Author Venkat Dhulipala says Pakistan’s history is one that Indians can learn from so that they do not repeat the same mistakes

Venkat Dhulipala, Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, is an extraordinarily articulate man. His eyes light up with excitement as he talks about his new book, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India , published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.

Having been on the literature festival circuit over the past couple of months, he was in Mumbai last week for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, where he spoke about the extensive public debates in the erstwhile United Provinces that led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947.

Dhulipala’s tome, which runs into 530 pages, questions the claims of previous scholarship on the Partition of 1947 that led to the wedging out of two separate nation states — India and Pakistan — in the subcontinent.

His book comes at a time when there is a great surge of interest in the Partition. Literature from the period is being widely translated, and films are being made. Oral histories are being collected, and distributed through print and digital platforms.

How would Dhulipala place his book and his voice in this context? He said, “The writing of Partition history is an industry. There is immense nostalgia about pre-Partition times in both countries. Many books came out last year, and I am sure there will be more books every year. If you look at Partition Studies as a discipline, the first volume edited by CH Phillips and MD Wainwright, which was called The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives 1935-47 , came out in 1970. It had essays by historians from India and Pakistan, along with some memoirs.”

Dhulipala pointed out that after Phillips and Wainwright, there was a tremendous lull until Pakistani American historian Ayesha Jalal’s book The Sole Spokesman was published in 1985: “Jalal argued that Pakistan was not even Jinnah’s real demand; it was only a bargaining counter to acquire political parity for Muslims. She claimed that the Cabinet Mission Plan offered by the British Government is what Jinnah really wanted but the Congress dominated by the Hindus would not let him have it. I question that, on the basis of evidence that can be found in the press, in pamphlets and books, and also records of public meetings and election campaigns.”

Dhulipala further notes that Anita Inder Singh’s Origins of the Partition of India, 1936-1947 that came out in 1987 also challenged Jalal’s thesis that Jinnah wanted a united India. In Dhulipala’s view, “What is important in Singh’s book is that she argued that Jinnah was the real villain of the story, and not the Congress. He wanted a separate sovereign state called Pakistan. The funny thing is that both Jalal and Singh agree that Pakistan was a vague idea, and nobody knew anything about it. To them, what happened in 1947 was a result of negotiations at the top going awry.”

Dhulipala was confounded when he learnt that the view held by Jalal and Singh had also gone unchallenged by scholars like Gyanendra Pandey, Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin and Vazira Zamindar who have focused more on the experiences of common people who experienced the Partition rather than on the role of ‘a few great men’ who dictated the course of history. “In the community of historians, there seems to be a consensus that the Partition happened suddenly, and people were caught unwittingly. If India is an argumentative society where everything is debated, fought over, and thrashed out, it is rather strange that Pakistan is presented as a vague, poorly developed idea that nobody knew about.”

Having taken 11 years to write this book, Dhulipala conducted archival research at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi, the UP State Archives, the National Film Archives in Pune, and in the UK. He has not visited Pakistan yet but has studied photocopied materials from the Archives of the Freedom Movement sent from Islamabad. Dhulipala’s aim in this book is to foreground the role played by Deobandi Ulama in articulating what the new state of Pakistan would look like.

He says, “There is a rich, wide-ranging and sophisticated debate on the meaning of Pakistan and its implications. People were either supporting or opposing it for very specific reasons. I use the term ‘new Medina’ used by Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a Deobandi alim aligned to Jinnah and the Muslim League. Pakistan was envisioned not as a secular state, but as an ideal Islamic state that would be a successor to the Ottoman Caliphate and unify all the Muslims in the world. It would be a force of resurgence for the ummah (community).”

Dhulipala seemed keen to demolish the idea that Jinnah was a secular man, and that Pakistan was imagined as an Islamic state only during the regime of Zia ul Haq who declared martial law in Pakistan in 1977. He cites Vali Nasr, a well-known academic who is also Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC:“Nasr’s book The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution talks about how a functionary of the Jamaat-e-Islami went and asked Jinnah what Pakistan would like. Jinnah told him that he was agitating first for a plot of land. And once, he would get it, Muslims would be free to build their mosque upon it.”

Dhulipala’s book is based only on English and Urdu sources. His study is limited to public debates in the United Provinces. He has not engaged with debates in Punjab, Bengal, Sindh, Balochistan, the former North West Frontier Province (now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). These debates are alive even in present-day Pakistan where many political groups define their identity based on their language and ethnicity. “I do not read Bengali, Sindhi, Balochi or Pashto,” he says. “Other understandings of Pakistan might emerge from a large canvas study.”

Varying reactions

He has received varying reactions from Pakistani scholars. He claimed that Faisal Devji and Pervez Hoodbhoy have rejected his arguments while Khaled Ahmed has welcomed them. Dhulipala also confessed that he might be mistakenly viewed as a Pakistan-hater, and as a Hindu, right-wing sympathiser.

Dhulipala added, “I think many Pakistanis will be happy to know that their country was not created in a fit of absent-mindedness. It was a result of the thought and agency of the Muslim league leadership, not just a sole spokesman like Jinnah who has been portrayed by Jalal somewhat like a Bollywood superstar such as Amitabh Bachchan who can fight 50 people at one time, all by himself.”

Dhulipala also mentioned that the intention of his book is not to dampen the India-Pakistan peace process. “India and Pakistan can live as good neighbours. Many in Pakistan believe that India has never quite reconciled itself to the Partition, and continues to see it as a moment of loss; which, for Pakistanis, was a moment of liberation. A lot of people across the board talk about the Partition with a sense of nostalgia: from Mulayam Singh Yadav to Lalu Prasad Yadav to the RSS folks who want an Akhand Bharat, to people who hold candles at the Wagah border for peace, to those who imagine an ideal cricket team with Indian batsmen and Pakistani fast bowlers. We must accept what happened, and move forward. Pakistanis must know that India has no designs to swallow and dismember Pakistan.”

Pakistan’s history, according to Dhulipala, is one that Indians can learn from so that they do not repeat the same mistakes. “Those who want to make India into a Hindu counterpart of Pakistan should not go down that road. Our diversity is our greatest strength. Once we define identity in religious terms, we get on to a dangerous and slippery path. We begin to decide who is purer than the other. We begin to take over places of worship. We begin to purify our languages of foreign terms.”

The author is a freelance writer