From ‘community’ to ‘nation’: indian muslims in the concepts of british orientalists

Abstract

Indian Muslims were initially viewed by British Orientalists as a foreign and alien element in the Indian society, as cruel invaders who came to spread their religion “at the tip of their swords”. According to these concepts, the Indian population was divided into two homogeneous and hostile “communities”, that is Hindus (including Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, etc.) and Muslims. Such perception ignored two aspects of crucial importance: first, it did not take into consideration various regional, social, ethno-cultural, linguistic and other differences within each of the imagined “communities”; second, the majority of the Indian Muslims were not descendants of the invaders, but local people converted to Islam. Through preservation of many elements of their pre-Islamic past, they were, and still are, closer to the Hindus of their respective regions concerning language, culture and lifestyle, than to their co-believers in other areas of India, or foreign countries. These orientalist concepts served as the basis of British colonial policy; through education system and press they were communicated to the local elites, who not only began to think in terms of homogeneous religious “communities”, but, quite logically, transformed them into the “nations”, thus laying ground for communalist trends in Indian nationalism. In this way, the “two nations theory” was born. Its implementation was the idea of Pakistan and the bloody partition of British India in 1947.