ABSTRACT
The partition of India and the creation of Pakistan has been the subject of fierce but lively historical debate. Various theories have been invoked to explain why, in the process of dismantling their raj, the British partitioned India along ostensibly religious lines. Official histories of Pakistan have in the main subscribed to the ‘two nation’ theory, according to which Indian Muslims were always a distinctive and separate community that had resisted assimilation into their Indian environment. A recurring refrain of historians of mainstream Indian nationalism, on the other hand, has been to blame imperialism for tearing asunder two communities which history and tradition had joined – the classical theory of British divide and rule. Both theories, propounded as part and parcel of the ideology of post-colonial nation-states, have had wide popular currency. Yet they raise more questions than they answer. Apart from limiting the terrain of historical study, they have only compounded the problems stemming from the lack of scholarly dialogue across the great divide of 1947. There is now overwhelming evidence to suggest that regardless of whether Muslims were in fact a ‘nation’, let alone one created by British policies of divide and rule, it was the contradictions and structural peculiarities of Indian society and politics in late colonial India which eventually led to the creation of Pakistan. So it is important to be sensitive to the social and political context which shaped the communitarian discourse on Muslim interests, especially the uses made of the ‘two nation’ theory by the All-India Muslim League and its leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, in the final decade of the British raj in India. There can be no understanding of the larger context of Muslim history in colonial India, of which Jinnah and the League admittedly formed an important part, without accounting for a multitude of other trends that had helped fashion the discourse, and eventually also the politics, of the ‘two nation’ ideal.
