Introduction

Abstract

Abstract During the twentieth century, many political actors and theorists across the globe believed that the religious partition was a solution to the democratic problem of numbers. To compensate for their numerical weakness, minorities were often turned into sovereign nations. This Introduction lays out the conceptual framework that animated the Indian Muslim refusal of this triumphant logic. Swimming against the tide of Pakistani nationalism, a set of eminent Muslim thinker-politicians associated with the Indian independence movement recognized the structural significance of a consenting minority to the formation of a plural democracy. Leaning on Islam’s universalism to extend its ambitions beyond political separatism, they not only endorsed but deepened a uniquely Indian nationalist rendering of the secular. By remaking the Indian Muslim concept of parity, championing regional particularity, and engaging with the shifting meaning of sovereignty over historical time, the likes of Abul Kalam Azad, Sheikh Abdullah, and Abdul Ghaffar Khan charted a third way to nationalism. On the one hand, and in the hope of averting its own minoritization, the Muslim secular challenged the abstractions of its Hindu friends, M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. On the other, it critiqued Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s campaign for Pakistan since it institutionalized rather than dispelled India’s identitarian animosities.