Letters to Sir Syed: Lajpat Rai’s Response to the Muslim Refusal of Minorityhood

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the thought of Syed Ahmed Khan, India’s most prominent nineteenth-century Muslim politician-thinker, and argues that Khan’s resistance to the Indian nationalist-democratic frame represented an early attempt by a Muslim aristocrat to resist the transformation of India’s Muslims into a new kind of vulnerable minority. It further examines the public refutation of Khan’s arguments by Lajpat Rai, a young Congressman later to become one of colonial India’s most well-known Hindu politicians, and illustrates that Rai’s easy and eager embrace of the Indian nationalist-democratic frame entailed an affirmation of Muslim minoritisation. The article argues that their different understandings and evaluations of modern representative democracy and nationalism, and their different emotive responses, dread or optimism, to these new phenomena was not a natural extension of their religious identity. What mattered more were their distinct socio-economic identities and belongingness to an all-India minority or majority.