From ‘community’ to ‘nation’: indian muslims in the concepts of british orientalists

Abstract

Indian  Muslims were initially viewed by British Orientalists  as a foreign  and alien element  in the Indian  society, as cruel invaders  who came to spread  their  religion  “at the tip of their  swords”.  According  to  these  concepts,  the  Indian  population was divided  into  two homogeneous and  hostile  “communities”,  that  is Hindus  (including  Sikhs, Buddhists,  Jains, etc.) and Muslims. Such perception  ignored  two aspects of crucial importance:  first, it did not take into consideration various regional, social, ethno-cultural, linguistic and other differences within each of the imagined  “communities”; second, the majority of the Indian  Muslims were not descendants of the invaders,  but local people converted  to Islam. Through preservation of many elements of their pre-Islamic  past, they were, and still are, closer to the Hindus  of their respective regions concerning  language, culture and lifestyle, than to their co-believers in other areas  of India,  or foreign  countries.  These orientalist  concepts  served  as the basis of British colonial policy; through education  system and press they were communicated  to the local elites, who  not  only began  to  think  in terms  of homogeneous religious  “communities”,  but,  quite logically, transformed them into the “nations”, thus  laying ground  for communalist  trends  in Indian nationalism.  In this way, the “two nations theory” was born. Its implementation was the idea of Pakistan  and the bloody partition of British India in 1947.