An Ethical Country

Abstract

Abstract Focusing on Abdul Ghaffar Khan, this chapter extends the argument that Muslim self-statement at the regional level could produce an Indian nationalism prior to 1947. Extending the historiographical engagement with Ghaffar Khan beyond the Pashtun ethnos, it demonstrates how he universalized his intellectual inheritance for India and the world. His reinvention of the Muslim Pashtun warrior as the harbinger of an ethical freedom allowed him to both replace its negative British and Indian image as an untameable savage, and in turn establish the Pashtun as India’s nationalist ‘gate-keeper’. Derived from Pashtunwali, Ghaffar Khan and his understudy Mohammad Yunus made a politics of honour and obligation the foundation for an ethical reciprocity between Muslim Pashtuns and Hindu Hindustanis. Enhanced by their endorsement of Nehruvian socialism, the contemporary, civic nature of Indian nationalism on the Pashtun Frontier was striking. The presence of neighbouring Afghanistan, with its large Pashtun population, meant that historical inheritance was unable to decisively award modern Indian nationality to Pashtuns. But this did not prevent Ghaffar Khan and Yunus from indulging in ancient history and making their Frontier the birthplace of a pre-Islamic Indian civilization. This only reinforced their counterintuitive argument that this peripheral region was the centre of an inclusive, non-violent Indian nationalism. They strengthened this claim further by cutting through colonial India’s sectarian politics to frame their national question not in religious but in explicitly secular terms: were Pashtuns Indians or Afghans? Ultimately, only the tumultuous event of Partition could undo their secular exceptionalism.