who oppose them, a plan of imagination and vague desire, behind which lie imagined interests. Inevitably, between these two emotional and imaginative approaches there is no meeting ground and so Pakistan and Akhand Hindustan are bandied about and hurled at each other. It is at least equally clear that group emotions conscious and subconscious must be attended to. It is at least equally clear that fact and realities do not vanish from ignoring them or covering them up as a film of emotion. They have a way of emerging at awkward moments and in unexpected ways and decisions taken primarily on the basis of emotions or where emotions are domination concentration, are likely to be wrong and led to dangerous developments. 218 Thus, while Nehru opposed partition, he, as a politician, was willing to compromise on the grounds of rationality. As Gandhis secular partner in the Congress leadership, Nehru represented a more modern outlook on Hindustan. Keeping true to his word, Nehru would not let his emotions get the best of him when partition really took place in 1947, as he reluctantly agreed to the creation of Pakistan. Even then, there were alternative and competing visions for Hindustan beyond the Hindu nationalists and the Congress Party. The Hindustan Republican Association, which was formed in October 1924 in Kanpur in the United Provinces, had a different concept of the land they called Hindustan than the INC. 219 Left of centre, they were more than willing to commit themselves to an armed struggle for independence from the British. Under the collective leadership of Chandrashekhar Azad and their adoption of the socialist creed, the organisation was renamed as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. Unlike Mangal Pandey, who lived in an age prior to nationalisms mainstream appeal in India and whose motives may be called into question220, men such as Lajpat Rai and Bhagat Singh
218 219

Nehru, Jawaharlal. Discovery of India. (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1996) 532. Singh, Vipul. The Pearson Indian History Manual for the UPSC Civil Service Preliminary. (Delhi, India: Dorling Kindersley [India] Pvt. Ltd., 2008) 118. 220 Rudrangshu Mukherjee considers Mangal Pandeys actions as a bout of madness possibly induced by the influence of bhang. Vide Mukherjee, Rudrangshu. Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero? (New Delhi, India: Penguin Books India, 2005) 3

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were nationalist revolutionaries that considered themselves to be fighting a war of independence for the Hindustani nation. The case of Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945), offers another prominent conceptualization with regards to the future of Hindustan. On an October day in Singapore, as commander of the Indian National Army and head of an Indian government in exile, Bose proclaimed the proudest day of his life in the following speech (excerpt): It does not matter who among us will live to see India free. It is enough the India shall be free and that we shall give our all to make her free. May god now bless our army and grant us victory in the coming fight. INQUILAB ZINDABAD! AZAD HIND ZINDABAD!221 Let us draw attention to the last two sentences of this excerpt (in translation) Long live the revolution! Long live free India. Hind is a protracted form of Hindustan in that it lacks the -stan, but nevertheless the meaning is the same. Azad Hind was the Indian government in exile that Bose had established in Singapore. With a capital strategically located in Port Blair, Bose had chosen a place that was no longer under British administration but would eventually find its incorporation into an independent India nation-state four years later. Bose had an admiration for the mechanisms of the fascist states of Nazi Germany and Mussolinis Italy (though not for their ideologies), but the closest inspiration for his vision for Hindustan lay in Turkey with Mustafa Kemal Atatrk (1881-1938). Atatrk, who transformed the dying Ottoman Empire into a secular and modern republic, offered the best model that Bose could conceive for the his nation, the Indian nation, by embodying goals of secularism, modernism, positivism, and rationalism through his Kemalist ideology.

221

Bose, Subhas Chandra. On To Delhi. in Hay, 345.

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While Bose would eventually die for reasons still unknown,222 he represents an important development in the history of Hindustan and its ever-changing perceptions of it. Despite how these different, sometimes bitterly opposed ideologies interpreted Hindustan and what they sought to do for it, there was a new idea on the move: the conception of Pakistan. The call for Pakistan would forever change how Hindustan was interpreted. Two men, Sir Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah emerged as the philosophical223 and political leaders of the Pakistan movement respectively. M.G. Chitkara observes how Earlier Iqbal gave us the Qaumi Taranae Hindustan (The National Song of Hindustan) Saare Jahan se Achha Hindustan Hamara. Hindi hain Ham, watan hai Hindustan Hamara. (The best in the world is our Hindustan. We are Hindies and Hindustan is our Motherland). But later composed Shikwai Muslman (Muslims complaint) proclaiming Muslim hai ham, watan hai Sara Jahan Hamara, (we are Muslims the whole world is our home-land) This became Iqbals most popular poem which he recited first in 1909.224 Advocates of Pakistan in the 1930s had ascribed to a singular, undivided Hindustan just two decades earlier. Iqbals disowning of the Qaumi Taranae Hindustan illustrates how thoughts are susceptible to rejection by some of their staunchest advocates, Iqbal and Jinnah included. Just because Iqbal made a public disavowal of this prominent poem that advocated a singular Hindustan that cut across religious boundaries did not mean that it ceased to be used by Indian nationalists. While these mens attitudes were in a state of flux, Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khans Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College transformed into Aligarh Muslim University.

222

The conventional story is that Bose died in a plane crash. However, the exact nature of Subhas Chandra Boses death remains a source of great curiosity and controversy to this day. For further details, please consult Getz, Marshall J. Subhas Chandra Bose: A Biography. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2002) 110. 223 Muhammad Iqbal was a political leader of the Muslim League. In fact, in 1930, he was elected as president of this party. Since he never lived to see his dream of Pakistan actualized, his post-mortem role in the development of Pakistan is undoubtedly a symbolic one. 224 Chitkara, 3

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Though Aligarh would ultimately remain as part of India, it became a prominent locus of the Pakistan movement.225 In fact, some professors at Aligarh justified the creation of two autonomous provinces inside Hindustan on the grounds that Muslim in the minority provinces needed the full and effective support by the Muslim majority provinces,. Muslims inside Hindustan were to be regarded as a nation in minority and part of a larger nation inhabiting Pakistan and Bengal. There would be defence alliances between the two Muslim states and Hindustan, and adequate safeguards would be incorporated in the constitutions, which obviously would have to be agreed upon by all three states. More over the A.I.M.L. [All-India Muslim League] would be the sole official representative body of the Muslims in Hindustan.226 The ideas that these Aligarh faculty members had would eventually come to fruition with creation of Pakistan. However, it is a vision of Pakistan within Hindustan rather than being separated from it. The demand here is for autonomy, and not independence. The very nomenclature of Pakistan itself does not come without a considerable degree of controversy. Coined in 1933227 by Choudhary Rahmat Ali, the word Pakistan has a double meaning: the land of the Pure and a near acronym for Punjab Afghania (North Western Frontier Province) Kashmir, Iran, Sindh, Tukharistan, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan. What does it mean to be pk? Pak can be understood to mean pure and untainted in a spiritual sense; it is the Muslim equivalent of pavitra for Hindus, acting as the necessary perquisite for worship in the Islamic faith. If a Muslim-majority Pakistan is a pure land, juxtaposed against Hindu-majority Hindustan, it has the troubling connotation of presenting this Hindustan as impure. Purity is a very important virtue in both the Hindu and Muslim faiths, and their opposites are considered as vices in the most inflammatory sense. It is very insulting to both Hindus and

225

Panigrahi, D.N. Indias Partition: The Story of Imperialism in Retreat. (New York: Routledge, 2004) 164. 226 Jalal, Ayesh. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 54. 227 The word Pakistan did not even enter into common parlance until 1940. See Lyon, Peter. Conflict Between India and Pakistan: An Encyclopedia. (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2008) 9

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Muslims living in Hindustan to have their land regarded as impure in comparison to Pakistan. For the Hindu, the Ganges is a sacred and pure river, and it would be a severe insult to have his religion called impure. While Pakistanis did not demand Hindustan to be renamed as Npkistan, name Pakistan by implication is prejudicial because of its identification with a Muslim state as pure. The original Hindustan, the land of the Indus, Sindh would be designated in Pakistan, and most of the river Indus runs its course through Pakistan. The emphasis of Hindu in Hindustan by men such as Jinnah and Savarkar demonstrates how communalist sectarian gravely abused a term such Hindustan which did not carry such a loaded meaning. So offensive was the term Pakistan to the Urdu poet Shamim Kashani that his reply was Say what is Pakistan? Where are we asked to live? What do they mean by it? Do we live in unconsecrated land? The pillars of our faith, do they rest on polluted soil? Scorpion spare! The heart of Chisti bleeds! Is the ground of Ajmer profane?228 As no stranger to controversy, the Muslim League raised provocative slogans like We will take Pakistan just as we once took Hindustan.229 This quote refers to the Islamic conquests of India centuries ago. It communalises the term Hindustan which was previously beyond such communal identities as heathens and infidels. It also raises questions about the meaning of we, essentially by self-alienating Muslims in their own land. The territories of Pakistan constituted a part of Hindustan, and yet the emphasis on a Muslim identity is so strong that it changes the very definition of it. To the Pakistani nationalist, Hindustan is not Pakistan it is the very anti-thesis of Pakistan. Their Quaid-e-

228 229

Ray, 563. Narain, 362.

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Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, however, had his own doubts with Pakistans relation to Hindustan, as he and the Muslim League achieved Pakistan, if not the Pakistan which fully encapsulated their political demands on behalf of Indias Muslims. The consummate Muslim lawyer had a constitutional point, but lost command of the case in the realm of hard politics when he argued that only Hindustan and Pakistan together could constitute a true union of India.230 The decision to name Pakistans neighbouring state as India and not Hindustan complicated Jinnahs assertion further. To Jinnah, Pakistan and Hindustan were the Muslim and Hindu pieces of India respectively. Somehow, Jinnahs hope against all hope was that all intercommunal feeling would subside Hindustan and Pakistan would be able to come together and work out the details.231 Pakistan was still Indian, but it was no longer Hindustan in the sense that it no longer considered itself to be a part of Hindustan. The great irony is that Hindustan had been the term that Muslim rulers, the same ones that Muslim thinkers such as Iqbal alluded to in the past the Mughal Empire and the Delhi Sultanate made use of. Hindustan was not the land of infidels to this pre-communal, pre-national community of sentiment. There was nothing dirty about India to them. While Babur may have had a personal dislike for Hindustan, this is because he was a foreigner and not a Muslim nationalist. The great Akbar and even his less than tolerant great-grandson Aurangzeb made use of this word, as they were the Emperors of Hindustan, and the people of Hindustan were their kings. Hindus and Muslims alike rallied around Bahadur Shah II, because he represented a symbolic if not literal continuation of apotheosis. Savarkar and the Hindutvadis overemphasised the Hindu in Hindustani, deliberately communalising the term. Muslim separatists also fed into this delusion, and even Ayesha Jalal admits that the partition of
230 231

Jalal, The Sole Spokesman, xvii ibid, 259

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1947 was no more than a partial solution to the Muslim minority problem in the subcontinent.232 Hindustan a term that is nearly two thousand years old had expanded to mean the entire subcontinent under the rule of the sultans of Delhi, Mughal emperors, their post-Mughal successors, the Company Bahadur, and the British Raj. On the 14th of August, the territories of Pakistan disowned the name Hindustan with the creation of the Pakistani state just as Iqbal had disowned his most celebrated creation, Sare Jahan Se Accha Hindustan Hamara From then until the present day, Hindustan was confined to India, a multi-confessional, pluralistic state with a Hindu majority and a significant Muslim minority. Hindustan lived on, as a newly independent country, that to quote its first prime minister had finally made a tryst with destiny. On the 15th of August 1947, the notion of Hindustan in its contemporary sense came into being with the creation of the newly-independent nation-state of India. Just three days later, Muhammad Ali Jinnah made delivered an emotional broadcast for Pakistans first Eid: For many, Eid will not be not an occasion of such great joy and rejoicing as in Pakistan. Those of our brethren who are minorities in Hindustan may rest assured that we shall never forget them233 Jinnah addressed India as Hindustan, stressing that it was land of the Hindus, but Hindustan was not to be Indias official name. As per Indias Constitution of 1950, India has two names: India and Bhrat. Jinnah also did not take into consideration that there were a considerable number of Muslims who opposed the partition of India. One of the most prominent was Maulana Azad (1888-1958), who opposed the partition on two major grounds, the first more intuitive than the other: Pakistan divided India, but it also divided
232 233

ibid, xvii. Ahmed, Akbar. Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin. (New York: Routledge 1997) 241.

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the Muslims of India. According to the 1951 census, more than 72 lakh Muslims had migrated from India to Pakistan (a slightly greater number of Hindus and Sikhs had gone in the reverse direction), and yet most of the Muslims within the post-1947 borders of India had opted to remain within an independent India. Hindustanis beyond Hind The Muslims that migrated from India to Pakistan, primarily from Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar, became known as Muhajirs. In West Pakistan, the muhajirs also came to be known as Hindustanis.234 Just like the Christians of Pakistan, Pakistans have retained a minority status (though they are linguistic minority and not a religious one, such as Pakistans small Hindu and Sikh communities) since independence. According to Linda S. Walbridge, The church records in Franciscabad235 do not tell us much about the individuals who settled thereThey and their descendents came to be known as Hindustanis Indians. They were joined later by a few Punjabi families. Though there has been some intermarriage, the two groups form distinct communities in this tiny village. Each group has its own street or galiThe Hindustanis have a lower status in the village than the Punjabis both because of their non-Punjabi roots and because of their lack of local kinship ties. On the other hand, the foreign missionaries who worked long years in Franciscabad speak with particular warmth about the Hindustanis, claiming that they are devoted and loyal Catholics, distinctive for their sincerity and generosity.236 The Hindustanis of Pakistan, some of the most ardent supporters of Pakistani nationalism, who gave up their homes in northern and central India, were still not accepted as being Pakistani enough. The label of Hindustani remained on these peoples, to emphasise that
234

Grover, Verinder and Ranjana Arora. Political System in Pakistan: Pakistan-India Relations. (New Delhi, India Deep & Deep Publications Pvt. Ltd., 1995) 328. 235 Franciscabad was a village established under the British Raj as a Catholic colony in Punjab. After 1947, it fell within Pakistans boundaries. There are numerous towns with similar purposes that were formed around the same time as Franciscabad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries such as Maryabad, Khushpur, and Anthonyabad. Vide Harding, Christopher. Religious Conversions in South Asia: The Meanings of Conversions in South Asia: The Meanings of Conversion in Colonial Punjab. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 242. 236 Walbridge, Linda S. The Christians of Pakistan: The Passion of Bishop John Joseph. (New York: Routledge, 2003) 30.

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they were refugees, as the literal translation of muhajir. While it is an admirable thing for a Muslim to be compared with those who joined Muhammad in the flight (the hijra) from Makkah to Madinah, calling someone a refugee in the pejorative sense is also tantamount to calling them an outsider. The native language of the Muhajirs is Urdu, and while Urdu is the official language of Pakistan, less than one-tenth of Pakistans population consider at as their mother tongue. The shift of the capital from Karachi (a port on the coast of the Arabian Sea, and it was the predominant city in which the Muhajirs settled) to Rawalpindi and subsequently Islamabad in 1956, represents an orientation of state towards Punjabis, the single largest ethno-linguistic group in Pakistan. The competition for economic resources has stimulated persecution against Muhajirs in Pakistan, which has persisted to this day. In 1972, when the Sindhi provincial government declared Sindhi as the sole provincial language of Sindh, severe rioting took place between the Sindhi and Muhajirs. Under a particularly hostile dimension of Sindhi nationalism, the identification of Mohajirs as Hindustanis has aided in the identification of these Urduspeaking peoples as usurpers and foreigners.237 Another major group of Hindustanis lay in East Pakistan. These Hindustanis were known as Biharis, as the prevalent majority of the one lakh muhajirs migrated from the Indian state of Bihar into East Pakistan during the course of partition in 1947.238 When Bengali nationalism challenged and ultimately debunked the Two Nation Theory with the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971239, the case of the Biharis demonstrates a faction of

237

Minahan, James. Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations: L-R. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002) 1277. 238 Van Schendel, Willem. Willem. A History of Bangladesh. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 110. 239 Sarkar, Sumit. The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. (New Delhi: Permanent Black Books, 2010) 347

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resiliently loyal supporters to the Pakistani state in the east.240 Unlike the Bengali-speaking natives of East Pakistan, the Biharis spoke Urdu, the sole official language of Pakistan until Bengali was adopted as Pakistans second official language in 1954.241 This alienated the Biharis, who spoke a language that only 1% of East Pakistan could identify as their mother tongue.242 During Pakistans administration of East Bengal, Biharis were disproportionately overrepresented in the public sector. West Pakistans preference for the Biharis over the Bengalis (who were regarded as tainted Muslims who need purification from their Hindu-like traditions, such as writing in a script which evolved from Sanskrit and used more Sanskrit-derived vocabulary)243 only added to the resentment that the Bengalis had for the Bihari people. In the course of the Bangladeshi Liberation War in 1971, Pakistan mounted the paramilitary forces of Al-Badr, Ash-Shams, and the Razakars. While the first two groups were dominated by Bengali Muslims who remained loyal to Pakistan, it was the razakars244 who were primarily of Bihari origin, though Ash-Shams is known to have Biharis among them as well. These armed groups, along with infantry divisions that were flown in from West Pakistan, attempted to quell the Mukti Bahini insurgency. In the process, they killed Bengali intellectuals, targeted East Bengali Hindus for ethnic cleansing, raped thousands of women, and slaughtered countless numbers of people. When Bangladesh independence was achieved later that year, the Pakistani paramilitary forces would be disbanded and Biharis in general would be made to pay collectively for the crimes of the collaborators
240 241

Van Schendel, 173. Everaert, Christine. Tracing the Boundaries between Hindi and Urdu: Lost and Added in Translation between 20th Century Short Stories. (Leiden, Netherlands: Koiniklije Brill NV) 265. 242 Ibid, 265. 243 Van Schendel, 110. 244 Farsi for volunteer

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among them. The Biharis in essence became a stateless people, which they remained so until May 2008. Even today, there are 1.6 lakh stateless Biharis who live in 116 makeshift camps in Bangladesh, particularly in Dhaka. Residing in abject poverty, they lack the most essential of amenities, such as running water, latrines, and sanitation.245 The plight of the Biharis is a testament to another stranded community of Hindustanis. Consolidating a Country Effective 15 August 1947, India was an independent country with Nehru as Prime Minister and General Mountbatten now Governor-General. Mountbatten made it clear to the various princes that they would have to either join India or Pakistan. The status of three princely states, however, remained unsettled at the stroke of the midnight hour: Kashmr, Hyderabad, and Jngadh in Gujarat. Kashmir and Hyderabad want to remain independent, but Kashmir was the Hindu sovereign over a Muslim-majority state while the situation was inversed in Hyderabad, with a Muslim ruler presiding over a predominantly Hindu region of India. Jngadh wanted to join Pakistan, but its largely Hindu population had determined otherwise in a plebiscite, and with Indian military action, it was incorporated into Hindustan. In September 1948, Hyderabad was also brought under the mantle of India through Operation Polo under the orders of Sardar Patel. Kashmir, however, remained the most contentious of these former princely states. Though Hari Singh desired to explore the possibilities of independence, because of the influx of tribal warriors supported by Pakistan, the Hindu maharaja agreed to join India in exchange for military support against these aggressors. Kashmirs transition into Indian
245

Hussain, Khalid. The End of Bihari Statelessness. Forced Migration Review, Apr2009, Issue 32, p30-31. http://web.ebscohost.com.central.ezproxy.cuny.edu:2048/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer? vid=1&hid=111&sid=cdced95c-7ce3-4883-9382-a78b25e13941%40sessionmgr112 Academic Search Complete. (accessed 23 May 2010).

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suzerainty was complicated through the efforts of Sheikh Abdullah. Abdullah was a Kashmir nationalist, but also a friend of the Hindu Pandit now Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru agreed to offer Kashmir the greatest autonomy of all the former princely states, and yet problems persisted with Pakistan. India went to the United Nations which helped broker a ceasefire in 1949, establishing Indias boundary with Pakistan. Pakistan took one-third of the region which it dubbed Azad Kashmir, an area known to this day in India as Pakistani-occupied Kashmir. India retained the central, eastern, and southern portions of Kashmir. To this day, Kashmirs relation with India and Pakistan is a troubled one, because Kashmiri nationalism had developed independently of its Indian and Pakistani counterparts. While the pre-national sense of Hindustan could have accommodated Kashmir fairly well, the nationalist imagination whether it is a Pakistani, Indian, or Kashmiri one for that matter cannot offer such an accommodation due to its limited and sovereign nature.246

A Constitutional Calling On 26 January 1950, Indias constitution came into being. The short lived Dominion of India was replaced with a full-fledged Republic of India.247 As far as the Constitution of India is concerned, neither was Hindi considered to be Hindustani nor was India considered to be Hindustan.

246

Zutshi, Chitralekha. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 2. 247 At this point, Mountbatten had already been replaced with C. Rajagoplachari as the Acting GovernorGenera of India. Mountbatten went on leave to Britain for the marriage of a then Princess Elizabeth (currently the Queen of England, Elizabeth II) to Prince Phillip. Mountbattens first choice for a replacement was Sardar Vallabhai Patel, but neither Patel nor Nehru agreed to this. As the first and only Indian Governor-General of India and Mountbattens second choice for this now abolished position, Rajagopalachari served from 21 June 1948 until Republic Day 1950. Vide Smith, Bardwell l. Religion and the Legitimation of Power in South Asia. (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1978) 53.

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The national anthem of India is Jana Gana Mana. In this song, India is mentioned as Bharat and not Hindustan. The word Bharat is used in the following context Jana-ganamana-adhinayaka, jaya he...Bharata-bhagya-vidhata meaning Thou art the dispenser of Indias destiny.248 The intended meaning of Thou is up to debate, as the song was presented to George V upon his coronation as Emperor of Hindustan.249 Given that India was now independent of British rule, this interpretation is absolutely unacceptable. Thus, Thou as used to mean God is more appropriate for the dispensation of Indias destiny. Hindustan is not mentioned in Indias national song Vande Mataram either. In 1947, this song was rejected as the national anthem precisely because of its provocative religious imagery. Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, and the members of Arya Samaj could all object to the conception of the Indian nation as Bharat Mata, notionally identifiable with the mother goddess Durga. Nevertheless, due to the efforts of Rajendra Prasad, who presided over the Constituent Assembly in 1950, a concession was made to acknowledge Vande Mataram as Indias national song with a status on par with Jana Gana Mana. The difference between a national song and a national anthem remains a technicality. To this day, the connotative meaning of Vande Mataram is up to debate, even from Indias minority groups themselves. Unlike Vande Mataram, Sare Jahan Se Achcha advocates a secular love of the nation without having to resort to references to Durga. Rather than a controversy over its lyrics as was the case with Chatterjis work250, it is the

248

Agrawal, S.P. Information India 1997-98 and 1998-99: Global View. (New Delhi, India: Concept Publishing Company, 1994) 111 249 Embree, 279. 250 As we have seen in the past chapter, Bankim Chandra Chatterji is not without his own share of controversy. As controversial as Chatterji was, he did not advocate Pakistan, and in the years following partition, it was much more difficult for Iqbals work to get official recognition from the Indian government as a national anthem or song.

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lyricist that proves as a contentious obstacle to the adoption of Sare Jahan Se Achcha within Indian nationalist culture. The Fate of Tarana-e-Hind What beccame of Iqbals Qaumi Tarana-e-Hindi in an independent Hindustan? It has no official status in the Republic of India. Nevertheless, India nationalists have continued to use it even after Dr. Iqbal disowned it and his dream of Pakistan was actualised. Posthumously honoured as Pakistans national poet, Iqbals cross-communal verses (at a time before he advocated sectarian politics) was not to be incorporated into a state that adhered an overtly Islamic identity. David Barsamian sums up the irony related Dr. Iqbal: Recently I was doing a documentary on nationalism for the BBC. I had wanted to put in one segment that doesnt appear actually in the film, unfortunately, which is that Iqbal Day in Pakistan is celebrated officially as the founders day, precisely because he is projected as the man who conceptualised Pakistan. Hes the founding father in some ways. He imagined Pakistan before Jinnah thought of it. At the same time hes the poet who said, Sare Jahan Se Achcha Hindustan Hamara. In the whole world there is no country better than our India. Exactly. But you have this phenomenon of his being portrayed in Pakistan as the father of Pakistani nationalism. In India, on Republic Day, January 26, the Indian army beat the retreat to Sare Jahan Se Achcha. And the Indian parliament, I am told, failed to adopt it as the national anthem by two votes. So India ended up with a Tagore song as its national anthem. Bangladesh also ended up with a Tagore song as its national anthem. So Tagore, an anti-nationalist, ended up providing the national anthem to two countries of South Asia. Iqbal has ended up providing no anthem whatsoever, because the only one that he wrote that could have been adopted would have been Indias.251 Barsamian makes an interesting point about Tagores anti-nationalist stance. In fact, Tagore was a severe critic of Western nationalism, presenting his own philosophical alternative to the nation with Swadeshi Samaj ideology, which demands a set of social relations that are not mechanical and impersonal but based on love and cooperation, of a

251

Barsamian, David. Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2000) 12.

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society where everyone is in tune with everyone else in the world.252 It is true that the younger Rabindranth Tagore was an advocate of nationalism during the first decade of the 1900s, but he gradually became disillusioned with it. The First World War marked Tagores conversion to the anti-nationalist stance that Barsamian talks about. In the same way that Iqbal lost faith in a united Hindustan with Hindus and Muslims work under the secular banner of mazhab nahin sikhana, Tagore had fallen out of love with Indian nationalism as the 1910s drew to a close. Indian nationalists have managed to carefully ignore the complexity of the Tagores and Iqbals philosophies (and their ideological transformations) so as to utilise poetry of these men for their national agenda. Even then, Pakistan could not accept Saare Jahan Se Achcha because this represented how the young Iqbal used to think, but the Government of India could not official accept this song because of who the mature Iqbal had in fact become. In addition to Tarana-e-Hind, Iqbal had another tarana (anthem). This poem was called Tarana-e-Milli. Frances Prichett notes how compared to Tarana-e-Hind, By contrast, 'Taranah-e Milli' (1910) seems to received much less attention. I've never heard anyone sing or even recite it, and until I came upon it in Iqbal's kulliyaat I had no idea that it existed. But that may just reflect my own lack of exposure. In any case, the two together obviously have a story to tell, about the direction of Iqbal's thought over time. I'm going to keep an eye out for references to either one. 253 Prichett is oblivious to how the first stanza of Iqbals Tarana-e-Milli, chn-o-Arab hamr, hindostn hamr, is very similar to the title of a Hindi song released in the film Phir Subah Hogi (1958). This song features Raj Kapoor, the protagonist of the film, as well as the voice of Mukesh, the music of Khayyam and the lyrics of Sahir Ludhianvi. In its own

252

Gupta, Kalyan Sen. The Philosophy of Rabindranth Tagore. (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1988) 50 253 Pritchett, Frances. A Study in Contrasts. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/taranahs/juxtaposition.html (accessed 24 January 2011).

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day, the song was extremely controversial. It is without coincidence that the song bears such a striking similarity to Iqbals own words. Ludhianvi, a Marxist who fled Lahore for Delhi and subsequently Bombay after a warrant for his arrest was issued by the Government of Pakistan254, had in fact intended the song as a parody of Iqbals Saare Jahaan Se Achcha.255 As a person who was known to have written some of Indias most memorable patriotic songs in the years prior, Sahirs decision to author this song represents an expression of his disillusionment with the Nehru-run establishment. It is not that Sahir Ludhianvi was not hostile to the concept of Hindustan itself, but his dissatisfaction with Indias government represented an avenue for him to creatively express himself through a social drama such as Phir Subah Hogi and a popular political satire such as Chin-o-Arab Hamara. The year 1945 marked the end of World War II, but it was also the year in which Ravi Shankar set Iqbals poem to music.256 The first, third, fourth, and sixth stanzas have acted as Indias unofficial anthem,257 while also serving as the official quick march of the Indian armed forces.258 It is thus as Pandit Shankars Hindustani259 marching tune 260, that this song has some kind of sanction from the government, and thus Iqbals vision of Hindustan in 1904 is able to last all the way into the present day in some manifestation. It is not being sung to, however, and the silence over that is a most conspicuous one.
254

The publication of inflammatory writings in his Urdu magazine Savera resulted in the decision by the Pakistani government to demand Ludhianvis incarceration. 255 Gulzar, Govind Nihilani, and Saibal Chatterjee. Encyclopedia of Hindi Cinema. (Mumbai, India: Encyclopaedia Britannica (India) Pvt., 2003) 289. 256 Kumar, Raj. Essays on Indian Music. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Discovery Publishing House, 2003) 209 257 Pritchett, Frances. A Study in Contrasts. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/taranahs/juxtaposition.html (accessed 25 January 2011). 258 Gaur, Mahendra. Indian Affairs Annual, Volume 2. (Delhi, India: Kalpaz Publications 2005) 232. 259 As in the style of North Indian music. 260 Makkuni, Ranjit. Eternal Design of the Multimedia Museum. (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company 2005) 142

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It was not from the government but from an emerging Hindi movie industry that the popularised vocal versions of Sare Jahan Se Achcha came about. Its usage in films such as Bhai Bahen (1950) and Dharmputra (1961) have helped to maintain, if not evoke a popular Indian nationalist culture in the years after Indias independence. Even if a song about Hindustan has no official place in the Constitution of India, the employment of this song by various Bollywood production houses has helped to maintain an unofficial aura of sanctity around it. One fairly recent version has intertwined Bankim Chandra Chatterjis Vande Mataram with some lines of Iqbals piece in the film Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001). The Bombay film industry has played a tremendous role in sustaining a Hindustani culture especially through the continued use of Hindustani as the language of mainstream cinema in India. Even though there are a plethora of regional films in languages such as Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, and the various Dravidian tongues of the South, it is the Hindi commercial film industry that first comes to mind when the term Indian movie is discussed. While Bengali films may be popular in West Bengal and across the border in Bangladesh, Hindi films captivate large audiences not only in Hindustani heartland of Uttar Pradesh and Bihr, but across the Indian nation and throughout the world by Desis and pardesis alike. Through the exhibition of vibrant song and dance sequences, Bollywood films are able to portray Indian culture, reclaim their diasporas, demonstrate piety and patriotism, and foster a cultural affiliation to the land, heritage, and traditions of Hindustan.261

261

Bhattacharjya, Nilanjana. Popular Hindi Film Song Sequences Set in the Indian Diaspora and the Negotiating of Indian Identity. Asian Music, no. 1, Winter / Spring 2009, pp. 53-82. Project Muse. http://muse.jhu.edu.central.ezproxy.cuny.edu:2048/journals/asian_music/v040/40.1.bhattacharjya.html (accessed 6 April 2011).

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In 1984, Rakesh Sharma became Indias first cosmonaut. When asked by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, How does India look from there? Sharma replied Sare Jahan Se Achcha.262 Though the question in the original Hindi did not refer to India as Hindustan but as Bharat, and Sharma did not complete his sentence with Hindustan hamara, Sharmas response is a clear allusion to Iqbals famous poem. So momentous was the Tarana-e-Hind that its nationalist refrain would be called out from space. Years later, as part of the festivities marking 50th anniversary of Indian independence in 1997, Lata Mangeshkars rendition of the song rang out.263 Just four years into the new millennium, Tarana-e-Hind marked its centenary.264 Shortly thereafter, Indias tourism ministry has also made extensive use of Sare Jahan Se Achcha through its Incredible India! campaign. As one of the premier theme songs to this campaign, a 61-second video has presented India as a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-confessional country with images of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Buddhists. Not only is the song a promotion for economic investment to come and visit India for the purposes of tourist, it is also in the greater sense a testimony to nationalist propaganda.265 As a demonstration of how Indias Ministry of Tourism conceives of Hindustan. This perception demonstrates how Hindustan can be used interchangeably with India. Thus, Hindustan in this video is neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh. As diverse a community is this is geographically, the Hindustan of this video is a national community nevertheless. This Hindustan of Incredible India campaign is not the
262 263

Ramunny, Murkot. The Sky was the Limit. (New Delhi, India: Northern Book Centre 1997) 7. Kudaisya, Gyanesh and Tai Yong Tan. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. (New York: Routledge, 1997) 3. 264 Pritchett, Frances. A Study in Contrasts. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/taranahs/juxtaposition.html (accessed 25 January 2011). 265 Not in the pejorative sense.

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Hindustan that Iqbal wrote about in 1904 because it cannot be forgotten that partition has still taken place (thereby divorcing such areas as Western Punjab, Baluchistan, Sindh, and Eastern Bengal from the concept of Hindustan) even though it still has elements of crosscommunal unity. What makes Hindustan of the Mughals different from Iqbals Hindustan is that the Mughal imperial realm did not have a nationalistic culture. While the cult of the Mughal emperor contained certain feelings that would eventually be incorporated into a nationalist understanding of Hindustan in the decades after the mutiny, it cannot be stressed enough how the Mughals were not Indian nationalists. By Iqbals time, Hindustan became a market place for different national communities. Some nationalist ideologies succeeded (namely India, Pakistan, and eventually Bangladesh), others did not (e.g. the Princely States). The issue of Kashmir complicates these matters even further, as even though an independent Kashmir has not been actualised, the idea of Kashmiri nationhood is certainly thriving. What happened in 1947 shrank the boundaries of Hindustan and equated them with India.

Conclusion In the twenty-first century, Hindustan has no official status in India. In constitutional parlance, the word simply does not exist. A term that has been used by generations of Hindustanis and others from Shprs third century inscriptions onward has no place in a modern Indian setting. The fact that communalists Hindus and Muslims alike have overemphasised the Hinduness of Hindustan is particularly distressing. This, however, does not mean that Hindustan is not and cannot be a secular term, or at least a term used without inherent religious meaning. The example of sultans of Delhi and the

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Timurid emperors serves as a testament to Muslims who took pride in being integral to Hindustan. Most of the Indus River flows in present-day Pakistan, but because of sectarian politics, the river that gave Hindustan its very name is no longer regarded as part of todays Hindustan. It is utterly regrettable that this term is still held captive by those people that think Hindustan must mean land of the Hindus. Such a view is both ignorant of Hindustans historical context and antithetical to its intended geographical rather than religious usage. The Indian constitutions silence on Hindustan has served as a concession to communalists. Hindustan is currently at a crossroads. It has been nationalised and communalised from the felt community that preceded it. The land that the Sassanians first called Hindustan (Sindh) is now a Pakistani province, and if the demands of Sindhi nationalists are to be a realised sometime in the future, it might actually become a new country called Sindhudesh.266 This would be very ironic, as Sindhudesh is highly Sanskritic in its nomenclature. Today, Hindustan is a label for two geographical regions: the Republic of India, and an area entirely within it where Hindustani languages such as Hindi and Urdu are spoken. There are some Indian peoples that are explicitly known as Hindustanis such as those in Pakistan (particularly in Karachi). Even though the 1947 partition divided Hindustani into Hindi and Urdu in South Asia, faraway in Fiji and Suriname, these languages are still known as Hindustani to this day. Hindustani is also an Indian classical musical style that has its core region in Uttar Pradesh, where Hindu and Muslim musicians are engaged in a cross-communal cultural exercise. The felt community of Hindustan has now been nationalised, but bits and pieces of it remain within the rural regions of India.
266

Korejo, Muhammad Soaleh. G.M, Syed: An Analysis of His Political Perspectives. (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2000) 85.

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More than 60 years after India is a republic, the Baadshah-i-Hind is no longer a ruler. The Pradhn Mantri267 of Bharat is the leader of the worlds largest democracy. Hindustan lives on, but as a concept, it represents on of the most viable alternatives to Indian nationalism.

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