This element deals with the salient characteristics of contemporary Indian political thought. This is not an easy exercise as there is no single body of thought that we can call 'Indian'. Nor is there a stability of concerns crossways time - say flanked by the early nineteenth century and the late nineteenth century. Taking a synoptic view so necessarily reduces the complexities and does not do full justice to minority or subordinate voices, relegating them further to the margins. You will do well to bear in mind that mainly of the contemporary Indian political and social thought is marked through the experience of the colonial encounter. It was within this universe that mainly of our thinkers, hailing from dissimilar societies and social groups, embarked on their intellectual-political journey.
TWO PHASES OF CONTEMPORARY INDIAN THOUGHT
We can broadly divide contemporary Indian thought into two phases. The first stage was that of what has often been referred to as the stage of 'Social Reform'. Thinkers of this stage, as we shall see, were more concerned with the internal regeneration of indigenous society and because its first effervescence occurred in Bengal, it was often referred to as the 'Bengal renaissance'. Nationalist historians of course, even started referring to it as the Indian renaissance, but this will be an inaccurate account for reasons that we will see shortly. The second stage, more intricate and textured in several methods, is the stage that we can designate as the nationalist stage. The concerns in this stage shift more decisively to questions of politics and power, and of freedom from colonial rule. It is significant to keep in mind that what we are calling the 'nationalist stage' is merely a shorthand expression, for there were precisely in this era, several more tendencies, and currents that cannot basically be subsumed under the rubric of 'nationalism'. At the extremely least, there are significant currents like the Muslim and Dalit that spot the intellectual and political 'search for the Self' in this era.
Before we go into the specific characteristics of the thinkers of the two broad eras that we have outlined, it is necessary to create a few clarifications. Though mainly scholars have tended to see these as two separate phases or eras, this method of looking at the history of contemporary Indian political thought can be quite problematic. These periodisations can only be extremely broad and tentative ones, made for the purpose of convenience of revise; on no explanation should they be rendered into fixed and hermetically sealed eras. In information, we can more productively see them as two broad currents which do not necessarily follow one after the other. As we shall see, there are several social reform concerns that take on a dissimilar form and continue into the nationalist stage. In information, the nationalist stage itself reveals two extremely separate tendencies in this respect. On the one hand, there is the dominant or hegemonic nationalism, represented in the main through the Indian National Congress, where the social reform agenda is abandoned in an important method; on the other there are other contending narratives that insist on privileging the reform agenda much to the discomfort of the nationalists. We shall soon see why. We shall also have the occasion to note that, in this respect, Gandhi remnants approximately the one figure within this hegemonic nationalism, who keeps trying to bring in the reform agenda into the nationalist movement.
SOCIAL REFORM AND THE ‘HINDU RENAISSANCE'
There was a veritable explosion of intellectual action throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in Bengal and Western India. In Bengal there was the Young Bengal movement, and publicists, thinkers and social reformers like Raja Rammohun Roy, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, Keshub Chandra Sen, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, Surendranath Banerjee, Swami Vivekananda and such other personalities who embodied this effervescence. In Western India there were reformers like Bal Shastri Jambhekar, Jotirao Govindrao Phule, Ramakrishna' Gopal Bhandarkar, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar and Swami Dayanand Saraswati (whose action was mainly in North India), such other luminaries who directly addressed the question of internal regeneration of Indian society. They launched the mainly vigorous critique of their own society, with the aim of bringing it out of its backwardness. As Rammohun Roy put it, it was the "thick clouds of superstition" that "hung all in excess of the land" (i.e. Bengal), that worried him mainly. As a consequence, he whispered, polygamy and infanticide were rampant and the location of the Bengali woman was ―a tissue of ceaseless oppressions and miseries". Idolatory and priest craft were often held responsible through thinkers like Dayanand Saraswati, for the destruction of the yearning for knowledge. He whispered that it was institutions such as these that had made Hindus fatalist and inert. The issues that dominated the concerns of the social reformers were primarily related to the status of women in Indian society. Sati, widow remarriage and the education of women were central issues raised through the reformers. To this end, they re-interpreted custom, often offered ruthless critiques of traditional practices and even lobbied support with the colonial government for enacting appropriate legislations for banning some of the more obnoxious practices like Sati.
Needless to say, while the location of women was a matter of central concern, there was another equally significant question - that of caste divisions and untouchability that became the focus of critique of several of these reformers. Though, you necessity bear in mind that their approach to caste was dissimilar from those of reformers like Jotiba Phule and later, Dr Ambedkar. Unlike the latter, they did not seek the emancipation of the lower castes, but their assimilation into the mainstream of Hindu society. Mainly of the reformers held not only that Hindu society had become degenerate, insulated and deeply divided into hundreds of dissimilar societies and castes, but also it had become thereby incapable of forging any type of general will'. Hindu society so, had to be reconstituted and reorganized into a single society. Swami Vivekananda or Dayanand Saraswati so, sought to reorganize somewhat beside the rows of the Christian Church, as Ashis Nandy suggests. If Vivekananda was candid that no other society "puts its foot on the neck of the wretched as mercilessly as does that of India", Dayanand Saraswati sought to redefine caste 'in such a method that it ceased to be determined solely through birth. He sought to contain the criterion of individual accomplishment 'in the determination of the caste-status of an individual.
Two Intellectual Moves of Reformers
There are two separate moves made through the reformers that we necessity bear in mind. First, their critiques drew extremely explicitly from the exposure to Western liberal thoughts. To several of them Birtish power was the livelihood proof of the validity and 'invincibility' of those thoughts. They were so, open admirers of British rule. For instance, as Bal Shastri Jambhekar saw it, a mere sixty or seventy years of British rule in excess of Bengal had transformed it beyond recognition. He saw in the lay of the ―violence, oppression and misrule of the past, a picture of ―security and freedom where people were able to acquire ―a superior knowledge of the Arts and Sciences of Europe". Jambhekar‘s statement is in information, fairly representative of the understanding of the early reformers with regard to British rule. It should be remembered that the first generation of reformist thinkers began their intellectual journey in the face of a dual challenge. On the one hand, there was the overwhelming attendance of colonial rule that did not basically symbolize to them a foreign power but also a contemporary and 'advanced' society that had made breathtaking advances in the field of thoughts - of science and philosophy. To them, it embodied the exhilarating growths of science and contemporary methods of thinking that a country like India — which to mainly reformers was essentially Hindu — had to also adopt, if it was to emerge as a free and powerful country in the contemporary era. On the other hand, there was the continuous challenge thrown before the emerging indigenous intelligentsia through Christian missionaries who mounted a powerful critique of Hinduism and some of its mainly inhuman practices like Sati, female infanticide, and caste oppression - particularly the abominable practice of untouchability. Questions of widow re-marriage and the education of women, so were major issues of debate and contention. These formidable challenges required two simultaneous intellectual moves: (a) an acknowledgement of the rot that had set in, in Hindu society and a thorough going critique of it. For this purpose, they welcomed contemporary liberal thoughts and philosophy with open arms, (b) as we saw, in the last element, they were equally anxious to retain a sense of their own Self. Complete self-negation could not create a people great. So, mainly of the reformers, drawing on modern Orientalist scholarship, claimed a great and ancient past. Even a influenced Anglophile like Rammohun Roy, for instance had the occasion to reply to a missionary critic that "the world is indebted to our ancestors for the first dawn of knowledge which sprang up in the East" and that India had nothing to learn from the British "with respect to science, literature and religion." This awe of Western knowledge and achievements and a simultaneous valorization of a hoary Indian past, were general characteristics of the reformers of all shades - even though the specific emphasis on dissimilar characteristics varied from thinker to thinker. For instance, Dayananda was not really influenced, as several others were, through Western thinkers and philosophers. Nevertheless, he too acknowledged the immense progress made through the West. He attributed this progress to the high sense of public duty, energetic temperament and adherence to own religious principles, rather than to their scientific and philosophical achievements. He so drew extremely dissimilar conclusions from his reading of the modernity and progress of the West, which focused on the regeneration of Hindu society through religious reform.
There are reasons to consider that the early responses to British rule and the so-described Renaissance were a distinctly Hindu phenomenon. For several reasons that we cannot go into in this element, it was within Hindu society that the first critical engagement with colonial modernity began. Other responses from societies like the Muslims, had their own separate specificities and history and we shall talk about them separately. Though, we can identify two immediate reasons for this relatively early effervescence within Hindu society. One immediate cause for the Hindu response was of course, the information that it was precisely sure practices within Hindu society that colonial rule sought to address. A second cause was that, for specific historical reasons, it was the Hindu elite that had an access to English education and exposure to the radical thoughts of the Enlightenment. It will be wrong, though, to present what was essentially a response from within Hindu society as an "Indian renaissance".
There was a time when mainly scholars would consider the Bengal Renaissance in scrupulous, as an analogue of the European Renaissance. More specifically, the "role of Bengal in India's contemporary awakening" as historian Sushobhan Sarkar argued, was seen as analogous to the role played through Italy in the European Renaissance. Later historians like Sumit Sarkar and Ashok Sen though, reviewed the legacy of the Bengal Renaissance in the 1970s, and came to the conclusion that the portrayal of the intellectual awakening of this era was actually quite flawed. The tendency to see the division flanked by the reformers and their opponents as one flanked by 'progressives' and traditionalists‘ was an oversimplification of the story of the renaissance. They noted the ―deeply contradictory" nature of the "break with the past" inaugurated, for instance through Rammohun Roy, which combined with it, strong elements of a Hindu elitist framework. Sumit Sarkar, in information, presented a much more modest and complicated picture of the Renaissance than had been drawn through earlier historians and scholars. It creates more sense, so, to see these responses as Bhikhu Parekh does, as primarily Hindu responses to the colonial encounter. Parekh has suggested that for these Hindu thinkers, their own self-definition and their effort to understand what colonial rule was all in relation to the, were part of the similar exercise: they could not describe and create sense of themselves without creation sense of colonial rule and vice versa.
In this context, an intense soul-searching marked the behaviors of the early intelligentsia. The encounter with colonialism and through it, with thoughts of equality and liberty, made them aware of some of the inhuman practices still prevalent in Indian society. It was the part that was able to avail of Western education and steeped so in Western values that became the harbinger of reforms.
Manners of Reformist Thought
Bhikhu Parekh has suggested that the arguments of these Hindu reformers relied on one or more of the following four manners of arguments derived from custom but deployed with a separate newness to meet the demands of changing times. First, they appealed to scriptures that seemed to them to be more hospitable to their concerns. Vidyasagar for instance retied on the Parasharasmriti, while Rammohun Roy invoked the Upanishads. Second, they invoked what they described sadharandharma, which they interpreted to mean the universal principles of morality. Third, they appealed to the thought of a yugadharma, or the principles that accord with the needs of the prevailing Yuga or epoch. Fourthly, they invoked the thought of loksangraha, and "argued that the practice in question had such grave consequences that unless eradicated, it would destroy the cohesion and viability of the Hindu social order.‖ As instances, he mentions that Vidyasagar argued that unmarried widows were turning to prostitution or corrupting their families; K.C, sen contended that child marriages were endangering the survival of the Hindu jati; Dayananda Saraswati whispered that image worship was leading to internal sectarian quarrels.
V.R. Mehta has suggested that there are at least two significant theoretical issues involved in these intellectual initiatives of the reformers. First, they worked strenuously to change the attitude towards fate and other-worldliness and assert the importance of action in this world. While they sustained to assert the importance of the soul and spirituality as a distinctive characteristic of Hindu/Indian thought, they shifted the emphasis to underline the significance of "enterprise in the service of the society." In that sense, they asserted the significance of secular, this-worldly concerns, in the face of the challenges of the contemporary world. Secondly, the main focus of their enquiry though, remained not the individual but society, society and humanity as a whole. They do not see society as and aggregate of individuals in pursuit of their self interests but as an organic whole. He suggests that this was so for two reasons. Firstly, there was already a strong custom in India that emphasized the wholeness or oneness of being. Secondly, the individualist thought society was already under attack in much of the nineteenth century thinking in Europe itself, There is a third characteristic that he also mentions in relation to later social reform thought - the concern with the welfare of the people and the attraction that thoughts such as 'socialism' and 'equality' held for thinkers like Vivekananda and Bankimchandra.
Mehta also locates three broadly identifiable sources of the elements that went into the constitution of Renaissance thought. The first, the "civilization and temper of European Renaissance and the Reformation", and more particularly the thoughts of Bentham, Mill, Carlyle and Coleridge through which came a sense of democracy and rule of law and private enterprise. These thoughts became accessible to the indigenous elite through the advent of English education. The second was the power of the thoughts of German philosophers like Schelling, Fichte, and Herder. This is a current though, that influenced the later-day nationalists more than the early reformers - with their sharp emphasis on the thoughts of volk, society, duty and nation that were more immediately the concern of nationalists like Bankimchandra, Vivekananda, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh. The third source recognized through Mehta is Indian traditional thought. Here the work of great Orientalist scholars like William Jones and Max Mueller, who had brought ancient Indian civilization and learning to light, became the foundation for a renewed appeal to the greatness of that past. Though, as you will see in subsequent elements, it was the first and third of these sources that made up the framework of the reformist thinkers. The concern with nation‘ and a rejection of everything British and colonial was strikingly absent in the middle of them.
THE ARRIVAL OF NATIONALISM
'Nationalism' could be said to have made its appearance in the last part of the nineteenth century. In this stage, the concerns and approach of the thinkers change in an extremely important method. Here there is a strong concern with the 'freedom of the nation' and an approximately irreconcilable hostility towards colonial rule. Unlike the social reformers before them, they placed no trust on the institutions of the colonial state for affecting any reform. On the contrary, they displayed a positive opposition to what they now measured the 'interference' through the colonial state in the 'internal matters' of the nation. Alongside this, there is a parallel move towards privileging of the political thrash about in excess of social reforms.
The ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ Domains
Partha Chatterjee observes that there is a disappearance of the 'women's question', so central to the concerns of the reformers, from the agenda of the nationalists towards the end of the nineteenth century. We may also mention here the information that practically the first major nationalist mobilization took laid approximately the Age of Consent Bill of 1891, where the nationalists argued that this was gross interference in the affairs of the nation and that Hindu society would be robbed of its distinctiveness if this were allowed to pass. As you would know, this Bill was meant to prohibit marital intercourse with girls below the age of twelve. You would also know that in the past, mainly reformers had in information solicited colonial legal intervention in the prohibition of sure practices, even when these supposedly intervened within the so- described 'private' sphere. It should also be remembered that this was a controversy that spread distant beyond the borders of Bengal and lay behind the final parting of methods flanked by Gopal Agarkar and Bal Gangadhar Tilak - the former supporting the cause of social reform and the latter staunchly opposing it. Chatterjee suggests that this disappearance of women's issues from the agenda of the nationalists had to do with a new framework that had been set in lay through then. This framework was feature of what Chatterjee calls nationalism's 'moment of departure' and was a fairly elaborate one, where the overriding concern was that of the nation‘s sovereignty. Here, Chatterjee argues that nationalism began through creation a distinction flanked by two spheres: the 'material and the 'spiritual', or what is another name for it, the 'outer' and 'inner' sphere. This was a distinction already made through the reformers and even they would, on occasions, claim that they were spiritually superior to the Birtish, even if the latter had made important material progress. What the nationalists did then, was to carry in excess of this distinction into the formulation of an entirely novel type. It conceded that as a colonized nation it was subordinate to the colonizers in the material sphere. But there was one domain that the colonizer had no access to: this was the inner domain of civilization and spirituality. Here the nation declared itself sovereign. What did this mean? This meant that henceforth, in this inner domain, it would not allow any intervention through the colonial state.' From now on, the questions of social reform would become an 'internal matter' that would be dealt with after the nation attained freedom in the material domain. This did not mean though, that all nationalists were against reforms per se. What it did mean was that these questions would now be dealt with after the power of the state passed into the hands of the nationalists.
There is another aspect of this distinction that Chatterjee does not deal with, but which we can easily see in relation to the question of caste reforms. Soon after the Age of Consent agitation, the nationalists led through Tilak threatened to bum down the pandal of the Indian Social Conference that used to be held simultaneously with the sessions of the Indian National Congress and used to be a forum for discussing questions of social reform. This was the era when the so-described 'moderates' were in the leadership of the Congress. The methods of the moderates like Gokhale and Ranade were in the framework of constitutional reform and extremely much in row with the location of the early reformers. With the arrival of nationalism, all this changed and soon power within the Indian National Congress passed into the hands of the so-described 'extremists', in scrupulous the Lal-Bal-Pal combine (i.e. Lala Lajpat Rai, BalGangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal). Unlike the women's question there was no resolution here with regard to caste reforms; they were basically deferred ―in the superior interests of anti-colonial unity". All issues of social reform were henceforth to be measured ―divisive of national unity. As it happens, there is one more thing that happened here: with the demarcation of the 'inner' sphere as a sphere of sovereignty, several socially conservative thoughts could also now easily inhabit the nationalist movement, It is here that we necessity locate the strident critique of nationalism that was made not only through leaders and thinkers like Jotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar but also several Muslim leaders who began to see the emergent nationalism as a purely Hindu affair. As nationalism became a mass movement and since mainly nationalists saw the incipient nation as primarily Hindu, there was an rising resort in this stage to a revival of Hindu symbols for mobilization.
Although Gandhi himself resorted to the use of Hindu symbols, he was acutely aware of the unfinished agenda of social reform. Here it is motivating though, that while he situated himself squarely within the framework of nationalism as defined through his precursors, and held on to the thought of sovereignty in the inner sphere, he nevertheless made an significant departure in conditions of his insistence on the question of the social reform. Unlike other nationalists, he was not prepared to abandon it altogether and would repeatedly insist upon require of Hindu society to redeem itself through exorcising untouchability from within itself through 'self-purification'. It is also motivating that while he himself used the thought of 'Ram Rajya‘ as a utopia of nationhood, he made untiring efforts to draw the Muslims into the mainstream of the nationalist thrash about.
Concerns of the Nationalists
At this stage, it is necessary to point out that it will be wrong to see the divisions flanked by dissimilar strands as those flanked by 'progressives' and 'conservatives' or 'modernists' and 'traditionalists'. For, as several scholars have pointed out, even the nationalists who rejected the standpoint of the reformers, were working for a thoroughly modernist agenda. Their valorization of Hindu custom was not a valorization of existing practices of Hindu religion. In information, they all wanted, much like the reformers, a contemporary and reorganized Hindu society that would become the centre-piece of the emerging nation. Being 'Hindu' to them was the sign of national identity rather than a religious one. It is for this cause that, as Bhikhu Parekh notes, these thinkers (whom he calls 'critical traditionalists') were mainly preoccupied with themes of statecraft, autonomy of political morality, political realism, will power, and courage - issues that were absent from the discourse of the reformers. And these were all entirely contemporary concerns. This concern with 'Hinduness' as a marker of national, rather than religious identity was extremely much there not only in the case of Congress nationalists but also of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the author of the ideology of Hindutva. It is not surprising that Savarlcar, who stayed absent from the Gandhi-dominated Congress movement, was a thorough modernist and atheist who was opposed to all types of superstitions and was greatly influenced through the scientific and philosophic achievements of the West. In information, Savarkar greatly valued the work done through Ambedkar and unlike Gandhi who was suspicious of his motives, he associated him with his Hindu Mahasabha functions. What is even more motivating is that Savarkar‘s critique of Gandhi was precisely because of Gandhi's wholesale rejection of contemporary civilization, science and technology. In a sense, like Nehru the secular-nationalist, Savarkar's complaint with Gandhi related to his 'irrationality' and 'backward-looking' thoughts.
This is precisely the conundrum of the nationalist stage that has eluded several scholars and historians. For, it is the proclaimed anti-modernist and sanatani Hindu Gandhi who stood steadfastly for Hindu-Muslim unity as the precondition of India's freedom, while the modernist and secular leaders like Madan Mohan Malaviya, Purushottamdas Tandon and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi often seemed to be speaking a language of Hindu nationalism. It was Gandhi who made the Khilafat-Non Cooperation movement collaboration of Hindus and Muslims possible. It is true that Gandhi's insistence on a Hindu sanatani identity could not eventually convince either the Muslims or the Dalit/lower caste leaders in relation to the sincerity in safeguarding their interests. In the case of the Dalits, in information, the problem was distant more intricate at one stage, for what they wanted was a self-governing political voice within the new nation and that could not be achieved merely through Gandhian self-purification methods.
THE TRAJECTORY OF MUSLIM THOUGHT
We have traced the broad contours of nineteenth and twentieth century thought as it appeared from within Hindu society. The history of Muslim society in India is still steeped in a sea of ignorance and misconceptions and a lot more work needs to be done to unearth the dissimilar types of trends of thought that appeared from within it. We will sketch a broad outline of this below but let it be stated at the outset that the situation is no less intricate and variegated and the general myth of a monolithic Muslim society is as ill-founded as that of any other society. There are a range of responses to the changing world that we encounter here too. A case in point for instance, is the role of the Ulama (i.e. religious scholars) of Farangi Mahal, brought out through the pioneering research of Francis Robinson in the mid 1970s. Robinson noted that this tendency, so active in the second decade of the twentieth century, had been consigned to silence, buried under the narratives of both the Indian and the Pakistani nationalisms. He pointed out the crucial role played through Maulana Abd-al Bari of Farangi Mahal in the pan-Islamic protest, particularly the Khilafat movement and in the base of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-I- Hind, which worked, for the mainly part, in secure cooperation with the Indian National Congress and remained opposed to the Muslim League demand for a separate homeland.
With regard to Muslim society in India, we might require to steer clear of two diametrically opposed viewpoints. One, represented through Hindu nationalists, who sees Muslims as an alien body continuously at odds with and insulated from local society arid civilization, and the other represented through the secular-nationalists who see merely a syncretic civilization that expressed the combined elements of Islamic and Hindu civilization. We require to see the procedure through which what was once and elite Perso-Islamic civilization of the ashrafs (the gentry or the nobility), slowly enters into a dialogue with the local traditions of learning, of the arts and music etc. This is a procedure that spans centuries and there are contradictory pulls and trends that are at work throughout. To take presently one instance, as Robinson observes, mainly eighteenth century Sufis whispered in the doctrine of wahdat-al-wujnd (the Unity of Being), which saw all creation as the manifestation of a single Being and therefore made it possible for them to search for a general ground with the Hindus. But this teaching of the 13th century Spanish mystic Ibn al-Arabi, was also challenged through the Naqshbandi order which insisted an the more sectarian doctrine of wahdat-al-shuhud (or the Unity of Experience) which insisted on the formal teachings of scriptures as they encapsulated God's revelation. This tendency though, remained distant less popular for an extremely extensive time. Though, we cannot dwell on this prehistory of contemporary Muslim thought in this element at any length but it should nevertheless be kept in mind as a background.
The Specificity of Muslim History and Thought
The advent of British rule meant a more immediate loss of political power for the ruling Muslim elite, especially in North India and Bengal. And this contest with British power sustained through the century from the Battle of Plassey (1757) to the Great Revolt - the so-described 'Mutiny' - of 1857, which saw a huge participation of Muslims as a whole and, not merely of the elite. As a consequence, in the immediate era following the institution of the power of the British, the connection flanked by the erstwhile ruling elite and the colonial rulers came to be marked through deep hostility and antagonism, One of the consequences of this hostility was a sure inwardness that came to describe Muslim attitude towards the contemporary. Through and big, they seemed to stay absent from English education and thoughts and institutions associated with British power. This, as you can see, is in sharp contrast with the attitude of the early Hindu intelligentsia which embraced the new thoughts and institutions with considerably less difficulty. One instance of this complexity can be seen in the instance of Delhi College, recognized in 1825, which began to impart both Oriental and Western education jointly in the similar institution. In 1827, it began the teaching of English. Though, after the revolt of 1857, Western education was discontinued and could only be restarted in 1864. Nonetheless, the information that such an institution was recognized designates a sure openness towards Western knowledge, despite the overall experience of hostility vis-Ã -vis the British. Mujeeb Ashraf, in information, claims that Delhi College became one of the models for institutions like Jamia Millia Islamia in the later era. Delhi College produced significant nineteenth century reformers and writers like Zakaullah, Muhammad Husain Azad and Nazir Ahmad Nazir.
The Reform Initiative
The crucial turning point in this respect, though, is the emergence of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-99) who is recognized to be the harbinger of liberalism and modernity in Muslim society. He opposed the Great Revolt as he whispered that not only had British rule come to stay but also that there was much to be gained through imbibing contemporary thoughts from its get in touch with. It is well recognized that in order to propagate contemporary scientific knowledge, he recognized his Mahommedan Anglo-Oriental College, which in due course, became the Aligarh Muslim University. In 1870, after his return from a trip to England, he began publishing his Urdu journal, Tahzib-ul- Ikhlaq, which exhorted Muslims to reform their religious thoughts. Sir Syed‘s vital intellectual move was to argue that Islam was not incompatible with contemporary thoughts and values. For this cause, though he was not a religious scholar through training, his insistence on reform took recourse to a well recognized method of ijtihad that calls for the use of self-governing reasoning in order to stay up with changing times. Theologically, so he took it upon himself to distinguish the essence of Islam from the inessential parts, which he described as 'social customs and practices' that had attached to it and which he argued, had lost relevance in the contemporary world. In the middle of these, for instance was the Islamic prohibition on charging interest. In doing so, he began to insist on the Quran as the sole legitimate source of Islam. Alongside the Quran, he proclaimed the importance of Cause and Nature, in his effort to combat the 'overgrowth' of superstition and 'unreasonableness' that was attached to the religion in excess of the centuries. It was a move, you can see, that was clearly parallel to the type of move made through the Hindu reformers in relation to their own society. There was undoubtedly a big body of support for his project in the middle of the educated Muslims as he supervised to raise enough money through contributions for setting up the Aligarh College.
In the middle of the other significant figures associated with Syed Ahmad Khan's reform moves were those of Sayyid Mahdi Ali, better recognized as Muhsin-ul-Mulk and Maulana Shibli Numani. Muhsin-ul-Mulk differed from Syed Ahmad Khan insofar as he sought to win in excess of the Muslim clergy to their face and so establish it necessary to dialogue with them in conditions of Islamic principles. Shibli Numani is measured, beside with poets Altaf Husayn Hali and Mohammed Iqbal as one of the key literary figures of contemporary Muslim society in India. A founder of contemporary literary criticism in the vernacular language, he also had a reputation as a great poet and historian of Islam. While Shibli supported the efforts of the Aligarh school, he was approximately entirely rooted in the vernacular world and the world of Islam. His ambition was to reform Islam from within. Just as to Ayesha Jalal, he is a more intricate figure as he eludes classification either as a 'liberal modernizer' or as an 'anti-contemporary traditionalist.
Islamic learning, in later years he took on a dissimilar project - that of trying to bridge the gulf flanked by the Aligarh modernizers and the 'traditionalists' represented through the Ulama of Deoband and Farangi Mahal. In his later years he also became a critic of Syed Ahmad Khan, whom he held responsible for stunting the growth of political consciousness in the middle of the Muslims. Shibli was in the middle of those significant voices who remained a strong critic of the Muslim League, which he saw as a forum of upper class, landlord elements of North India, and whispered that the interests of the Muslims would be better served through overcoming its 'minority intricate' and malting general cause with the Congress.
The Anti-imperialist Currents
The Aligarh school came under fierce attack from the more theologically inclined Muslims the learned Ulama. The disagreement flanked by the Aligarh school and the Ulama has often been seen as the disagreement flanked by the 'modernizers' and the 'traditionalists' but this is in some sense an oversimplification. The Ulama's main problem with Syed Ahmad appears to have been with what they measured his eulogisation of the British - his Angreziyat or Englishness. There was here something parallel to what we witnessed in the case of the nationalists departure from the social reformers, insofar as the Ulama saw his Angreziyat as being too collaborationist. It is motivating so that his mainly strident critics were also those who were more clearly anti-imperialist and sought to ally with the nationalist movement for liberation from the British rule. In the middle of the mainly scathing of his critics was the Persian scholar Jamaluddin-al-Afghani who was also an advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity against the British. Afghani's strident anti-colonialism combined with a deeply religious Islamic universalism, says Ayesha Jalal, establish a receptive audience in the middle of several Muslims put off through Syed Ahmad Khan's loyalism vis-Ã -vis the British.
Into the twentieth century, other significant figures like the poet-philosopher Mohammed Iqbal, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi came to the fore. Through the time nationalism appeared as a strong mass force and it was becoming clear that it was increasingly being dominated through Hindu ethos, Muslim politics and thought went through motivating transformations. Mohammed Iqbal was, at one stage, one of the great modernizers of Islam, who infused a sense of action and celebration of individual freedom in this world, into the religion, He was supremely concerned with combating the fatalism, contemplation and resignation that is normally associated with pre-contemporary religions and strove hard to articulate a notion of the Self (khudi) that would take its destiny into its own hands. As W.C. Smith put it, to that end he even transformed the notion of a transcendent God into an immanent one - into a God that lives here, in this world, arguing that the will of God is not something that comes from without but surges within the Self, to be absorbed and acted upon, In doing this, he was actually creation a sharp critique of Islam as it was practiced through the mullahs. While Iqbal imbibed much from European philosophy - especially Nietzche and Bergson - he was equally contemptuous of those who thought they could become contemporary through basically aping the West. Here again, much like the Hindu thought we discussed earlier, we can see a clear critique in his thought, of the "materialistic" and - "irreligious" nature of Western thought. It is motivating too, that like much of modem Hindu thought, he too sought to extricate science from his overall attack on the West, arguing that while repudiating the latter, the East should adopt the former. It is also motivating that like all reformers from Syed Ahmad Khan to Ameer Ali, he also took recourse to ijtihad. Though, he also qualified the recourse to ijtihad, through arguing that in times of crisis of Islam, such as was his time, this should be resorted to with circumspection.
It is also significant to keep in mind that while being a votary of Islamic universalism and a trenchant critic of the western thought of territorial nationalism, Iqbal was till pretty late in his life a celebrator of a deeper unity of Hindus and Muslims as evidenced in some of his finest poetry. Here we will not go into the intricate political procedure through which Iqbal, inveterate enemy of territorial nationalism finally through his lot with the movement for Pakistan.
The figure of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad symbolizes the more supposedly 'traditionalist' Muslims, who like other believers in Islamic universalism, are often seen as a paradox through mainly scholars. For, like the other traditionalists like the Ulama of Deoband, he was a strong believer in Islamic universalism, that is, the thought of a worldwide Islamic ummah, even while remaining as one of the mainly steadfast supporters of a composite Indian nationalism. This is a paradox that awaits greater research, which alone will explain why the so-described traditionalist and theologically inclined Muslims establish it easier to create general cause with the Hindu-dominated Congress. This stands in sharp contrast to the location of someone like Jinnah who was a liberal and secular politician but eventually became the driving force for the thrash about for Pakistan.
THE REVOLT OF THE LOWER ORDERS
The significant point that needs to be registered here in relation to the work and thought of lower caste leaders like Jotirao Phule, EVR Ramaswamy Naicker - also recognized as Periyar and B.R. Ambedkar is that it differed from the trends recognized in the case of both Hindu and Muslim thought in two crucial methods. Firstly, at no point did these thinkers provide up the social reform agenda and in information their constant critique of nationalism remained connected to this question. Secondly, they did not suffer from the deep ambivalence with regard to the West that marked the thought of reformers and nationalists alike in the case of the Hindu thinkers or of Shibli Numani, Muhsin-ul-Mulk and Iqbal in the case of the Muslims. You will read in relation to the respective thoughts of these figures later but for now we will briefly outline some of the reasons for this stark variation.
It is significant to note in this context, that to mainly leaders of the lower castes, particularly the Dalits, the notion of a putative Hindu society basically did not carry any positive significance. To them, the memories of past and continuing humiliation and degradation through practices like untouchability and violent exclusion from society as such, constituted their in excess of-riding experience that framed all their responses. In their perception, so, there was something insincere in the efforts of even the reformers who merely wanted the assimilation of lower castes into mainstream Hindu society without disturbing the power structure in anyway.
Phule‘s main concern so, is with an all-out attack on Hinduism and caste — where he sees caste as central to the subsistence of the former. In information to mainly of the radical lower caste thinkers, Hinduism is merely another name for Brahmanism and they prefer to refer to it through that name. So Phule, like Periyar after him, seeks to unite all the non- Brahmans or shudra-atishudras against the power of the Brahmans. It is also necessary to note that in this thrash about approximately all the radical lower caste leaders provide special importance to the question of women's education and emancipation. Plule so recognized the first school for shudra-atishudra girls in 1848, at great risk, for he knew that it would invite the wrath of the upper castes. Later he also recognized a school for girls of all castes.
In a method, education was the key to Dalit or in the case of Periyar, Non-Brahman liberation, for it was their exclusion from the arena of knowledge that was seen as the main mechanism of their oppression. In the new, contemporary world, the possibilities had opened out for the lower castes to take their destiny into their own hands. For the first time, their exclusion was significantly broken down, with the arrival of colonialism, which not only opened the doors of education to them, but also opened up secular public spaces where they could move in relation to the without fear of upper caste retribution. This being 'the case, the Dalit and Shudra leaders were less concerned with marking their variation from the irreligious‘ and 'materialistic' West and more directly concerned with breaking down the chains of bondage that had shackled them for centuries. To them colonial rule, if anything, appeared as their major benefactor. It is precisely for this cause that they saw the continuation of the social reform agenda as being of critical significance for the emancipation of the Dalits/Shudras. It is not as if they had great faith in the social reform of the upper caste, bhadralok reformers of the nineteenth century but the abandoning of even that limited agenda through nationalism was something that Ambedkar had occasion to recall bitterly in his writings and speeches. He especially recalled the role of Tilak and his followers in stopping the sessions of the Social Conference in the late 1890s.
It is important that even when the focus of Dalit and lower caste thinkers shifted to the explicitly political terrain — witnessed for instance in the work of Periyar and Ambedkar, their central preoccupations remained with the structure of power within the emergent nation: who would wield power within an self-governing India? What would be the location of the Dalits in the new dispensation? And central to this structure of power was the question of 'social reform‘ - not in the vague sense of uplift‘ of the untouchables that Gandhi was seeking to do, without of course disturbing the power of the upper caste elite - but in the more radical sense given to it through Phule. These thinkers and leaders also realized that if the British were to leave without the question of power being settled, they would be yoked into slavery once again. It is from this fear that the main plank of Ambedkar‘s and Periyar's political life appeared: the vexed question of safeguards‘ or communal proportional representation' as it was also described. The radical lower caste leaders realized that independence would come, sooner or later; therefore it was necessary to stake a claim for power through bargaining hard on the question of safeguards, while the British were still here. It is this battle that Ambedkar was forced to partially lose thanks to Gandhi‘s emotional blackmail - his notorious fast-unto-death and the eventual Poona Pact.
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