The Awadhi Qusbah and the Communal Politics of History in India

Mushirul Hasan, Professor of History, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi

In a paper published in the special issue of South Asia (Australia: December 2002), I cited the insightful and eloquent views of Shafaat Ahmad Khan, a historian based in Allahabad. "We must keep vividly before us the conception of Indian history as a whole," he had stated at the All India Modern History Congress (later the Indian History Congress) in 1935, "We must not divide ourselves into watertight compartment of Marathas, Sikh, Muslim, and Bengali historians. Every Indian historian should aim at a conception of united India." Today, a group of historians, basking in the inglorious sunshine of BJP's rule, are busy rewriting this secular agenda. Efforts are underway to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda. Such is their power and influence that a growing number of people, drawn mainly from the urban elites, are abandoning the quest for an objective approach to the past. As the educationist Krishna Kumar points out, professional ethics and standards have become irrelevant for a dispensation concernedonly with the instrumentality of education as a means of social and ideological propagation. Predictably, the political-cum-intellectual project of the sangh parivar is to portray India's fractured past solely in terms of the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the "Hindu culture" of the past. Their other concern is to establish that Islam is alien to the Indian environment, even though almost simultaneously with political conquests in the seventh century Muslims began to find lodgments in India's western coast, and that "Islam" as such provides a complete identity, explanation and moral code for Muslims, and they conflate the mere fact of people being Islamic in some general sense with that of their adherence to beliefs and policies that are strictly described as "fundamentalist". Lastly, the saffronized perspective rejects the possibility of Islam working out reconciliation with other religions on the subcontinent. This notion is essentially based on the Orientalist construction of Islam's resistance to synthetic constructions and, above all, its aversion to rationalism.

Is this position historically tenable? Without engaging with the BJP polemicists or the Western Orientalists, I endeavour to establish historical truth and to defend the cult of objective historical inquiry. For this reason, I profile the qasbas of Awadh where Muslim groups rejected archaic conceptions of the Shariat, moved with the times, uncontrolled by theology, and responded to the conditions of modern life. In fact, popular, as opposed to scriptural (‘Great Traditions’) Islam, influenced qasba life. Though politicians, religious reformers, and imperial administrators could be seen developing and broadcasting a discourse centred on ‘Islam’ as a universal faith rather than ‘Islam’ practised in numberless congregations, religious beliefs in qasbas were diverse and sometimes even contrary to the fundamental texts of Islam. A large part of the educated elite did not necessarily live within the bounds of the sharia. Criminal and civil cases were decided according to British codes and procedures, and the authority of the sharia, and of the judges, who dispensed it, was confined to matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance. Strident expressions of religious orthodoxies in the qasbas were minimal, not because religious stridency was replaced by ‘secularism’ but because formal religious structures were, in some cases, supplanted by local ties and networks that sustained quasi-legal institutions to settle disputes, exchange information, and share risks. One result of all this was that the mutual interpenetrating of Sufi ethics and the Hindu way of life was amply evident in village and qasba-based khanqahs rather than in large urban centres where Hindus and Muslims tended to lead a more self-centred, if not exclusive, life. Coexistence, at times marred by external interventions, became the rule in qasba society. In other words, besides differences and distinctions there were also relationships and interactions. One of the underlying themes of this paper is to argue that those relationships and interactions can, and to some extent should be studied, because they tend to be so remarkable and influential in their own right. Today, the history of Islam in South Asia—the writing of which has always been peculiarly susceptible to the climate of current politics—demands a serious intellectual re-assessment. The historian Aziz Ahmad (1913-1978) referred to "the alternating and simultaneous processes of mutual attraction and repulsion" in medieval Indian society. Steering clear of such generalisations, I suggest that the qasbas predisposed ashraf or gentry families to the rational and ethical dimensions of Islam, to the virtues of charity, tolerance, generosity, good neighbourly conduct, and to those elements of piety that go into the making of the Perfect Man (Insan-e kamil). Without denying the existence of negative critiques or the wide gap between ideals and reality, there was only one Weltanschauung of significance, the rationalist and humanist construction of Islam. To be educated in the second half of the nineteenth century meant to be steeped in those values. It promised dignity and advancement in life.

This paper scrutinizes the communal aspect of qasba life, together with its manifestations in rituals, in religion, in fairs, melas and festivities, in inter-community relations, and in the routines of daily life. In so doing, I engage with the everyday in a specific setting, the qasbas. A second object is to follow in the footsteps of other historians and sociologists, and endeavour to uncover and emphasise how popular culture formed an important background to and produced a favourable environment for the steady but often contested emergence of assimilative thought and liberal convictions. My engagement is with the particular and the specific, rather than rehearsing the generalities of "composite culture" and "pluralism." My third and final objective is to recover an important fragment of Awadh's historical past, a past gradually fading into oblivion.