The problem with romanticising history is that it reduces science to fantasy, and facts to propaganda. Indian intellectual space has long suffered this malaise, where the intellectuals, mostly leftists and closet communalists beat up historical facts so mercilessly to bring them into a shape of their liking that in the protest it lost any life it had. The telling of history ought to be lively so that it can help us define the future. The propaganda that influenced our reading of history to suit the political requirements of today made it useless for our future. To protect our future from the failures of the past is, to my mind, the primary reason for reading history.
As a school Principal was suspended for making the students sing a poem by Mohammad Iqbal and a slew of articles came out in close succession in the national dailies in support of the school functionaries breaching the set curriculum and making the kids sing a poem with allegedly religious tinge. Nostalgia-strained articles were written referring to the younger days of old intellectuals about how in the non-communal world of Nellie, Bhagalpur and Meerut before 2014, poems were sung without such interventions. Syeda Hameed wrote referring to various poems referring to Hindu deities that were sung and unlike Nahida and Waziruddin no one got suspended. She forgets that for a wounded nation, it is not only the work of art, rather the artist is also important before taking in his art into national school curriculum.
We cannot take Hitler’s paintings into the curriculum of Art Schools, where you have a much more mature audience, even to teach them how paintings should not be painted. Sayeeda Hameed challenges the 140 Crore people to put their hands on their hearts and then say whether they agree to this state action against a Mohammad Iqbal poem. She is not wrong. She knows we are a nation which had put the members of the Muslim League into the Constituent Assembly and made them participate in the making of the constitution of a nation which they had just broken into two. She also knows that we have been conditioned so well over the years, post-independence that we believe Iqbal to be a nationalist, freedom fighter with a secular outlook. She is so sure of the propaganda that she is not afraid of the truth. She leans on the trope of now-defunct due to the overuse Ganga-Jamuni culture which is nothing but a representation of the large-heartedness of the Majority population of India who allowed one of the two of their own rivers to represent the foreign faith.
While Mohammad Ali Jinnah is the political father of Pakistan, those who have read history know that Mohammad Iqbal, known by his pen-name Allama Iqbal was the ideological father of Pakistan. In order to exonerate the actual proponents of the Two-Nation theory, by alienating them from the Indian Muslims, an erratic policy, post-independence pushed the Muslims into their lap, by creating fake villains of Partition. There is no evidence to suggest even in the last, blood-tainted days, Hindus of Lahore or Dhaka were taken on board and agreed to the creation of a Muslims-only India out of a Hindu-Majority India. Apart from the loss of businesses, history and culture, this partition unfairly forced Hindus of the region to the point of sword resulting in the loss of their political relevance after almost two centuries of mostly Hindu fight for independence, if we leave it alone the small phase of Caliphate movement which was jointly carried forward by both Hindus and Muslims.
While the story is long and will need full attention, for now, let us go with the undeniable fact that religion as a basis for nation-making first raised its ugly head in the last phases of 1857 when the Muslim mutineers raised Islamic flags in the Red Fort, followed by the pro-British Sir Syed first raising the two-nation theory, in a speech he made in Meerut, on 14th of March, 1887. Savarkar was five years old at that time. It was in 1906, that Sir Aga Khan- III founded Muslim League and formalised this two-nation theory by obtaining a separate electorate for the Muslims. Hindu Mahasabha was founded in 1916, a reactionary movement of Hindus, years after the foundation of the Muslim League. In 1921, it removed the clause of being loyal to the British and made independent and self-ruled India its goal. Congress approved the Poorna Swarajya resolution in 1929.
In 1926, Justice Abdur Rahim from Midnapore gave a more definite shape to the Two-Nation Theory, in a speech he made in January at the 17th Convention of Muslim League, claiming that Indian Muslims are closer to Pan-Islamism than they are to the Hindu inhabitants of India. RSS, just as Hindu Mahasabha, was again formed as a reactionary force in September 1926. Every time Muslim leaders sought to separate themselves from Hindu India, the Hindus came together, perforce forming an organisation for Hindu unity. Coming to Mohammad Iqbal, born to Hindu ancestors, Sapru Brahmins from Kashmir, on 9th November 1877 at Sialkot. (Iqbal would write proudly about his Hindu caste credentials). Khushwant Singh wrote that Iqbal’s father Rattan Lal was caught in a case of embezzlement, in Afghanistan and to escape punishment, he converted to Islam.
This ordinary case of corruption created a separatist Islamic leader and thinker. Around 1907, Iqbal returned from England and started legal practice in Lahore. Unlike Jinnah who even in 1947 tried to distinguish Indian, and later Pakistani Muslims from Pan -the Islamist movement, Iqbal from the early one pushed the idea of Muslims being a part of Pan-Islam and considered any loyalty to nationalist feelings inconsistent with the teaching of Islam. In December 1930, Allahabad session of the Muslim League, Iqbal made a speech claiming that it was impossible for the Muslims to live together with the Hindus and demanded the creation of Muslim states. Arguing strongly against the idea that religion is a private affair and should not have a play in the political space, Iqbal pushed for an Islamic political entity. He said in this famous speech hidden away from public view in a secular India – I demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interest of Islam and India.
Iqbal has been positioned to the people in India, in the minds of majority Hindus with the secular slant of thinking as the writer of Tarana-e-Hindi, known better as Sare-Jahaan-Se-Achcha in 1905. However, within the next five years, in 1910, after he had become a secretary in the Muslim League, he wrote Tarana-e-Milli on a similar rhythm and poetry structure but with a diametric opposition theme. No longer claiming himself to be ‘of hind’ (Hindi hain hum, vatan hai Hindostaan hamara), Iqbal is now a Muslim with no allegiance to his motherland, rather a citizen of Ummah or Pan-Islam with loyalty to the global Islam not to the nation (Cheen-o-Arab Hamaara, Hindustaan hamaara, Muslim hain hum, vatan hai, saara jahan hamara- China is ours, and so is India, we are Muslims and entire world is ours). The man who five years back claimed to be a Hindustani, writes in Nazm Wataniyat “baaju tera tauheed ki kuvvat se kavi hai, islam tera desh hai to mustafvi hai (Your arms carry the strength of monotheism, and your nation is Islam and you are a citizen of Prophet’s nation).
In 1922, the man who secularists in India would later project as a Nationalist freedom fighter got knighthood from the British Government. While he was very happy about Muslims getting the support of the Hindus in the Caliphate movement, he was disappointed when Turkey declared itself as a secular nation. He wrote in despair – If a nation gives up Islamic fanaticism and chooses a national fanaticism as the principle of order then for that nation preaching of Islam is meaningless, and it means it has no interest in the preaching of Islam. Read in plain English, Iqbal contends that unless a nation chooses the path of Islamic fanaticism, it cannot propagate Islam. Iqbal batted aggressively for Hijab for women. Annemarie Schimmel writes in her book Gabriel’s Wings that Iqbal saw the Western methods of female education as a greater danger to his dream of Muslim womanhood. A vocal opponent of women’s right to vote, Iqbal blames this political involvement of women on monogamy.
It is not so shocking that a religious prayer of the architect of Pakistan is being objected to, what is more, surprising is that our secular slant has kept the truth about Iqbal hidden from our masses. We have cultivated our intelligentsia in such a manner that out of some sense of inadequacy they cannot think of Sahir or Ashfaq who repudiated Pan-Islam and celebrated their nationalism as poets of repute to teach them in schools, rather we run after Pakistani heroes like Iqbal and Faiz. While we have awards constituted after the architect of Pakistan, in a way, honouring those who broke India to pursue their fanatic goals, Pakistan has no awards named after Indians who made great cities of Pakistan like Karachi. 1947 saw creation of Pakistan and destruction of India, it is strange that Pakistan has open animosity towards the Hindu ancestors of theirs who contributed towards developing the region, and in India we have intellectuals falling over one another to honour the Pakistanis.
The secularists of India would be shocked that while we seek unity on the account of similar cultural ethos and ideological moorings as the citizens of the same nation, Iqbal clearly denounced any such possibility. In a speech made in Aligarh in 1911, he said- It is not the unity of language, or country or identity or economic interest that constitutes the basic principles of our nationality. It is because we believe in a certain view of the universe and participate in the same historical tradition that we are a member of the society formed by the Prophet of Islam. An absolutely divisive Islamist, Iqbal was never a secular nationalist and was the nourisher of the thought which created a theocratic Muslim state, by severing India on which his ancestors grew. He wrote letter after letter to Jinnah persuading him to never settle for anything less than the creation of a Muslim homeland.
While I am totally against banning any work of art, to officially introduce the works of someone who was the ideological creator of Pakistan, to students who are innocent enough not to evaluate the value and meaning of a work of art, is not right. If this protest is being raised not because our intellectuals look at bigoted intellectuals of the past as a voice of free expression, then we must remember that the same Pakistan-loving class remained silent when a noted musician like Hridaynath Mangeshkar was sacked from All India Radio under Congress rule merely for composing a song of Savarkar. We as common citizens must listen to the silence with which action on a noted composer like Hridaynath Mangeshkar was received, and understand the noise with which a suspension notice to a barely known School Principle is challenged. One had put to music a song by an Indian leader, another had made young kids sing a song composed by innocent children.
