Book Reviews / Asian Journal of Social Science 41 (2013) 219–236

230 Book Reviews / Asian Journal of Social Science 41 (2013) 219–236 Neeti Nair (2011) Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and Partition in India. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 356 pages. ISBN: 9780674057791. Most of the literature on the partition of India and Pakistan highlights the role of Muslim League and the British colonialists in dividing the Indian peninsula. However in a novel rendition of partition studies, Nair analyses the situation of the minority Punjabi Hindus in the Muslim majority province of Punjab, who as a religious community were otherwise a majority throughout India, during the partition. The partition suddenly rendered the Pun- jabi Hindus alien in their own land. In this revisionist history of the partition, Nair focuses on the social and political history of the Punjab province in India, from the four decades preceding independence to the postcolonial times. She traces the religious and communitarian politics of the Punjabi Hindu minorities and their dynamics of interaction with the British, the Sikhs and the Muslims. Plodding through an unconventional analysis, Nair demonstrates that there was nothing inexorable about the partition of Punjab. Presenting an eventful historical narrative from 1920 onwards, Nair rejects the usual notion that the communal divide between the Hindu and the Muslim led to the partition of India. She also culls the naturalized view that the Muslims were responsible for the partition of India. In fact many of the influential Punjabi Hindu families and leaders actively contrib- uted to the petty politics that led to the partition. However it was not a sinisterly pre-planned decision, as none of these families oversaw the brutal destruction of life and property that followed the partition. Rather the idea of partition came as a tardy and poignant surprise for most of the Hindus in the region. Moreover, the violence that followed the partition had little to do with religious fanati- cism. It was a consequence of failed political negotiations. At the provincial and central levels there were missed opportunities that could have solved the communal tensions. It was not religious differences but petty political differences and underlying economic tensions that created the unresolvable option of partition. The marginalization of the Punjabi Hindus in colonial India started with the 1900 Punjab Land Alienation Act and the 1907 Colonization Bill which both restricted the communities that could acquire agricultural land. The ‘tribes’ who were mostly Muslims and the Sikhs who joined the British Army were entitled to agricultural lands which resulted into the deprivation of the Hindus in Punjab. Additionally, there was an ongoing struggle of power that emerged within various Punjabi Hindu castes, such as the dominant Punjabi Khatri, Arora and Arains. A form of Hindu-nationalist political undercurrent emerged during this phase in a most contingent manner for safeguarding the rights of various communities. This change in political stance also came as a result of the announcement of “separate electorates” for the Mus- lims, which enabled them with exclusive privileges to choose their own Muslim leaders. Subsequently, the Punjabi Hindu Sabha (organization) was formed in 1909 to protect the right of the Hindu minorities in Punjab. In the Sabha, it was decided that the Punjabi Hindu politics should focus on religious mobilization rather than on the national anti-colonial political struggle. Thus, between the anti-colonial agrarian struggles to the First World War, various shades of ambivalent politics were practiced by the Punjabi Hindu minorities, such as tactical loy- alism, emotive anti-colonialism, communal patriotism and communal antagonism. The © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15685314-12341289 Book Reviews / Asian Journal of Social Science 41 (2013) 219–236 231 Punjabi Hindus reflected multiple identities and shifting positions due to the ever changing political scenario. There were much ambivalence and equivocality in their politics. In the 1930s there were various plans, programs and proposals of power sharing among different communities and many proposals of partition were discussed to safeguard their interests. In many historical junctures, there were several possibilities of Hindus and Muslims unity to wage the anti-colonial struggle in a joint front. History could have been written otherwise if the choices made by the leaders in these critical moments were astute. All these changes made the period of the 1930s and its politics a very exciting and unpredictable one. Lately, the postcolonial project of nationalist history led by the Indian National Congress (INC) party painted all other alternative political histories in light of communalism and violence. But in the nationalist struggle there is no clear picture that emerges between the secular INC versus the communal Muslim league and the Hindu Mahasabha. Rather it was historical contingency and context that led the politics in Punjab towards a communal line. To demonstrate this point, Nair presents the biographical cases of three prominent Punjabi Hindu political leaders, who played active roles in the anti-colonial struggle: Lala Lajpat Rai, Swami Shradhananda and Bhagat Singh. In 1924, the Kohat riot took place in North-West Frontier Provinces that resulted in the evacuation of minority Hindus from Kohat and caused the development of solidarity among the Hindu communities. There was an increasing feeling that the Hindus were being side- lined by the Gandhi led INC. During this phase, Lala Lajpat Rai actively promoted the reduc- tion of the “absolutist rights” of the Muslims which created boundary between Muslim and Non-Muslim India. He resigned from the INC and became the president of Hindu Mahas- abha in 1925. However, though he fought the election against the INC in 1926, he again returned back to INC in 1927. After he came back, he promoted the reservation of seats for the Muslim minority in line with the Nehru Report. His vacillating ideological position reflected his fractured political self. He on the one hand yearned to secure the rights of his community in his province and at the same time, promoted secular ideals at the national level as an INC party member. Similarly, Nair demonstrates that leaders like Shraddhanand alias Munshi Ram, who is regarded as a bigoted Arya Samaji, had participated in strikingly secular politics in the anti- Rowlett act agitation in 1919, which was a key component of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. Shraddhanand was also against the burning of Christian churches in Amritsar and Gujranwala in 1919 and was against the use of coercion in religious conversation in the 1920s. Shraddhanand unprecedentedly delivered a speech from the pulpit of Jama Masjid professing Hindu-Muslim unity. That experience of ‘secular politics’ remained relevant for him, even when he practiced ‘communal’ Hindu politics of Shuddhi (purification) and San- gathan (organization) later on. Though the third protagonist Bhagat Singh’s modality of anti-colonial struggle was ‘violent’, along with other associates, he followed the Gandhian line of non-violent hunger- strike for the demand of their rights as political prisoners, when he was incarcerated for the Lahore Conspiracy case from 1929 to 1931. This political move by Bhagat Singh was grossly overlooked by Gandhi that partly resulted into the divergence of ‘national’ anti-colonial struggle and the ‘provincial’ politics of Punjab. In the second half of the book Nair treads through history, memory and narratives of the common people. She engages with politics much after the 1947 partition of India. She brings in oral narratives and interviews of former refugees from rural and urban West Punjab (now .

Load more