One can find many interesting things in a second-hand bookshop. For example, many years ago, randomly browsing the shelves of such a shop, I came across a 500-page hardcover volume called Wonderful India and Three of Her Beautiful Neighbours: Ceylon, Burma, Nepal. This book of hundreds of black and white photographs was published by the Times of India and Statesman and Book Department in 1938.
Of course, I snatched the book right away. Over two decades and multiple life-changing events later, the book is one of the most treasured volumes on my shelves. In addition to the photos, the book is also a statement of how India’s literate class saw the country as the 1930s drew to a close.
Next to a photo of the mighty Himalayas is the inside cover on the left. On the right, next to a portrait of Pandit Nehru, is the inside cover from the back, which is of course front in Urdu because it’s written from right to left. Clearly, the three major languages in India in the late 1930s were English, Bangla, and Urdu.
To the extent that the importance of a language reflects underlying political and economic dynamics, how have the speakers of Bangla and Urdu fared in the decades since the book was published?
Bangladesh’s economic success in the recent decades is well known. But this had come after several decades of stagnation, punctuated by a devastating war in 1971. The neighbouring states of eastern India have not exactly been economic powerhouses. Might things have been different had history played out differently?
The recent political turns in India seem to suggest a smashing validation of Jinnah -- a friend recently quipped in a political adda. Ah, indeed. But which Jinnah, I wondered.
There is a clip in the four-decade old Oscar-winning biopic of the Mahatma involving Jinnah, Nehru, and Sardar Patel. Jinnah tells Gandhi about his concerns about the “slavery of the Muslims,” noting the “real world is not full of Mahatma Gandhis.”
“In the real India there are Hindus and Muslims in every village, and every town, how do you propose to separate?” an angry Jinnah interrupts.
“Where there is a Muslim majority, it will be Pakistan, the rest is your India,” Jinnah retorts.
“But there are Muslim majorities on two sides of India!” exclaims Patel.
“You worry about India, and let us worry about Pakistan,” is the reply.
Movies are rarely the best guides to history, but that scene does capture the complexities of our shared sub-continent. However, the past 75 years show that the Partition and Pakistan have not resulted in lasting political freedom for most of the Muslims of the sub-continent, no matter the colour of their passport. That is, Jinnah, as played by Alyque Padamsee, has been thoroughly repudiated by history.
A far more nuanced Jinnah emerges in Ayesha Jalal’s “Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan.” The Jinnah of Jalal, a Pakistani-American historian, is no less a pukka sahib than the one of Richard Attenborough. But here his concerns and intransigence are explained and contextualized. The demand for Pakistan as a separate homeland for India’s Muslims, according to Jalal, was an ambit claim, a maximalist bargaining strategy.
And what was Jinnah bargaining for? What did he really care about? From Jalal’s telling, Jinnah was at his core a liberal constitutionalist who worried about the dangers of majoritarianism in an illiberal democracy. The events of the last 75 years in general, and the recent turns in India’s politics in particular, is indeed a smashing validation of this Jinnah.
There is another scene in Attenborough's movie where Gandhi asks Nehru to stand down so that Jinnah could become the first prime minister of a free India. The whole thing falls flat because Nehru demurs.
This is an extreme caricature of what actually transpired. But, as argued by voices as diverse as Jalal, Maolana Azad (the foremost Muslim leader in the Indian National Congress), and Jaswant Singh (a senior minister in various BJP governments under AB Vajpayee), it was Nehru’s centralizing tendencies, rather than Jinnah’s recalcitrance, that led to Partition. For example, it was Nehru, not Jinnah, who scuttled the Cabinet Mission Plan under which a confederal but un-partitioned India would have replaced the Raj.
I wonder about all this as I leaf through the pages of my photo book. The book was published well before World War II, the Lahore Resolution, and the Quit India uprising, and the riots that led to the Partition. There is a palpable sense of optimism in these pages, with the introductory chapter hailing the constitution of 1937 and the elected ministries across the subcontinent, looking forward to a great future.
With his prominent photo, it’s clear that the publishers thought Nehru would herald that future. And 75 years ago this year, Nehru made a pledge “to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.”
That pledge has gone un-redeemed, not just in the truncated India, but all her neighbours, including Bangladesh. Perhaps it’s time to make another tryst with destiny.
Jyoti Rahman reads and watches stuff and writes about them. His writings are archived at https://jrahman.substack.com/
