THE KHILAFAT MOVEMENT IN INDIA 1919-1924 VERHANDELINGEN VAN HET KONINKLIJK INSTITUUT VOOR T AAL-, LAND- EN VOLKENKUNDE 62 THE KHILAFAT MOVEMENT IN INDIA 1919-1924 A. C. NIEMEIJER THE HAGUE - MAR TINUS NIJHOFF 1972 I.S.B.N.90.247.1334.X PREFACE The first incentive to write this book originated from a post-graduate course in Asian history which the University of Amsterdam organized in 1966. I am happy to acknowledge that the university where I received my training in the period from 1933 to 1940 also provided the stimulus for its final completion. I am greatly indebted to the personal interest taken in my studies by professor Dr. W. F. Wertheim and Dr. J. M. Pluvier. Without their encouragement, their critical observations and their advice the result would certainly have been of less value than it may be now. The same applies to Mrs. Dr. S. C. L. Vreede-de Stuers, who was prevented only by ill-health from playing a more active role in the last phase of preparation of this thesis. I am also grateful to professor Dr. G. F. Pijper who was kind enough to read the second chapter of my book and gave me valuable advice. Beside this personal and scholarly help I am indebted for assistance of a more technical character to the staff of the India Office Library and the India Office Records, and also to the staff of the Public Record Office, who were invariably kind and helpful in guiding a foreigner through the intricacies of their libraries and archives. 1 also remember with gratitude Miss M. D. Wainwright of the London School of Oriental and African Studies, who was the first to advise me in these matters. The staff of the library of the Technological University at Eindhoven was kind enough to facilitate my contacts with British libraries. Finally my thanks are due to Mrs. L. F. Richards for correcting my English manuscript, and to professor Dr. A. L. Vos for his readiness to supervise her work. I am most grateful to the "Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde" for its willingness to publish my book as one of its "Ver­ handelingen", and to the Foundation "Oosters Instituut" for subsidizing th is publication. My thanks are also due to the Netherlands Foundation VI THE KHILAFAT MOVE MENT IN INDIA for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) which gave me a grant and thereby made possible my research in London. Secondly, I should like to say something about the nature of this book and my object in writing it. Having become interested in Hindu­ Muslim relations as a factor in the Indo-Pakistan issue, I found my attention drawn to the Khilafat movement in pre-partition India, since it was instrumental in bringing the two communities together for a short period. I was thus confronted with the question: what was the Khilafat movement? I did not find a very clear answer in the current literature. There are many books devoting a few pages, sometimes even a chapter, to the Khilafat movement, but none of these is quite explicit about its background and its importance for Indian Muslims. I set about finding an answer to these questions myself, and the result is presented in this book. But because my interest was focused on Hindu-Muslims relations, my research covers only the period up to the time when the Khilafat question ceased to be an issue in Indian politics. Another point is that every student of a subject of Indian history who conducts his study and research in Europe accepts, by that very fact, certain limitations, as he is not able to consult archives in India and Pakistan. In my own case there was also a personallimitation, since I do not know any Indian languages. On the other hand, the London archives contain a wealth of material, and many Indians who played a role of some importance in the history of their country or took an interest in events, wrote and published their views in English, and this compen­ sated, to some extent at least, for these limitations. But this does not alter the fact that my study can by no means pretend to be exhaustive; it cannot be more than a contribution to the study of a subject on which other historians will be able to throw more light. A special problem was constituted by the orthography of Oriental words and proper names. Not being an Orientalist I did not want to make a false pretence of leaming by borrowing an orthography that would meet all scholarly requirements; I preferred to adopt a simple system which has proved its practical usefulness. This I found in the system used by Sir Percival Spear in the third edition of the Oxford History of India, which generally consists in the Hunterian system of spelling but without making use of diacritical marks. Unpublished materials from the India Office Library and the India Office Records transcribed in this book, and also transcripts of Crown- PREFACE VII copyright records in the Public Record Office, appear by permission of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. There is one more person I wish to thank: my wife, who encouraged me to take up these studies and ungrudgingly left me to them for so many evenings, week-ends and holidays when I might have been with her and my family. Eindhoven, January 1972 A. C. NIEMEIJER CONTENTS page Preface . .. V I Some Genera! Aspects of Nationalism in India . .. 1 11 Nationalism and Pan-Islamism in 19th-Century India . 22 111 Towards a Hindu-Muslim Entente . 49 IV The Khilafat Movement - its Start and Organization 69 V Action . 99 VI Crisis .... 126 VII The Second Blow 144 VIII Evaluation . 164 Samenvatting (Summary in the Dutch language) 179 Notes. 185 Abbreviations 252 Bibliography 253 Index. 259 CHAPTER I SaME GENERAL ASPECTS OF NATIONALISM IN INDIA Nationalism is generally acknowledged to be one of the great driving forces - perhaps even the most powerful of them - in modern history. This statement will probably not meet with much opposition, but it might very weU evoke a polite question as to its precise meaning, or even the blunt comment that it has no meaning at all. The problem is that no concise and acceptable definition of the concept of nationalism has been formulated thus far, notwithstanding the fact that a good many historians, and political theorists as weU as practitioners, have attempted to find one.1 Probably no definition combining conciseness with relevancy is possible in the case of a concept which, in common parlance, covers such disparate phenomena as the nationalism of revolutionary France about 1800, Italian nationalism about 1860, Indian nationalism about the beginning of our century, Russian nationalism in the era of Stalin, and African nationalism at present. For that reason, any general defini­ tion is apt to be lacking in substance, like this one quoted from H. Kohn, a well-known authority on the subject: "Nationalism is the state of mind, in which the supreme loyalty of the individu al is felt to be due to the nation-state." 11 Apart from containing the word "nation", badly in need of definition itself if this definition of nationalism is to be of any use, this sentence does not convey very much. But this is a fact of which Kohn is well aware: his definition is not a conclusion, but only a starting-point for further argument. But luckily we are not obliged to solve all the problems arising here. We are not primarily interested in nationalism as a general concept, but with its concrete shape in the Indian environment. Therefore, we will feel free to use the term "Indian nationalism" if we are able to make clear what we mean by it. In other words: we think we may be content with a very vague definition of nationalism if we are able to point out the special features of Indian nationalism as we see it. 2 THE KHILAFAT MOVE MENT IN INDIA We might start from the truism that nationalism is a kind of group loyalty. But, like every truism, this one, too, poses more questions than it answers. What exactly is the group involved? And has the loyalty it commands any special qualities when compared with other loyalties? The group involved is, of course, the nation, but then, what is a nation? To this question, there are two kinds of answer, an "objective" one, defining the nation by more or less outward qualities like the possession of a territory, of a common language, culture, religion, history, and so on, and a "subjective" one, stressing the consciousness of a group that it is constituting a nation because its members wish to do so. In the first case, the nation is mainly looking backwards for its legitimation. This attitude suited many European nations which in the 19th century already existed as fairly homogeneous groups - we are thinking of the Germans, the Italians, the Hungarians for instance. With them, nation­ alism was an attempt to make the boundaries of the state and those of the nation coincide.3 In the second case, however, it is the future which has to prove the nation's right to exist. This attitude had to be assumed by many recently acknowledged Asian (and African) nations made up of rather heterogeneous components, which had been brought together by foreign domination and were united mainly by the urge to get rid of it. In the Indian context, the possibility of these different approaches is important because the choice between them, to some extent, de ter­ mines whether further analysis will result in one or two (or even more) nations in India - the "two-nation theory" justifying the demand for Pakistan was based partly upon the "subjective" theory of the nation.