Pickthall’s Islamic Politics 111
He was both editor and later leader writer at The Bombay Chronicle, which was
“among the 8 or 10 [newspapers] with a circulation of 10,000” in the Bombay
Presidency, and also “among another elite grouping on an All-India level, read
and quoted beyond its metropolitan and provincial borders”.16 He was witness
to the alliance of the Khilafat movement and the Congress Party within the
Non-cooperation movement, and reported in detail the “Congress week” held
in Nagpur in January 1921:
I believe in Non-cooperation thoroughly. [...] It is liberty. It is national
resurrection, postulating only the destruction of such things and influ-
ences as are positively noxious to the growth of healthy Asiatic life. It
began as an indignant protest against certain wrongs committed by the
British Government; but it is already far more than a protest, a negative
thing; it is an assertion; a positive thing – an assertion of the existence of
an Indian nation independent of British education and patronage.
India has been promised the status of a Dominion in the British Com-
monwealth. What is the difference between the status of a Dominion,
and that which India occupies at present? The government of a Domin-
ion stands for the people of the Dominion, even against the Government
of England whereas the Government of India stands for the Government
of England even against the people of India. We have two glaring instanc-
es in the Khilafat and the Punjab wrongs [a reference to the Jallianwala
Bagh massacre, April 1919] which show how far India is at present from
Dominion status, and how improbable she could ever obtain such status
by cooperating with her present rulers. If those rulers had but stood for
India firmly on the question of the Turkish peace terms, threatening Non-
cooperation with the Government of India in case the wishes of so many
millions of British subjects were disregarded for the sake of foreigners,
the position would have been quite different.
[...] Too long have Asiatics looked to Europe as the fount of wisdom.
There is evil as well as good in the European education and ideas of life.
Asiatics have become inferior to Europeans. Why? Because they have16 Milton Israel, Communications and power: propaganda and the press in the Indian nation-
alist struggle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1994), 216. Milton states that The
Bombay Chronicle was founded in 1907. However the masthead of an archival copy seen
by the author indicates “Founded by Sir Pherozshah Mehta in 1913”, (X, 32, 7 February
1922). This masthead also states: “Edited by B.G. Horniman, 1913–19”, and “Conducted [sic]
by Marmaduke Pickthall and Syed Abdullah Brelvi”. The author is grateful to Professor
Ebrahim Moosa for this archival copy.