226 Part III: South Asia
underrepresented in Muslim colleges. Instructive tracts for Muslim women
emphasized the need to observe purdah. Communal conflict was expressed in
competing religious festivals. Identities firmed up and enmity increased.The Umma and the Independence Movement
As Indian politics was moving toward independence, Muslim leaders set their
sights on a separate Islamic state. Toward this goal, they attempted to unify
India’s varied Muslims into a harmonious community. Islam provided a useful
concept: the umma. The umma is an ancient vision of the total community of
Islam, an idealized unity encouraged by events like the hajj (the pilgrimage to
Mecca) and collective prayers in the great mosques. It has always been an ideal-
ized value of pan-Islamic unity, never an actuality. But it became a key concept for
Muslim leaders in building momentum for Partition. Some of this has been dis-
cussed in the introduction to part III, but we return briefly to the religious forces
that led to the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The Islamic umma in India grew out of opposition to Hindus with the
encouragement of Muslim political leaders like Jinnah. There had never been
strong shared identities as Muslims among the millions of Muslims in India,
which may seem a strange thing to say, but let’s look at who was a Muslim
prior to the political movements of the early twentieth century.
The foundational social order of India was, and has always been, the caste
order. Although Islam declares equality of all before Allah, Islam in India has
never been able to fully free itself from caste-linked sensitivities. Over many
long centuries of conversions to Islam (almost never by the sword, inciden-
tally), the social origins of families and groups converting did make a differ-
ence. Muslims were not all equal in India.
Indian Muslims distinguished between those whose origins were in low,
peasant, artisan, and serving castes (the ajlaf), and those who came in from Per-
sia, Central Asia, and the Middle East with the conquerors. The ajlaf continued
to be dominated and exploited even after their conversion (Saberwal 2006).
They include such groups as the Ansari, formerly weavers; or dyers, who were
low caste because they used urine in the process of dyeing, prior to conversion.
Many in eastern India (now Bangladesh and West Bengal state) were peasant
castes. The ashraf were those who, during the Sultanate and Mughal period,
had been part of the elite, descending from immigrants and proud of their lin-
eages. They spoke Persian or Arabic and participated in the learned culture of
poetry, art, and philosophy. They lived in urban areas like Delhi, Calcutta,
Hyderabad, and Madras, or else lived comfortably in smaller rural towns on
revenue-free grants of land from the Mughals (Jones 2009). They had little
sense of commonality with Muslim converts from the lower castes. There were,
as well, especially in the south, other Muslim groups of traders and merchants.
All of these diverse Muslim communities had to be brought together into a
common umma for political reasons. They had to get over the instinct in Islam
to take religious differences so seriously that rivals were declared as kafir, mis-