Dhulipala's first two degrees were from Hyderabad. Facile was born in Zanzibar & studied in Canada & the US. Unlike Venkat, Devji has zero emic knowledge of Urdu speaking Indians.
Venkat Dhulipala’s book reads like a long love-letter to the Pakistani-American historian Ayesha Jalal.
No. It reads like a book by a Hyderabadi Hindu who is not interested in elderly American ladies who left Lahore at the age of 14.
Like any traditional lover, Dhulipala accuses his beloved of betrayal. So he suggests Jalal’s argument about Jinnah using the demand for Pakistan as a “bargaining counter”, to arrive at a one-state solution that Congress rejected, is disingenuous at best.
Jalal was saying 'Jinnah was as stupid as shit. Thank God I got out of the shithole he created when I was 14'. This may be disingenuous or it may simply be a case of one stupid person thinking a clever lawyer was actually as stupid as shit.
Yet like all such lovers Dhulipala remains faithful to his beloved,
plenty of jealous husbands are banging anything with a vagina
since he is unable to break free of her spell, and can only affirm what she denies or deny what she affirms.
Dhulipala is from India. For people of his generation, Ambedkar's view of Pakistan is important because Indian Dalits are politically important. Jalal is not. Senile Commie shitheads are not.
Indeed given the fact Jalal’s book no longer commands the field
it never did. Still, if you want a strawman, go after her by all means.
– for which the work of scholars like Farzana Shaikh or Christophe Jaffrelot stands as proof
Indians think both are shit. The fact is, there is a lot of continutity in Indian politics. Since the Muslim vote matters, getting Muslim political history right is worthwhile. Don't forget, Owaisi is from Hyderabad. It is said he is planning to contest 200 seats in UP.
– Dhulipala’s interest in her appears obsessional. How else are we to account for the fact that he spends 500 pages arguing against a thesis put forward some 30 years ago?
Commies were obliged to tell stupid lies to their students about the Party's support for the creation of religion based states like Israel & Pakistan . Also, courting the Muslim vote isn't hypocritical at all. Stalin explained all this to Engels in 1848.
Is this a testament to Jalal’s seductive power, the poverty of Pakistani historiography or Dhulipala’s own lack of imagination?
Dhulipala is not writing about Pakistan. He is writing about UP in India.
Dhulipala’s book wears a curiously dated aspect,
because it is concerned with stuff which happened ninety years ago.
rehearsing as it does debates going back much further than Ayesha Jalal’s book, to the 1930s, as if to fight their battles all over again. We see this kind of thing happening on social media all the time, where quarrels about the “Aryan Invasion” or “Muslim Intolerance” are endlessly replayed, but don’t expect them to become the subject of an academic tome.
Like Facile's 'Muslim Zion'?
Is it because Indian history writing, in the wake of Subaltern Studies, has returned to the status quo-ante, in which national, imperial and Marxist histories square off against each other?
Dhulipala emigrated. He is an American pedagogue teaching cretins. Still his lectures- particularly on Ambedkar as the father of Partition Studies- went down well in India.
For whatever else may be said about it, Subaltern Studies had criticised all three of these historiographical traditions, though they seem to have survived it and are even enjoying a revival today. It need not be said that Creating a New Medina belongs in the camp of national or rather Congress history, and its frankly partisan character (where Muslim Leaguers are invariably described as speaking “piously” or “smugly” while Congressmen do so “sagely”) is indeed its most attractive feature.
For Indians- sure. What's wrong with Indians preferring a narrative which makes their leaders look good?
Pakistan imagined
It is refreshing to see an author abandon the kind of mealy-mouthed narrative in which all characters end up looking equally good or bad, to make a set of strong historical arguments. But how strong are they? It is difficult to see Dhulipala’s criticism of Ayesha Jalal, with whose thesis I also disagree, as anything more than a travesty of her argument.
Is there a 'steelman' he can go after? Not to my knowledge. Jalal had actually lived in Pakistan. Facile has no emic knowledge of the sub-continent.
For the “bargaining counter” theory not only pre-dates Jalal’s book, having been a favorite explanation of Jinnah’s politics among his enemies in the Congress, it is not even one she argues. Instead Jalal claims that Jinnah’s politics was defined by the effort to come to an arrangement with Congress on the communal question that included partition as one among a number of options, and indeed she ends her study by describing how he attempted to reach such an agreement even after Pakistan’s creation.
So, she was a patriot, according to her own lights. Nothing wrong with that. The truth is that Congress Ministries spooked the Muslims. It turned out that 'Nai Talim' was (as Zakir Hussain himself said) a fraud. Hindus wanted to promote Hindu values and would do so where they were the majority. Meanwhile, they were Hinduizing the Muslims- getting them to give up beef and sing Vande Mataram and so forth. Why not at least try to create a Medina on the soil of the sub-continent? The alternative would be for idealistic young Muslims to follow the siren song of Sovetization.
Now I think the question of responsibility for partition a dull and legalistic one, not least because it reduces the history of political ideas to one of tactics, but if Dhulipala is so invested in disproving Jalal’s argument he should at least get it right.
Dhulipala may have found that his American colleagues had read, or had met Jalal. He may have believed that the Americans were inclined to believe that Pakistan wasn't really Islamic. It was a corrupt place where the almighty dollar was stronger than Allah.
It seems as if Dhulipala has been seduced by a formulaic summary of Jalal’s book, the kind that students often memorise to pass exams. Perhaps not accidentally, his own book is largely made up of such summaries, which are strung together to demonstrate its argument more by dint of repetition than analysis.
I suppose it was based on lectures he had given.
In the ceaseless repetition of what can only be described as scoring points about the Muslim League’s desire to pose India a military threat or hold Hindu and Sikh minorities as “hostages”,
the 'hostage' theory was real enough. What mattered was whether those who backed Pakistan would be richly compensated for any land or property they had to leave behind on the other side of the border.
Dhulipala again appears to adopt the style of polemics on social media, where endless “proofs” of varying quality are adduced to deliver one’s opponent a knockout blow. Yet despite marshalling all this evidence, he refuses to discuss the most important demonstration Ayesha Jalal provides for her argument – Jinnah’s willingness to give up his demand for Pakistan on the very eve of partition – during the Cabinet Mission talks of 1946.
He wanted the whole of Punjab and Bengal for his own party. This was a greater Pakistan within a weak, federal, India. The premise was that the Congress party would accept 'compulsory' grouping. But if Congress had refused to bow to the Brits, why the fuck would they bow to the Muslims?
And while Congress was no doubt right in rejecting this offer, in view of the weak state it would have created, Jinnah’s climb-down does enough harm to Dhulipala’s thesis to merit more than the two asides he devotes to it.
There was no 'climb-down'. Instead, there was a 10 year secession clause- i.e. from the League's point of view, Pakistan- that too a greater Pakistan with significant non-Muslim majority territory- was merely delayed.
Dhulipala’s argument is itself both simple and familiar, that Pakistan was fulsomely and from the very beginning imagined as a religious state with a Pan-Islamic mission.
Whereas the truth is that Jinnah was a Buddhist Lesbian. Liaquat, however, wished Pakistan to be ruled by Irish leprechauns.
He ridicules the idea that it was, in Salman Rushdie’s memorable phrase, “insufficiently imagined”, and assumes that no historian before him was aware of the many ways in which Muslims “imagined” the country that would be created in their name.
It would be fair to say that Communists believed in Stalin's nationality theory such that various cosmetic 'stans' would be created but all power would rest with a Supreme Soviet.
But surely the point is not that such an imagination existed, as, after all, did its “Hindu” equivalent, even at the heart of the Congress in Gandhi’s “Ram Raj”.
But the younger Congressmen wanted 'scientific socialism'. The problem was land reform. Who would bell that cat? Would doing so lead to a scissors crisis (i.e. not enought food reaching the cities from the countryside)? The other big question was linguistic reorganisation & integration of the Princely States. India successfully dealt with both questions. Pakistan did not. It broke in two.
What was insufficient about the way Pakistan was imagined, rather, was that having been created less than a decade after it was proposed, the country lacked a tradition of sustained constitutional debate and institutional practice, to say nothing of the cultural shaping of a citizen-subject.
Iskandar Mirza fucked up Pakistan. Interestingly, the same thing happened in Burma. A civilian administration invites in the Army to implement Martial Law. The army decides to get rid of the civilans.
In other words the varied and luxuriant visions of an Islamic utopia Dhulipala points to
were what actual Muslims were actually saying. The spirit of 'hijrat' had revived. People were willing to uproot themselves to settle in 'the new Medina'.
derive from the absence of a strong national imagination, if that word is used to mean something more than a literary narrative—as in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Ronald Inden’s Imagining India or Sudipta Kaviraj’s The Imaginary Institution of India.
This is imaginary scholarship by people who don't understand and can't shape any sort of history whatsoever. By contrast, Dhulipala appears a true prophet of the Pakistan of Field Marshall Munir- the son of an actual mullah.
It is precisely because the “ideological” way of imagining a new society possessed so little juridical precedent or political context that Pakistan proved so difficult to mould into a nation-state.
The Army is the State. Its ideology is now wholly Islamic. The days of the whiskey drinking General speaking in a clipped Sandhurst accent are gone for good.
Now to say that Pakistan was “insufficiently imagined” as a nation-state is not to claim, as Dhulipala seems to think, that it was unintended or lacked a positive character. Indeed I have argued in my own book on Muslim nationalism that for a number of historical reasons, it took an ambiguous if not contradictory form by founding a state outside the legitimising vocabulary of blood and soil, history and geography, to focus on ideas alone.
Nonsense! Pakistan was like Northern Ireland. Ideas didn't matter. Religious bigotry did.
And it was precisely because this “ideological” way of imagining a new society possessed so little juridical precedent or political context, that it proved so difficult to mould into a nation-state.
Pakistan became the first Islamic Republic in the world in 1956. Mauritania was the next in 1958. Iran became an Islamic Republic in 1979.
Dhulipala, however, is not concerned with the novelty of this political vision – and in fact thinks it to be neither very original nor even political – but instead nothing more than old-fashioned religion, which, in an equally archaic notion, he imagines as filling the masses with “enthusiasm” (p. 354).
You will see no 'enthusiasm' amongst the millions of Muslim pilgrims in Mecca. They don't pray. They dance disco- right?
He might as well have said “fanaticism”, for which enthusiasm was, after all, once a synonym, since Dhulipala considers Islam to be an irrational element that, in explaining the paradox of Muslims in UP acting against their own interests in voting for Pakistan, actually explains nothing.
There is a reward in Heaven for doing what Religion wants you to do even if you suffer on earth for it. A lot of Hindus did pointless Gandhian shite because they thought they were getting good karma and thus would be reborn on a paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures.
Equating Muslim nationalism and Islam
Is like equating Hindu nationalism with Hinduism.
The Islam that Dhulipala writes about is a stereotype, as when he describes the madah-e sahaba conflict between Shias and Sunnis in 1939 Lucknow as an example of the behaviour to be expected from the “two warring sects of Islam” (p. 117).
Facile was writing this when there was far worse Shia/Sunni violence in Iraq.
The fact that this conflict was unprecedented
The precedents begin with the Battle of Siffin- which was fought from May to July 657 CE. Devji's own Ismaili ancestors may have been chased out of Sindh by Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century.
and had a context-specific history and politics, as Justin Jones has demonstrated in his book Shia Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism, is of no consequence.
My father had an Iraqi friend who blamed the Nawabs of Avadh for creating Shia/Sunni animosity by sending so much money to Najaf & Kerbala.
But his focus on old-time religion also means that Dhulipala sees Muslim divines as its only representatives.
No. He sees them as being represented by the JUM which was a fairly important player before the League swept the polls in 1946.
At no point does he consider the fact that so many of the Muslim League’s leaders and propagandists were products of a reformed or modernist Islam, like that retailed by the Aligarh Movement, and that it was this version of the religion that defined the party’s Islamic vocabulary – to the degree of subordinating clerics and Sufis to it.
The dude is Indian. He knows about this because plenty of Indian political or administrative dynasties were associated with Aligarh, Osmania, Jamia Millia etc.
This is certainly true of the way in which they used the term “Islam” to name a “complete way of life” that not coincidentally dovetailed with modern-day and totalitarian ideologies, as Marcus Daechsel has argued in The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Pakistan.
In UP, the rise and consolidation of Hindu power was bound to cause a reaction. Could Muslims retain affirmative action? Not after Partition. Sad.
Dhulipala is happy to compare the League’s ideology with Nazism but instead of taking its ideas seriously, he insists on giving them a purely religious weight – and so effectively depoliticises the Pakistan movement.
Facile thinks Nazism wasn't political. It's main focus was on ecumenical cheese fondling.
This focus on the religious dimension of Muslim nationalism, of course, had been characteristic of Congress secularism’s efforts to delegitimise its rivals—while Hindu nationalism to its credit always recognised the Muslim League as its political enemy.
Congress & the League had allied in 1916. Maybe, if Gandhi hadn't unilaterally surrendered in 1922, the Congress/Khilafat combine would have had a common anti-Imperialist ideology. Hindu nationalists would have been cool with that. After all, Amba Prasad Sufi was a martyr in that cause.
But despite stressing the importance of the ulema and their brand of Islam, Dhulipala is unable to make a convincing case for the Muslim League subscribing to it, apart from telling us that Jinnah prayed in public once or twice – but then so did the Congress’s Hindu leaders.
Jinnah's 'two nation theory' was not based on religion. He argued that Lesbians, like himself, were a separate nation. They wanted to create a pure land for themselves where dicks would be banned.
Sadly, Liaquat Ali Khan was a bigotted Buddhist heterosexual. In 1949, he introduced the Objectives Resolution, which laid the foundation for Pakistan's constitution. It affirmed that sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Almighty Buddha, and delegated authority to be exercised by the people of Pakistan through a democratic system guided by heterosexual principles of social justice, equality, democracy and all men having a ginormous Buddhist dick.
His chief example of a Muslim Leaguer who imagined Pakistan as an “Islamic state”, is the Raja of Mahmudabad,
Venkat portrays him as a pious and charitable man who wore 'khaddar' & wanted the League to embrace socio-economic reform
a Shia aristocrat who we are told was deeply troubled by the future of his sect in a Sunni-dominated country.
He took Pakistani citizenship in 1957. Back then, even Ahmadiyas were tolerated.
This is not very convincing support for the ulema whose importance Dhulipala extols.
The priests of a religion are important for that religion and gain in importance if a country is created in the name of that religion.
Even by his own evidence, Dhulipala’s Muslim divines seem to have been more interested in circumscribing the role of the post-colonial state, whether Indian or Pakistani, than in creating an Islamic one.
They wanted state support and, speaking generally, got it one way or another.
Thus Ashraf Ali Thanvi, one of the League’s most important clerical supporters, is described as bewailing the participation of his fellows in politics, which he thinks the Congress encouraged.
He died in 1943. By then, the tide was turning in Jinnah's favour. Nehru's 'mass contact' had been a failure. Had it been sabotaged by Hindu Congressmen? Up to a point.
Part of a tradition that includes Gandhi – whose ardent followers many of India’s ulema and even Islamists like Maudoodi had once been – these men were interested not in the state so much as a self-regulating society, which they would of course shepherd.
Where in the world can you find clergymen who don't have this belief?
It was the Muslim League’s leaders who were concerned with the state as a political entity.
as opposed to what? An entity made out of shit?
As for the Pan-Islamic vision of Pakistan as a successor to the Ottoman Empire, Dhulipala only thinks this idea a peculiarly religious one because he is unable to imagine an intellectual and political context outside India, trapped as he is in a dead debate about who or what was responsible for its partition.
By contrast, Facile can imagine a Pakistan where Jinnah was a Lesbian & Liaquat was a Buddhist.
For Pan-Islamism, as Cemil Aydin has shown in The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought, was intimately linked to “secular” movements around the world.
Because the sacred is intimately linked to the secular. That's how come you have to take a shit now and then. You can't spend all your time on prayer.
Muslim nationalism in India was part of a much larger enterprise,
Telling Europeans to fuck the fuck off.
and addressed, in particular, what was widely considered to be the crisis of the nation-state in the 1930s.
Multi-ethnic empires had broken up. Minorities were fucked. Then 'collective security' failed in Europe & there was a second World War.
Muslim nationalism
began with Prophet Muhammad and his rightly guided companions. Within an extraordinarily short time, the Arabs founded a great Empire and universal civilization which might well have conquered Western Europe or been the first to cross the Atlantic.
For Indians, the rise of the Young Turks was troubling. The religious unity created by Islam was being challenged. True, Muslim Princes had warred against each other and, more often than not, the original Muslim inhabitants of a country had come under the yoke of nomadic tribes whose conversion to Islam was much more recent. Still, the Indian Muslim dreamed of the Islamic oikumene stretching from Spain to the Phillipines.
emerged from a set of debates about the possibility of democratising imperial politics that had become commonplace at the end of the 19th century,
No. One may say that Muslim leaders like Sir Syed sought more jobs and influence for Muslims because they feared they were falling behind the Hindus.
and famously included men like Gandhi within their ranks.
Gandhi joined Indian politics at a later date- after Jinnah had brokered a deal between Congress & the League.
These ideas had taken on a new, internationalist character
Internationalism already existed. The first International was created in 1864 and dissolved in 1876. Some people in Calcutta did try to set up an Indian branch in 1871. As far as I know, the first prominent Indian to participate in the Second International was Dadhabhai Naoroji in 1904.
after the First World War, and especially with the founding of the League of Nations.
Of which India was a member.
In addition to the League and the Pan-movements, such an internationalist politics included both British imperialism, conceived of as a future commonwealth, and Soviet communism with its Internationals. Whether Pan-Islamic or not, then, Muslim nationalism in India was part of a much larger enterprise, and addressed, in particular, what was widely considered to be the crisis of the nation-state in the 1930s.
There were Muslim nationalists but there also were Muslim separatists. The 'hijrat' migration to Afghanistan was an example.
Fearing as they did the nation-state’s majoritarian politics, minorities in India
e.g. non-Muslims in Muslim majority aareas
and Europe tried to imagine non- or even anti-national political futures for themselves in imperial, international and other ways.
The sensible one's sold up and moved to where they would be safe. Sadly, the illusion of Pax Brittanica caused too few Indians to do the sensible thing.
Gary Wilder, in Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World, has recently written about the way in which such a project continued into the 1950s and ‘60s in the politics of Pan-Africanism and negritude.
Which didn't matter at all. Facile confuses phrase making with the business of securing government jobs for the boys and contracts for guys who finance particular political parties.
Rather than being peculiar, this was a political vision with great salience globally, and one that continues to play a role in the world today.
It was and is nonsense. Nothing changes whether or not we condemn Israel or Hamas till we are blue in the face.
Waging an old war
While Dhulipala is not above suggesting that historians like Ayesha Jalal are disingenuous in their use of sources, if not entirely ignorant of them, his own narrative is full of such evasions.
Also, the dude isn't Muslim. Why can't he just convert already?
Correctly describing Ambedkar as the great theorist and critic of Pakistan, for instance, Dhulipala offers us one of his extended summaries of the Dalit leader’s book, Thoughts on Pakistan, which serves as an example of his mode of analysis.
Ten years ago, Indian origin academics had to praise Ambedkar. Sadly, Ambedkarites are as stupid as shit.
By having the text “speak for itself” he can report without comment those passages in which Ambedkar deploys the repertoire of colonial scholarship
which was actual scholarship because knowing the facts mattered
to paint Muslims as a religious and military threat to Hindus,
and Muslims of other sects or regions
whose exclusion from India can only be welcomed.
Muslims are hardworking and thrifty. We want the fruits of their labour. Politicians also want their votes and tell lies in order to get them.
Instead of accounting for such hyperbolic statements by locating them within Ambedkar’s political rhetoric, where they are arguably meant to frighten upper castes into turning to Dalits for support, Dhulipala merely declares them to be Ambedkar’s “own beliefs” (p. 135).
They were sensible enough. Still, since Congress prevented Ambedkar from getting elected in Bombay, he had to get into the Assembly through his pal Mandal in Bengal. But Mandal's decision to ally with the League proved disastrous for himself and his community. Still, for a while, Ambedkar was Nehru's Law Minister & Mandal was Jinnah's Law Minister. Then Mandal had to run away to India and could not restart his political career.
How, then, are we to account for his good relations with Jinnah,
both were against Congress
whose statement, that Ambedkar wanted Dalits to replace Muslims as the favored subjects of quotas in a partitioned India, is passed over in silence?
It was true enough. Ambedkar stripped Dalit Muslims of the small amount of affirmative action they had previously received.
Or the support Ambedkar enjoyed from the Muslim League before and after his book was published?
It was tactical. Also, nobody actually bothers to read books by other Indians. I once asked my father why nobody had ever bothered to correct an incorrect quotation of the Gayatri Mantra (known to all Hindus) in his 1934 autobiography. The answer was simple. Hindus bought the book but didn't read it.
Dhulipala doesn’t mention this, just as he doesn’t tell us, when describing with horror the “Day of Deliverance” Jinnah declared to celebrate Congress’s resignation of government in 1939, that both Ambedkar and Savarkar joined in the festivities.
It is obvious that both stood to gain- Savarkar less so because the Brits didn't trust him- if Congress spent the war sulking in jail. The fact is, there were plenty of juicy war contracts and bureaucratic sinecures available for those 'cooperating' with the War effort. The Commies, in particular, were like pigs in shit.
In the time-tested way of old-fashioned national history, Dhulipala’s book depoliticises Muslim nationalism by making it out to be a religious phenomenon at the popular level.
Facile doesn't get that Islam has always had a political horizon.
Of course Shahid Amin’s Event, Metaphor, Memory manages to do the same for Gandhi’s first movement of Non-Cooperation,
No it doesn't. I'm not a historian but I do know that the Majithia family got a big zamindari in Chauri Chaura thanks to their loyalty during the Mutiny. The Police chief there was a Sikh related to the Majithias. It was natural for the indigenous people to resent these interlopers who had arrived some fifty or sixty years ago. Why does Amin not tell us this? I suppose the answer has to do with some stupid Leftist shibboleth.
but without suggesting that Congress and its leaders were therefore depoliticised or in thrall to Hindu “enthusiasm”.
Nothing wrong with saying Hindus are 'enthusiastic' about Mahatmas for the same reason that Catholics are very happy to see the Pope.
The author of Creating a New Medina separates the Muslim League from all other parties and politics in India,
because the League alone created a new nation
as indeed the world, to stand alone as the unique but still inexplicable villain of the story of partition,
not to mention the ethnic cleansing that followed or Pak sponsorship of cross-border terrorism.
which has now surely become one of the most boring subjects in Indian historical writing.
done by Indian origin bores.
Having myself written a book severely critical of the idea of Pakistan, I am not caviling at Dhulipala’s political allegiances, but find his argument to be anachronistic in its subject and scope, and therefore singularly unproductive intellectually.
Dhulipala is a Hyderabadi who understands the Muslim popular politics of UP because it still has resonances amongst Owaisi's core constitutency.
Is the kind of history written by young scholars like Dhulipala going to be reduced to waging old wars with equally ageing analytical equipment?
Dhulipala's book passes muster because of Pakistan's subsequent trajectory. Contrary to what Facile might believe, the place isn't actually run by a Jewish Lesbian collective.
Or maybe it is only in the intellectually impoverished field of Pakistani history that a book like this can be published.
That could certainly be said of Facile's book published a couple of years previously. Dhulipala's book, however, might be useful for history students in Yogi's UP. Will Owaisi be able to establish himself there? Is there something in the rhetoric of 'the new Medina' which can have renewed currency? Maybe, Akhilesh's advisors could pick up a hint or two from Dhulipala's book.
I should mention, Dhulipala defended his work but this infuriated Facile all the more. He wrote in 'naya daur'
The Islamabad-based journal Islamic Studies
which, strangely, has a high opinion of Islam
has taken the unusual step of publishing an essay that I initially thought must be an academic spoof, adopting the form of a lengthy tirade thinly-veiled as a review article. In it the historian Venkat Dhulipala
from Hyderabad, India, where politicians compete to gain Muslim votes. This means it is helpful for them to speak highly of that religion.
berates critics of his book, 'Creating a New Medina',
rather than a 'Muslim Zion'. I should explain, for Muslims, Medina is a holy place. Zionism, however, is not liked. Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel.
for numerous scholarly as well as personal and political faults including making up facts.[1]
like the fact that Pakistan was inhabited by Palestinian Buddhists. Jinnah & Liaqat decided to conquer that land and chase away the indigenous people so as to create a 'Muslim Zion'.
I am surprised that a reputable journal should have published a piece of this nature, which lowers the standard of debate on Pakistan’s founding by reducing it to the kind of polemics more familiar among trolls on social media.
It is Facile who started the fight. Now he is weeping because he got the worse of the argument. Even the Pakistanis were siding with the kaffir!
In my 2015 review of Dhulipala’s book, I had jokingly described the attention he lavished on Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman as a perverse gesture of love.
Telling the truth, as you see it- e.g. that Facile is a fucking moron- is actually a perverse gesture of love. What you mean to say is 'Facile is so cute! I wish he'd ask me to the prom.'
Jalal’s book, after all, was published three decades ago, and in his view posed two questions about the Pakistan movement that had become stereotypes during its heyday.
Facile was educated in the West. Why is his English so bad?
These had to do with whether Jinnah really wanted Pakistan,
Yes. That's why he went there and became its Governor General.
and if so, whether it was meant to be an Islamic state.
Rather than a Jewish Lesbian collective.
Dhulipala’s book asked the same questions, but offered positive answers where Jalal had given them negative ones.
Because Jinnah wanted Pakistan which was bound to be an Islamic state because it was created on the basis of the Muslim religion.
Its aim was to turn a political debate into a religious one.
Religion is part and parcel of the politics of Pakistan and Iran and Afghanistan. Why pretend otherwise?
The book was saved from becoming a mirror-image of Jalal’s by his focus on the writings of some Deobandi clerics, for whose limited number he compensated by prolix summaries of their works.
Though Deobandis are a minority, it is a fact that they have been accorded greater importance than the Bahrelvis in the sub-continent.
These men, he argued, had imagined Pakistan as a New Medina and successor to the Caliphate. Without adducing any evidence for their influence,
There is no evidence they were not influential. The plain fact is, Jinnah- supported by Shabbir Ahmad Usmani- got 90 percent of the Muslim vote. The Madani led JUH faction delivered nothing. Can evidence be found for Usmani & his ilk having greater influence? No. War-time conditions- stuff like censorship & biased intelligence reports- precluded any such evidence being preserved. We know the outcome of the election and must accept any thesis which squares with it.
as Barbara Metcalf noted in her review of his book, Dhulipala suggested that as religious figures they must somehow be more authentic in their representation of Muslim opinion than the leaders of the Muslim League, thus turning Pakistan into a theological entity.
The word ʿulamāʾ (عُلَمَاء) translates literally to "the learned ones," "scholars," or "the ones who know. What do they know? They know about religion. There may be a guy who describes himself as a Mullah but who is actually a Jewish Lesbian. Such a person is not authentically a Mullah or even a Muslim. On the other hand, it must be admitted that it was only in 1949 that Pakistan committed to becoming a theological entity' and it was only in 1956 that it became, officially, an Islamic entity.
My own book, Muslim Zion, argued that like other minority movements,
Muslims were the majority in what became Pakistan. Some Muslims had previously performed 'hijrat' from dar-ul-harb to dar-ul-salam. In 1947 millions more would do so.
Pakistan emerged from a tradition of political thought that viewed the nation-state with suspicion,
No. It emerged from a tradition of viewing European Imperialism with suspicion
adopting federalist and internationalist visions of the future.
Pakistan, like India, rejected federalism. Afghanistan did briefly embrace Communism- which could be considered 'internationalist'- but that didn't last long.
When these possibilities collapsed with the Second World War,
Plenty of countries turned Communist after the War
the state Muslim nationalists turned to was defined by the rejection of historical and territorial identity as its foundations.
No. Pakistan was the successor state to the British Raj in certain territories demarcated by a Boundary Commission.
Pakistan, I suggested, belonged to an Enlightenment rather than Romantic political genealogy,
There was no English 'Enlightenment' though the Scots did go in for it at one time. Pakistan, like India, was the creation of England returned barristers with experience of sitting in Legislative Councils or participating in General Elections.
and was founded upon the repudiation of blood-and-soil belonging
actually, the notion of 'Mitti Musalmaan Ki"- i.e. the clay of the buried Muslim- is about 'blood and soil belonging'. This is because Hindus go in for cremation while Muslims bury their dead. Still, it is praiseworthy to leave 'dar ul harb' to go to 'dar ul salam'.
in an ‘artificial’ social contract.
Lord Coke said the Common law was based on 'artificial reason'. Jinnah & Liaquat etc. learnt this while eating their dinners in London.
I was gratified to note that in his response Dhulipala has transferred his affections from Ayesha Jalal’s work to my own.
Facile draws the line at being 'gratified' by me. Is it because I have a tiny dick?
In this text of fifty-five pages, he invokes my name more than a hundred times, not counting all indirect references to me and my book.
You went after him and so he went after you.
I am flattered by this attention. But since Dhulipala has poured his heart out about me in deeply personal terms, pronouncing upon my psychological state and political motives, I feel I owe him the courtesy of a few pages in response.
Also his backside. Facile is very courteous in that regard.
As he has complained more than once about the difficulty of my writing, I have also ‘dumbed down’ my remarks for his benefit.
We get it. Facile thinks Venkat is 'rough trade'.
Contradiction
For the most part Dhulipala’s essay consists of a laundry-list of sometimes random and self-contradictory accusations.
He wants to bugger Devji but contradicts himself by pretending that he disagrees with Facile's views.
He begins and ends it with a plea for civil debate, while nevertheless accusing me of a long catalogue of sins, from an “aversion to facts” to “pompous and often impenetrable prose”, even suggesting that the argument of my book can be reduced to “a case of collective acid tripping”.
Whereas the truth is that Jinnah was a Jewish Lesbian. He ejected peaceful Palestinian heterosexuals from West Punjab, Sindh, etc. so as to bring in more people like himself to create a 'Muslim Zion'.
All very civil, in other words, but why then dedicate forty of his fifty-five pages to such self-evident tripe? Some mysterious obsession seems to be at play.
Why can't he just come over and rid me of my anal cherry? Would that be too much to ask?
Having blamed me for ignoring Pakistan’s religious context in the Muslim world by lending it a falsely cosmopolitan history,
some erudite Muslim converts did settle in Pakistan
Dhulipala dwells on Jinnah’s supposedly fascist influences from Europe.
Back then, almost everybody was influenced by Mussolini's histrionics. Iqbal fell completely under his spell.
Dismissing attempts to derive Jinnah’s secularism from his dress and eating habits, he nevertheless sees the Quaid as a devout Muslim by virtue of occasionally donning Indian clothes similar to Nehru’s, and by rumours of his religious practices.
Plenty of people become more religious as they grow older.
I am accused of turning the low-caste leader Ambedkar into a “grubby bargainer”, only to have his alliance with Jinnah described as a “politics of convenience”.
Which is what it was.
My comparing the theme of a ‘New Medina’
The Hanif in Mecca migrated to Medina. The notion of migration to a spiritually pure place is part of the Pakistan story.
with that of ‘Ramrajya’
back then, everybody was Hindu.
leads to a mini-lecture on how Gandhi’s idea of the latter was inclusive. But so, by Dhulipala’s own account, was the Congress-supporting cleric Hussain Ahmad Madani’s notion of the former.
Madani had argued for territorial nationalism. But the Hanif who took refuge in Medina founded a great nation.
My point, in any case, was to show that neither of these terms could be restricted to religious or secular points of view in either the Congress or the League.
They were restricted to the political point of view because both Congress and the League were political parties.
My statement that Pakistan, like the United States, did not set its foundation in some immemorial past,
Very true. The majority of people in Pakistan arrived in boats from England or Holland three or four centuries ago. It isn't the case that the descendants of the ancient Harrapans still live in Sindh.
is refuted by mentioning Jinnah’s disapproval of its federalism in a non sequitur.
Pakistan was never Federal.
My claim that Pakistan was imagined with fluctuating borders,
Nobody has ever imagined any country in this manner. What Devji means is that those who wanted Pakistan claimed territory which they did not receive.
which may or may not have included Bengal, or the whole of its colonial territory along with that of Punjab, or a land corridor between East and West Pakistan, or the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, is taken to imply my denying Jinnah any territorial conception of Pakistan altogether.
Jinnah explained that he would sacrifice the Muslims in Hindu majority areas so that the Muslim majority areas could become a separate sovereign state. This is what Devji denies.
Describing how the country’s national narrative survived East Pakistan’s loss, because it was not territorially-grounded, leads to accusations of ignoring the “deep wound” of 1971.
It was Bengal which was wounded. The Army had to go back into the barracks. Sadly, Bhutto ruined the economy & many were glad when the Army returned. Incidentally, armies tend to be very fucking territorial. Talk to them about Jean Jacques Rousseau and the social contract and they will jump to the conclusion that you are drunk off your head.
But surely trauma means the inability to process an experience?
Why bother? I was deeply traumatised by Beyonce not coming to my birthday party but processing the experience would have involved buying lots of expensive cocaine.
Crime
Dhulipala charges me with “wild speculation” based on misrepresentations unworthy of a scholar.
Like Amir Mufti, Devji thinks it would be cool if Pakistan was a high IQ place like Israel. But it isn't really.
Such an accusation is more in keeping with his own prose, and expressed in a naïve or disingenuous reading of my argument.
Devji can only be read for shits & giggles.
But this is the very thing he berates me for doing to his work, in what appears to be a defensive displacement of responsibility.
At least he doesn't say Devji has a perveted love for Ayesha Jalal's puppy dog.
Responsibility is key here, because Dhulipala’s concern with it is one that animates colonial history writing as well as that of its right-wing descendants.
Did you know Venkat is a fucking kaffir?
This way of writing conceives the past as a crime scene for which someone must be held accountable.
If crimes occurred- e.g. lots of people getting killed because of their religion- somebody must have done something wrong. In the case of the Partition of India, it is easy to fix the blame on Provincial Administrations & their political bosses for refusing to plan for and implement an orderly exchange of populations.
My intent is supposedly to exculpate the League by describing it as liberal and the Congress as fascist: “Devji insinuates that the Congress was a fascist party and that British appeasement of the Congress was akin to appeasement of the Nazis.”
Zionists genuinely had to flee Nazi persecution. The Brits genuinely appeased Hitler at one point in time. Saying Pakistan is a 'Muslim Zion' means you are making the insinuation Venkat imputes to Facile.
But I described the way in which all parties deployed the language of fascism and communism against each other while appropriating either—the most famous being Subhas Chandra Bose.
But only Jinnah & the League sought a 'Zion'.
The crime, of course, is India’s violent Partition, for which the Muslim League is made responsible.
They started the violence with Direct Action Day.
My work must be linked to this original crime,
which Devji whitewashes by saying the League were actually responsible for some sort of Zionist refugee resettlement program.
whose responsibility Dhulipala thinks I am simply trying to conceal in what amounts to an ad hominem argument.
An ad hominem argument is that Facile is a shithead who writes utter shit.
Because he understands history as the record of a crime,
says a shithead who is incapable of saying anything true or sensible
Dhulipala dismisses my invocation of complexity, contingency and contradiction as mere evasions.
Which is what they are.
Clearly, I must be part of a conspiracy to preserve the secular and liberal myth of Pakistan’s origins,
as opposed to what is now blindingly obvious- Muslims don't like kaffirs.
which sets Dhulipala on a search for ulterior motives.
Devji is simply stupid. Is Shruti Kapila stupider? Yes. But she doesn't have a penis. Allowances should be made.
He condemns my description of the League’s non-sectarianism by mentioning its exclusively Muslim membership. But I was only describing its refusal to entertain Muslim religious disputes.
In which case, the Bajrang Dal is non-sectarian.
These tendentious readings of my work are obsessional,
Devji started the fight.
with Dhulipala adopting the mirror-image of what he falsely considers my position in describing the League as fascist and Congress as liberal. He inveighs against Jinnah’s 1946 refusal to allow non-Muslims in Bengal and the Punjab to vote in the event of a plebiscite over Pakistan, describing it as “hardly the gesture of a constitutionalist, seeking a ‘social contract’”.
His worry was that the Unionists in Punjab or the Peasants & Workers party in Bengal would win.
Yet this only proves my point about Jinnah’s refusal to accept the defining role of territorial belonging, since he insisted that Hindus and Muslims constituted separate nations on other grounds.
Religious grounds. Which religion was Jinnah appealing to? Was it Judaism? In that case Devji is right to speak of a 'Muslim Zion'. But if Jinnah was a Muslim appealing to Islam, then it is insulting to describe Pakistan as a Zion of any kind. On the other hand, comparing a Muslim country to Medina is flattering to that country.
As separate nations, Hindus and Muslims could not form a single electorate,
Yet that is exactly what happened
but had to negotiate a contract on the basis of parity without any determining reference to demography.
That didn't happen at all. Does Devji not know this?
However convenient such a notion, which in the case of a plebiscite betrayed Jinnah’s uncertainty about which way the Muslim majority would vote, it suggests the political idea I explored in my book.
What was that idea? Devji believed that 'Muslim nationalists rejected history, geography and even demography as the foundations of their political life,'
This was not the case. There was a distinction between watani (nationalist) and Islam-pasand (pan-Islamists) Muslim political ideologies. However, where an Emirate could not be created or an existing monarch could not be made paramount, the workaround was to make the Islamic 'watan' (nation) the building-block of an Islamic federation. This did not involve 'rejecting history or geography or demography' but building upon what already existed.
Was the notion of an Islamic 'ummah' as a global community
' an abstract idea of belonging together.'?
No. It was the same idea as ecumenical Christendom. In Hegelian terms, it was not abstract. It was a concrete universal.
'But what could such an idea mean in the practice of Indian politics?'
Affirmative action & more money for Islamic schools, mosques, etc. Also, Muslims wanted to run Muslim majority states and to be part of the governing coalition where they were the minority.
' I want to reflect here upon the ambiguous implications of such a practice,'
Politics is about saying different things to different people while seeking to deliver for your core constitutency. Ambiguity is helpful to the politician.
' beginning with how this idea defined the Pakistan Movement',
Muslim industrialists saw they could rise if Muslims ruled provinces.
'like Zionism
Muslims were the majority in large Indian provinces. Jews had been a persecuted minority everywhere. Also, some Jews believed that they needed to do agricultural labour when not training to be soldiers, in order to stop having hooked noses. Arthur Koestler described the 'sabra' as blonde and snub nosed. Pakistanis were already both farmers and soldiers.
'or New World settlements,'
some Protestant sects were persecuted in England. In the 'wilderness Zion' they would be free to worship in their own manner and kill witches to their heart's content.
'as in some ways a product of the Enlightenment.'
There is no English enlightenment. The Islamic Ishraqi school was mystical. Refore- Tanzimat etc- was a different matter.
Dhulipala, however, is interested not in ideas but responsibility, irrelevantly accusing me of absolving the British of blame in the Partition and ignoring Jinnah’s anti-democratic actions, as if assigning responsibility was ever my object.
Devji's object was to shit on Venkat. Sadly, Venkat shat upon him and some Pakistani journal published his tirade.
Not content with trying to rescue the League in history,
It doesn't need rescuing. The Sharif family are Muslim League. They have made billions.
I am accused of translating its anti-Congress alliance with Dravidian and Dalit movements in the past into a Dalit-Muslim one for the present.
Owaisi would love that.
We have left the realm of scholarship when Dhulipala says about me that “those wistful about the lost opportunity of an ethnic alliance against the Congress in colonial India are now pitching for a Dalit-Muslim alliance”.
Venkat knows his own country. Facile may be a great expert on Canada.
Except the article of mine he cites as evidence does exactly the opposite, arguing that a Dalit-Muslim alliance is impossible, and even that the ‘Muslim community’ cannot be a political actor in India.
Yet it is.
It is in such petty flights of fancy that Dhulipala becomes truly inventive, as when he describes Jinnah’s “stereotyping of Gandhi as the Bania, using it as a term of opprobrium and abuse similar to the use of the term Jew by the Nazis to connote a congenitally devious, scheming, lying, despicable or untrustworthy people”. Caricatures of the Bania were part of Indian common-sense,
cultural commons. Facile's English is poor.
at the time as today, and hardly unique to Jinnah. Indeed, he took pleasure in describing himself, correctly as far as caste went, as the Bania’s Muslim equivalent, saying that he could speak to Gandhi as a Khoja would to a Bania.
He was a Lohana. They have martial qualities. The truth is, Jinnah got the better of Gandhi. Liaquat, it must be said, out manoevered Patel & threatened to tax the Hindu bania out of existence. Partition became inevitable.
Clerics
There is often something Pavlovian about archival historians, whose salivary glands are triggered by the very mention of unseen evidence—whatever its actual content might be.
Devji is against evidence of any type. History is not a crime scene. It is some tasty chocolate pudding which comes out of his own anus.
For them Dhulipala’s research on the obscure if not uninteresting treatises of some Deobandi writers promised to reveal a new world of religious thinking about Pakistan.
This may be true of guys like Devji who know nothing about the sub-continent.
Nothing could be more attractive in the post-9/11 world, where Islam has become a fascination grouping Muslim fundamentalists, Hindu nationalists and the alt-right in Europe and America into a kind of dysfunctional family.
Why not have a nice Zionist family grouping Vegan Lesbians and militant Cheese-fondlers together?
But even the fascination with Islam cannot save Dhulipala’s account, for his evidence supports my argument more than it does his own.
Very true. When Dhulipala says 'Facile is a shithead', this is evidence that he lurves Facile and wants to sodomize him tenderly and respectfully.
The ‘New Medina’ Dhulipala writes about is surely an example of my ‘Muslim Zion’, since
Muslims love Zionists. They hate Medina.
it is premised upon the rejection of India’s own Muslim history and geography for an abstract utopia placed elsewhere in space and time.
Nope. It was just 'hijrat' to a place where Urdu would be the national language.
Rather than a traditional religious category, such a conception was a liberal or modernist, and later Islamist one, meant to re-imagine the future in a purely theoretical past of the kind familiar from a New Rome, New Athens or New Jerusalem.
Medina has remained Medina as a sacred place since the time of the Prophet. Incidentally, it was the Muslims who allowed the Jews to return to what had been Jerusalem. On the other hand Byzantium was the second Rome & Moscow was supposed to be the third.
Anyone familiar with how Medina is deployed as a theme, knows that like my ‘Muslim Zion’, it is premised upon ideas of migration to a new land.
No. The Ansars were native to Medina. Under the leadership of the Prophet they created a new, spiritually pure, place of prayer & refuge.
It doesn’t matter how many Muslims actually live in or move to its Pakistan, crucial instead being the very conception of hijrat or departure—with Pakistan itself seen as leaving India.
The Ansar didn't leave Medina. It may be that Faisal was not instructed in his ancestral religion.
Medina is also conceived in liberal rather than religious terms as the site of an ‘ancient constitution’, generally called the ‘Constitution of Medina’,
This is the Sahifat al-Madina which was superseded by subsequent revelation
and defined by the ‘social contract’ between different religious groups. Its adoption by the ulama
It can't be 'adopted' by ulama because it has been superseded.
signals the breakdown of their theological categories.
Fortunately no such Ulema exist. That is why you don't see them getting drunk in the mosque. Theological categories are respected even by ordinary Muslims- let alone the clergy.
Unlike Medina, a utopia generally situated in Muhammad’s time, the Caliphate is seen as a post-prophetic institution.
Tell that to ISIS!
It represents an ideal dominated not by the relationship of different groups but the problem of legitimate authority. These are, in other words, distinct, even contradictory sites of social and political imagination, and cannot be lumped together as Dhulipala does.
Dhulipala is writing about Indian history. There was a Khilafat movement which had various successors- e.g. Ahrars. They are 'lumped together' because they co-existed in a particular place at a particular time.
They also illustrate how the ulama can only frame their politics in modernist terms,
any term used by a contemporary is modern in some sense as well as being very ancient in some other sense. We know of no limits to how anyone can frame anything.
as Muhammad Qasim Zaman argues in his recent book, Islam in Pakistan, but without therefore becoming liberals in the process.
We live in modern times. This doesn't mean we are liberals. Rather we are all Jewish Lesbians constructing a Muslim Zion inside the empty brainpan of Facile Devji.
Dhulipala focuses not on their theological views but engagement with modernist categories, and can therefore offer us neither an alternative nor religious narrative for Pakistan.
He isn't writing about Pakistan. He is writing about the Pakistan movement in India.
His chief example of a cleric who ‘imagined’ Pakistan as a New Medina, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, only did so in 1946, hardly enough time to influence its creation.
Yet, Pakistan's creation depended completely and utterly on what happened in 1946. Usmani's political influence greatly increased from 1944 onward. Jinnah, in March 1941, had first mooted the notion that 2 crore Muslims in Hindu majority areas would have to be sacrificed for the sake of the 7 crore Muslims in areas where they were the majority. Since Usmani's family came from the North West Frontier, he was happy enough to quit India along with the Brits.
Dhulipala accuses me of denigrating religion,
denigrating Pakistan. A Muslim who hates it may well call it a Zionist entity.
but the theological position I had dismissed belonged to him, not the ulama.
Devji thinks he can 'dismiss' Muslim theological positions. All these so called Mullahs who spend decades studying Quran Sharif, Sahih Hadith, etc. have wasted their time.
In order to have them represent some authentic and alternative vision, he must sequester these men in the zenana of religion like so many concubines.
Wives and mothers are found in the zenana. Why say they are 'concubines'?
Yet Dhulipala focuses not on their theological views but engagement with modernist categories, and can therefore offer us neither an alternative nor religious narrative for Pakistan.
He says 'mujahirs from UP were pious people who moved to Pakistan for the sake of religion, not gaining wealth.' What is wrong with that?
Dhulipala’s fixation on the ulama’s importance and authenticity is misplaced.
The clergy of a religion don't matter. Pope should dismiss all the Cardinals & Bishops. He should humbly request Devji to write his Encyclicals.
Both major groups of clerics, Barelwis and Deobandis, but also the Ahl-e Hadith, emerged in the 19th century alongside the modernists.
The Aligarhites? I suppose there were important connections between Aligarh & Firangi Mahal.
They only came to have a significant influence in the areas that became Pakistan after its creation, by a migration of ideas and personnel to its ‘New Medina’.
But Iqbal gets pride of place as the poet-prophet of Pakistan.
Pakistan’s leading modernist scholar, Fazlur Rahman,
The mullahs chased him out of Pakistan in 1968.
noted decades ago that the ulama’s views paradoxically coincided with those of the secularists in their attempts to prevent the state taking possession of Islam.
He was seen as Ayub's man pushing for further 'West-toxification'. The Americans were afraid of Maulana Bashani- his polar opposite.
He pointed out that in all three recensions of Pakistan’s constitution, it appears either as an item or a limitation without positive form.
Pakistan's constitutions didn't greatly matter.
It was the modernists and Islamists who wanted to turn Islam into an expansive ideology, which they situated in a Cold War context by comparing it to communism. Such alliances and influences can neither be seen nor acknowledged in Dhulipala’s religious narrative.
Because there was no fucking Cold War in the period he was looking at.
The only Islamic institutions that survive from pre-colonial times, dominating the countryside, are the Sufi shrines with which these ulama have an ambiguous relationship. No significant seminary or clerical tradition remains from that period.
The Dars-i-Nizami curriculum used in South Asia dates from 1750. Sufi lineages contain many great jurists and theologians. True, some 'Pirs' weren't Muslim. Apparently, in Gujarat, the tomb of King James's jester is venerated as a Sufi shrine! However, if it really were true that Islam was not continually handed down in an error-free form, then South Asian Islam would deviate widely from Hanafi Islam. Such is not the case.
If Dhulipala looked beyond theology,
He is a historian. He is not looking at theology because he is as unqualified to talk about it as Facile Devji.
he would realise that my argument is confirmed by new research. Andrew Sartori’s
evidently a Muslim from Dacca by his name
archivally rich Liberalism in Empire, for instance, doesn’t mention my book, but makes a similar argument about the way in which the Pakistan movement gained traction in Bengal.
Both Fazl ul Haq & Suhrawardy backed the Pakistan demand. These were the two most popular leaders.
One site of its emergence, he writes, was as a ‘subaltern echo’ of settler colonialism in the Muslim agricultural colonisation of Assam.
Bengalis, irrespective of religion, were moving into Ahom or Bhutiya or othe North Eastern territory. Burma, too, received a lot of Indian immigration.
It was the colonial government’s attempt to hinder this movement into a new land that gave Pakistan political meaning as what I call a ‘Muslim Zion’.
The Assamese were a martial people. They rejected the Pakistan demand. There was nothing the Bengalis could do about it.
Caste
Ambedkar plays a crucial role in Dhulipala’s argument, though his claim of being the first to take the Dalit leader’s views on Pakistan seriously is false, since I dealt with them fulsomely in Muslim Zion.
Ambedkar was a Jewish Lesbian just like Jinnah.
But Ambedkar plays a curious part in Creating a New Medina, his anti-Hindu stance making his anti-Muslim views acceptable as the unbiased opinion of a third party. This role of neutral arbiter had characterised the colonial state, and Ambedkar adopted it on occasion. Today Ambedkar’s negative views on Islam, minus his intimate dealings with the Muslim League before 1940, are deployed by Hindu nationalists to claim him as one of their own.
That was a fad. People thought Ambedkar knew Econ. He didn't. Still, I tried to make out he was a Coasian avant la lettre. The big mistake, when it comes to Indians, is to actually read the utter shite they wrote or are still writing.
Dhulipala sees my historicising of Ambedkar’s views on Islam as an effort to explain them away. He argues that if Ambedkar supported a state for Muslims in order to have Dalits take their place in India, as he tells us Jinnah thought, then why continue invoking anti-Muslim sentiments after Partition?
To take away affirmative action from Muslims. Incidentally, the Brits had set the trend by denying Christian Dalits reservations.
But Ambedkar was disillusioned by independence, leaving Nehru’s cabinet, which, among other things, still valued Muslims more than Dalits.
He gambled and lost. Hindus needed Nehru to push through reform of Hindu family law. Ambedkar was too crazy to be of any use in that department. What was he good for? Nothing at all. He ended up converting to Buddhism which exported Untouchability all the way to Japan. Bali has Brahmins but no untouchables.
Anti-Muslim as I showed his views were, Ambedkar continued to follow some version of the Muslim League’s early political vision, including the abortive desire for a ‘Dalitsthan’.
Churchill had mapped out this brand of politics in his 1931 speech attacking soi disant Tory 'capitulation' to 'the cunning Brahmin' Nehru.
In “Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah”, Ambedkar argues that Hindu-Muslim conflict is not, in fact the primary one in India, with Gandhi and Jinnah opposed more by their personalities than politics, whose true motor is actually caste.
More particularly, his own Mahar caste though he also welcomed donations from Jatav millionaires in Kanpur while getting the Namasudras in Bengal to nominate him to the Constitutent Assembly.
Ambedkar’s primary focus was caste,
because that was what got him a seat on the Viceroy's Executive Council.
yet Dhulipala omits this category from his analysis of the man’s work. How might we understand his changing views of Muslims after the 1940 Pakistan Resolution if we consider the role caste plays in them?
He married a Brahmin, not a Muslim. When push came to shove, Hindus had his back. Muslims did not.
He similarly inserts caste into history, arguing that Muslim invasions were directed less against Hindus than the Buddhists who had been reduced to Untouchables by the former. Hindus are seen as coming to terms with the invaders and surviving their rule better than the Buddhists, who had to deal with both Hindu and Muslim enemies.
This was a fantasy. Apparently, it was Col. Olcott who sold Ayothee Dasan this pile of horse-shit. Ambedkar had initially been promoted by the anti-Brahmin party but after Dalits got reserved seats, Babasaheb Bole gravitated to Savarkar's Mahasabha.
Yet they still preferred converting to Islam, even as Hinduism was transformed by its engagement with Buddhism into incorporating vegetarianism and idolatry. The point of all this was to make Dalits, and Buddhism as their ideological vehicle, central to Indian history and politics.
The point was to go one-up on Gandhi by becoming a Boddhisattva- i.e. an incarnation of Vishnu.
Muslim Zion is the first study of Pakistan’s founding that takes caste seriously,
Pakistan has never recognised caste as the basis of any type of affirmative action though there was a 1957 ordinance which notified 40 groups as "Scheduled Castes" (such as Bheel, Kohli, and Menghwar). Nothing came of it.
not least because the Muslim League was the first party in India to advocate the electoral separation of low castes from Hinduism.
Nonsense! There were anti-Brahmin parties in Bombay and Madras which pushed for this. Incidentally, the League had no objection to low caste Muslims getting affirmative action under the GoI act of 1935. It's just that, once in power, they had no truck with the thing.
Self-serving as this move was, it heralded the institutional form Dalit politics would take. But caste is also capable of fragmenting the Muslim community,
which is why Pakistan will have none of it
so taking my cue from Ambedkar rather than weaponizing him as Dhulipala does, I use caste to break through the historiography’s communal categories. This new kind of narrative
what narrative? Pakistan didn't do caste based affirmative action. That's the whole story.
is what his return to the past and its dead debates denies.
Concupiscence
At first glance, and in keeping with his view of the past as a crime-scene,
as opposed to chocolate cake which came out of Devji's anus
Dhulipala’s essay looks like the argument of a lawyer deploying selective quotation and undue inference to make his case.
It may look like that to Devji who is feasting on the chocolate cake seeping out of his anus.
But upon closer inspection, it turns out to be more like the frenzy of a lover’s quarrel, with the aggrieved party throwing anything that comes to hand at a treacherous beloved without regard to shape, size or importance.
Everybody is in love with Devji. Why don't they just drop by and bugger him instead of writing mean things about him?
This is why it is so difficult to deal with his accusations in conceptual terms. He also blames his critics for ignoring things that didn’t happen, in particular the Muslim League’s so-called ‘hostage theory’ of neighbourly relations and statements about the transfer of populations.
It was Ambedkar's theory regarding what he believed was Jinnah's theory. What made it plausible was Muslim League governments organising retaliatory pogroms. Did Congress do the same? I suppose so but they kept quiet about it.
The hostage theory argued that the presence of Hindu or Muslim minorities in either country would guarantee the protection of their coreligionists in the other. But the assumption that majorities cared for the fate of their minority populations elsewhere was quickly shown to be false, and so this ‘theory’ remained a dead letter.
Why not arrange an orderly transfer of populations. Too much work, yaar. India pherry hot.
As for the transfer of populations, it is a major theme in Ambedkar’s book on Pakistan, as among Hindu nationalists, and was a demand made by Sikh leaders upon the Congress during Partition. The Transfer of Power papers show that Jinnah disdained it, and in fact repeatedly urged Hindus and Sikhs not to leave Pakistan—from where they were nonetheless expelled.
Hilariously, Pakistan tried to prevent bhangis (night-soil carriers) running away!
Instead of engaging my argument
which isn't chocolate cake. It is shit.
as a whole, Dhulipala contests it in bits and pieces. He only addresses my narrative in its entirety by conspiratorially attributing it to ulterior motives.
Rather than ignorance and stupidity.
This is an approach more appropriate to far-right polemics.
It is the approach Devji took towards Venkat's book.
I will not undertake the unpleasant task of inquiring into Dhulipala’s own motives.
He is madly in love with both Ayesha Jalal as well as Facile Devji.
But I should note that for the conspiracy-theorist all contrary argument and evidence is discounted, because it must be understood as subterfuge, evasion and excuse.
Whereas it is actually chocolate cake which Devji's anus is very good at producing.
And yet Dhulipala is unable to propose an argument of his own, simply adopting the mirror-images of those he dislikes in a perverse gesture of love.
Venkat read 'Muslim Zion' & fell in love with Devji. Perversely, instead of brusquely sodomizing the object of his adoration, Venkat pretended that Pakistan is an Islamic country which holds the city of Medina sacred. This shows that Venkat truly lurves Devji- as should we all.
I look forward to Devji's study of the Islamic Republic of Iran titled 'Shia Sodom- how Ayatollahs embraced anal sex due to Englightenment Modernity'. I am sure Devji will be appointed Supreme Guide of Iran on the basis of his extraordinary theological acumen.
