The Political Evolution of Muslims in Tamilnadu and Madras 1930-1947

Title: The Political Evolution of Muslims in Tamilnadu and Madras 1930-1947
Author: J B P More
Publisher: Orient Longman, 1997 (First)
ISBN: 8125010114
Pages: 272

When Muslims demanded creation of a new Islamic state of Pakistan in the 1940s by dividing India, it evoked a range of emotions on Indians. For some, even the idea of vivisecting the motherland – Akhand Bharat – was anathema. Some others evaluated the Muslim demand on the basis of two-nation theory and looked at the scenario in a dispassionate way. The question was whether the two largest religious communities in India formed two separate nations. Eminent statesmen like Dr. Ambedkar studied the problem in detail and confirmed that there are no common historical antecedents which Hindus and Muslims shared together as matters of either pride or shame. In fact, one party’s episode of shame was the other party’s moment of pride. The invasions of Muhammad ibn al-Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Timur, Babur, Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali and the ensuing devastation are matters of glory for the Muslims as these helped to implant the religion firmly on this ground. In the absence of a common feeling, Ambedkar rejected the Hindu view that the two communities formed one nation. The focus of the studies on the radicalization of Muslim politics and the accentuation of Muslim separatism during the 1930s and 40s were mostly north Indian Muslims. This book supplies that deficiency and is an analysis of the political evolution of the Muslims in the Tamil districts of the Madras Presidency under British rule. J B P More – Jean-Baptiste Prashant More – Is a French historian of Indian origin. He was born in Pondicherry and stays in Paris. His specialization is south Indian history. He has authored many books.

More introduces the historical background of the Muslim community from very early on and how they influenced politics in the region. Apart from brief incursions during the Sultanate period and in the Mughal era, the land was comparatively peaceful. On account of this short duration of Muslim political domination and the small Muslim population of 7 per cent of the total, division between Hindus and Muslims on the basis of religion did not appear to be very glaring. Two different streams of Tamil-speaking and Urdu-speaking people together formed the community of Muslims in Tamil Nadu. The cultural and social milieu of the Muslims was dominated by the Urdu-speaking aristocrats like the Nawab of Arcot while the Tamil-speaking faction was mainly traders or merchants, often very rich. The Nawab of Arcot owed his throne to the British and moved his seat to Madras in 1767 where the British were headquartered. However, the British abolished the Nawabship in 1855 and reduced him to the degree of a mere pensioner with a grand title of the Prince of Arcot. He was the president of the Madras unit of the Muslim League. The shortage in numbers was sought to be made up with conversions from Hindus which frequently caused social tension. The community was backward by the end of the nineteenth century as the Muslims did not opt for modern secular education introduced by the British, but resented the Hindus taking part in it and occupying positions in government. The Urdu-speaking Muslims were nostalgic about their past glory and regarded the British as usurpers. Times were changing however. English, Tamil and Telugu assumed more importance at the expense of Arabic, Persian, Urdu and the study of the Muslim religion.

In the description of the development of political awareness among Muslims, lack of meticulous depth is seen. Whatever he has included is provided in other books on this subject and nothing new is found. As an example, the continuous defeats and side-lining of Turkey in European politics which earned it the sobriquet of the ‘Sick man of Europe’ in the mid-1860s elicited anger and unrest in Indian Muslims, but this episode which is a harbinger of the Khilafat movement half a century later, is not at all considered for discussion. Even though Muslims constituted only 7 per cent of the population, communal riots occurred intermittently though not on the scale and severity of north Indian riots – except perhaps the 1921 Malabar riots which reached genocidal proportions. The Muslim League was formed in Madras as a sequel to the parent organization’s birth at Dhaka and it was led by Urdu-speaking aristocratic-merchant elite. They were part of the Deccan and north Indian Muslim tradition. The Urdu press of Madras tried their polarizing campaign by describing the Congress as a Hindu gathering, working in the interests of the Hindus. The Tamil- and Malayalam-speaking Muslims were said to be impervious to pan-Islamic sentiment and usually kept a low profile in politics until the launching of the Khilafat movement. Their behaviour underwent a sea change thereafter and became more conscious of their Islamic identity. This was the state of affairs when Indian politics was entering an explosive phase in the 1940s.

The development of the anti-Brahmin movement in the Presidency and its steadfast alliance to British interests and the Muslim League are clearly explained in this book. This was the precursor of the Dravidian movement which is still flourishing in Tamil Nadu today. A political set up known as the Justice Party contested elections from 1919 under British rule and formed ministries in Madras. This was while the Congress was boycotting these powerless legislatures. The Justice Party always sided with the British, but their government did not satisfy Muslim aspirations. Even though the Justice Party constituents were non-Brahmin but higher caste Hindus, their hatred towards Sanskrit and the Hindu religion was legendary. E V Ramasamy, the leader of the Self-Respect Movement, asked the untouchables to convert to Islam in 1919. Large scale conversions from lower castes to Islam began to take place in the 1930s. Muslim leaders made it a practice to celebrate such events in villages (p.91). This spawned a lot of communal unrest. An interesting thing to observe is that when communal disturbances occurred, the Muslims treated the entire Hindu community as one in inflicting damages. Several instances are recorded in this book involving Muslims fighting the Brahmins, intermediate castes and Dalits separately.

External observers of Islamic societies are usually reluctant to countenance the level of bigotry and fundamentalism that dictate those societies’ actions. Instead of examining whether a particular act was caused by any specific religious injunction or not, they assume economic/political factors behind it and arrive at very wrong conclusions. Instead of studying the target society comprehensively, they attempt to define those societies based on what they have learned as part of a western liberal education. This timidity bordering on fear of consequences is a characteristic of the scholars who try their best to avoid offending Muslim hardliners who are easily enraged by the slightest of provocations, however benign they might be. This author is also not different. However, he points out that the idea of secularism directly threatened Muslims’ historical conditioning where Islam occupied the central place which sought to control the actions of the believers individually as well as in groups. The author also makes a crucial observation that the population factor played an important role in communal riots. In all places where Muslims were concentrated or in sufficient numbers to form a compact block, there were systematic instances of riots (p.98). The book also includes a survey of the growth of educational institutions in the Presidency with special focus on how the Muslims utilized them in the twentieth century. The government went out of its way to establish separate schools for Muslims in addition to admitting them in common schools. Muslims, as a community, was lagging behind only the Brahmins but was far ahead of other Hindu communities. Further yielding to Muslim pressure, the government provided religious instruction for Muslims in common schools at taxpayers’ expense. The Hindus or Christians did not demand any such facilities and instead, high castes like Brahmins readily partook in modern education (p.86).

The Khilafat Movement viciously roused the communal sentiment among Muslims. Their political consciousness was again revived with the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s. When Congress changed its strategy to demand complete independence instead of dominion status, the true colour of nationalist Muslims came out. Yakub Hasan Sait severed his connection with Congress because he feared that Muslims won’t have the commanding position in an independent country the Congress was contemplating. Muslim leaders collectively condemned the Gandhian movement to be inimical to Muslim interests. Jamal Muhammad opposed the boycott call of foreign goods as they were sold in the shops owned by Muslims. In the 1937 elections, Muslim League won 6 out of 8 Muslim seats it contested in Madras. Jamal Muhammad, the leader of the Muslim League, contested from the general constituency of commerce and was soundly defeated by T T Krishnamachari, an independent candidate. The author then claims that Congress’ assuming office in 1937 without a coalition with the Muslim League was a blunder which contributed to radical Islamization of Muslim politics that led finally to the religious assertiveness of Muslims (p.151). This is plainly wrong and a stout refusal to see the elephant of Muslim fanaticism in the room. It won’t be mollified by anything other than total control of the society of believers and submission of unbelievers to it. Muslims then objected to singing Vande Mataram in the assembly and opposed the ban on cow slaughter proposed by the Congress. The party meekly yielded to Muslim demands and stopped singing of the patriotic song after a few weeks. Even the usually stubborn Dravidian leaders were also willing to bend over backwards to satisfy Muslim claims. When P. Khalifullah chided the Self-Respect Movement for being atheistic, E V Ramasamy capitulated and submitted that atheism was not part of the official program of the movement which in fact was garlanding Hindu idols with strings of footwear.

The author elucidates the bitter tale of how the South Indian Muslims eagerly supported the call for the division of India and creation of Pakistan. During World War II, the Madras Muslim League joined the pan-Indian struggle for Pakistan and extended support to the British war effort which the Congress boycotted. The Leaguers wasted no opportunity to seed discord among Hindus by carping on caste differences. They joined the Dravidian campaign against Brahmins and also against the ‘Aryan’ influence in Congress. Finding the time ripe for extracting his pound of flesh, E V Ramasamy came out with an outrageous demand for a new nation called Dravidastan roughly coterminous with South India to which Jinnah expressed his tacit backing. The entire Muslim community in Madras voted for Pakistan in 1946 as the Muslim League won all 29 Muslim seats in the assembly, securing 99 per cent of the votes in most constituencies. But it soon became apparent that the newly created Pakistan is intangible for Madras Muslims as they would not migrate to it. The Muslim leaders then put up a bold face and declared their unflinching loyalty to their religion. Mohammed Ismail, the President of the Madras Muslim League, boasted that ‘a Muslim is always a Muslim, a Muslim first and a Muslim last’ and that he was proud of being part of creating Pakistan (p.203). Ramasamy added fuel to the fire by observing India’s Independence Day as a day of mourning, but Muslims cleverly dissociated from him after 1947. The Muslims in Malabar was also wholeheartedly in favour of Pakistan. When it was clear that they will not be a constituent part of it, they demanded a separate state of Moplastan. The campaign included observing May 23, 1947 as Moplastan Day.

The depth of research in this book is quite shallow and never goes much lower than skin-deep. The author sidesteps the issue of fanaticism and believes that the Muslim community responded in ways put forward by European social theorists without any basis in fact. He claims that after 1930, general economic decline of Urdu-speaking Muslims led to their influence dwindling and economic prosperity of Tamil-speaking Muslims increasing. This assertion remains pure speculation and never substantiated. This might also be a feeble attempt to introduce an economic factor in the transformation of a Muslim society. More seems to be unaware of the people he was handling in this book. On page 215, he states that ‘if low caste Hindus were a majority in the border areas like the Muslims, they too would have demanded partition’. The stupidity of this comment is mind-boggling because the low-caste Hindus are indeed the majority not only in border states but in other provinces as well, except perhaps Uttarakhand. On the other hand, this is a wily argument to weigh in a geographical ballast into the Pakistan demand rather than the purely religious which it was. The author mentions the many ways in which conversion to Islam was being continuously taking place in the Presidency. The duplicitous nature of Sufis comes out in the open. They outwardly preached eclectic values but strictly maintained their Islamic identity and indulged in conversions on the sly. The copy of the book which I had used had 16 pages (p. 113-128) missing. Instead, a duplicate copy of pages 129-144 was found inserted.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism

Title: Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism 1905 – 1944

Author: K Nambi Aarooran

Publisher: Aarooran Pathippagam, 2008 (First published 1980)

ISBN: Nil

Pages: 474

 

India is constituted on the federal principle – even though you may not find it written as such in the Constitution – with several linguistically and culturally self-sustained states which are indivisible parts of the Indian whole. The state of Tamil Nadu is a really good example of how a state can develop its language and culture without feeling suffocated by the national language and ethos and without any sentiment of separation operating underneath. Tamil boasts of a lineage comparable to classical languages like Sanskrit and Greek. Besides, the people deem themselves to belong to the Dravidian race, even though scholars have convincingly proved that the appellation is applicable only to the body of languages spoken in south India. This book explains the birth and growth of Dravidian nationalism and the renaissance of the Tamil language. The time period of the work starts in 1905 when the partition of Bengal and the opposition to it provided an impetus for Swadeshi culture which in turn helped awaken the national spirit. The curtain falls in 1944 with the formation of the Dravidar Kazhagam which was fathered by E V Ramaswamy Naicker. This transformed version of the Justice Party thereafter became the vehicle of Tamil nationalism. Nambi Aarooran was the former professor and HOD of the Institute of Correspondence Courses at the Madurai Kamaraj University. This book is a thoroughly researched work with implacable objectivity.

 

Strange it may seem, but the term ‘Dravida’ itself is of Sanskritic origin. Kumarila, an eighth century CE scholar, had used the term ‘Andhra dravida bhasha’ to denote the languages of the Tamil and Telugu countries. Robert Caldwell also used it in the modern times to denote the four principal south Indian languages. The westerners – many of them Christian missionaries engaged in open proselytization work – contributed a lot to the development of Tamil, but have not spared any trick up their sleeves to sow dissent and strife among their students. Gustav Opert, a German philologist, and Herbert Risley, a British ethnographer, first used the term ‘Dravidian’ to denote a group of people. Their theory claimed that Indian society consisted of two major races – the Aryans and Dravidians. Caldwell and G U Pope – both of them Christian missionaries – hypothesized Tamils’ original religion as a modified form of Saivism where the central deity Siva differed significantly from his Hindu counterpart. The book does not specify that both were missionaries. With active British support, the missionaries tried to occupy all seats where new knowledge was being created or collected. When a committee of five scholars was constituted in 1913 for publishing a Tamil lexicon, it contained two missionaries representing India and Ceylon. They were the object of severe criticism for poor performance and more members had to be later added to the committee to make up for the loss in quality.

 

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, a strong anti-Brahmin lobby rose up in various Hindu castes which did not include Dalits. Most of them were upper castes including large zamindars holding the title of Raja, wealthy merchants, affluent lawyers and government officials retired from very high positions. This non-Brahmin movement metamorphosed over the years to become the Dravidian political movement. Tamil non-Brahmins described the Aryan civilization as caste-ridden and the Dravidian civilization as egalitarian and democratic. Aarooran proves that this was a pious wish having no relation to reality. In the Sangam literary works themselves, one finds the mention of several social divisions which became the basis of caste organisation in later times (p. 22). The earliest Tamil work Tolkappiyam speaks of the four varnas as antanar (Brahmins), aracar (rulers), vanikar (traders) and vellalas (cultivators).

 

This book beautifully catalogues the rise of non-Brahmin movement from the start and the reasons behind it. The Brahmins had occupied the lion’s share of government jobs because of their better proficiency in English. The Madras Dravidian Association was established in 1916 which started a newspaper named ‘Justice’. When this association turned into a political party, the paper’s name was co-opted as the party’s. They opposed the Home Rule Movement of the Indian National Congress, fearing that Brahmins would occupy the major share of power and sided with the British. They demanded communally separate electorates like the Muslims but were successful only in getting reserved seats within a general electorate. 28 out of the 63 seats were reserved for the non-Brahmins who enjoyed eager support from the Muslims and Christians. In return, the Justice Party supported the Khilafat Movement. At this stage, the Telugu non-Brahmins opted out of being labelled Dravidians. Kannadigas and Malayalis soon followed suit and Dravidianism has remained a Tamil fad ever since. The Dravidians’ hatred of Brahmins was legendary and showed symptoms similar to antisemitism in nature. When Annamalai University retrenched 7 out of 84 teachers during World War II as an economy measure, all of them were Brahmins. The Dravidian leaders openly justified it in public saying that it was ‘a small step in the direction of reducing their number permanently’.

 

Aarooran convincingly explains the renaissance of the Tamil language around this time. As the term implies, renaissance involves the recognition of a glorious past and its re-evaluation in consonance with the modern spirit. In the period 1905-20, archeological and epigraphical evidence provided details of the ancient kingdoms of south India which rose in fame in its heyday across the entire Southeast Asia. The Tamil language’s antiquity was also widely accepted. Politicians began to make Tamil the medium of public speech. But Tamil writers like the legendary C. Subramania Bharati took pride in the heritage of India as well as that of Tamil language and culture. Bharati was as much Tamil as he was Indian. He was very proud of the state he belonged to, but saw Tamil Nadu as an integral part of India. His outlook was nationalistic in scope. At the same time, there also arose a separatist ‘Pure Tamil’ movement which sought to dispel Sanskrit vocabulary from the language. The book also provides a very detailed story of the efforts to bring out a Tamil lexicon and establish a Tamil university.

 

The Dravidian Movement took on an anti-Hindu façade right from the start. The Self-Respect Movement of E V Ramaswamy Naicker was launched in 1925 and sought to restore the self-esteem of non-Brahmins alleged to have been denied by Brahmins. A fanatic sense of pride was cultivated in the volunteers. The British government exploited this chance to meddle in Hindu religious affairs by promulgating the Hindu Religious Endowments Act which confiscated surplus temple funds to use for public purposes benefiting all religious communities. Hindu religious texts were also criticized for supposedly discriminatory content. The monkey force in Ramayana was taken to be referring to Dravidians and the epic was alleged to contain racial insult. Self-Respect writers re-wrote the Ramayana to depict Ravana as a Dravidian hero repelling Rama. The anti-Brahmin rhetoric of EVR smacked of xenophobia which closely resembled antisemitism. EVR even opposed Brahmins joining his movement. This attitude gradually mellowed when the Self-Respect Movement made a foray into politics with the refurbished Justice Party. The political arm arranged its young members to form groups in 1935 to work under the direct leadership of the Raja of Bobbili and is reported to have derived inspiration from the Hitler Youth in Germany. EVR said the Aryans, like the Jews, came to Tamil Nadu only to exploit the Dravidians. The Dravidian Movement was anti-national too. EVR denied the applicability of the political concept of ‘nation’ to the whole of India and wanted a Tamil nation called Dravidastan to be carved out of India. He declared unconditional support to the British Raj and claimed it to be better than Brahmin Raj. He unashamedly joined hands with Mohammed Ali Jinnah and supported the demand for Pakistan. As a quid pro quo, Jinnah attended a meeting in Madras in 1941 and supported the demand for Dravidastan. Sensing that EVR had no mass support on this issue, Jinnah stayed aloof from Dravidian leaders thereafter so as not to complicate his own case. Anna Durai characterized Quit India campaign as a ‘huge hoax’ and threatened to start a Quit Aryan program.

 

The book also deals with the anti-Hindi agitation of the 1930s. Provincial elections were held in 1937 and Congress formed the ministry in Madras. With the entry of Congress, Justice Party which had won earlier elections to the provincial legislature, was wiped out electorally. The Rajaji government made Hindi a compulsory subject in the first three forms of high school in May 1938. This came at a time when even Tamil was not a compulsory subject. The Justice Party under EVR protested but their demand and agitation did not have popular support. The author claims that some of the protestors were paid cash for participation. The teaching of Hindi continued. However, the Congress ministries suddenly resigned to mark their disapproval of the government’s decision to involve India in the Second World War without consulting Indian leaders. After the native ministry resigned, the British government stepped in and stopped the teaching of Hindi. All agitators who were detained for illegal activities were also released.

 

This book is a well-balanced piece of fine research that should be a model for pure, objective analysis. In fact, I have a confession to make here. When I took this book, I was expecting it to be a collection of silly arguments of Dravidian ‘greatness’ or stupid claims about a submerged continent called Kumarikandam where Tamil reigned supreme. Instead, I found Nambi Aarooran to be an intellectually well-heeled scholar with a nice diction and an impartial observer and recorder of events related to the topic of concern. The author’s style and choice of material is highly relevant and amazingly precise without any trace of subscribing to any propaganda. It has captured the locus of Justice Party from a British stooge to an EVR-prop and shows the poor popular support it enjoyed. It also contains several chapters on Maraimalai Atikal’s religious and social thoughts. At the end of the book, the readers feel regret that the author abruptly stopped the narrative in the year 1944. He should have continued it till the ascent of the Dravidian parties to power.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star