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December 30, 2006
The split face of Muslim educational policy in India
The Muslim League supported an educational policy which had two imperatives: to mobilize the Muslims as a homogenous group (political or symbolic face); to empower Muslims to function as members of the educated, modernizing, elite. These aims were not always in harmony with each other. Indeed, they created a split—possibly even a kind of schizophrenia leading to societal apartheid—which remains with us even today.
The first aim, the political or symbolic one, led to the usage of Islam as an identity symbol of Muslims. This meant the preservation of traditional Muslim educational institutions, the classical languages of Indian Islam (Arabic and Persian) and, above all, the use of Urdu as an all-India, common, Muslim language. The second aim, the pragmatic one, meant the promotion of English and Western education so that state services, especially the British bureaucracy, could be filled in by Muslims.
The major crisis of the Muslim elite, especially after 1857, was that Muslims did not learn English. This meant that they could not compete with Hindus for state employment. However, the idea that the Muslims were behind the Hindus in India is only partially correct. Whereas they were much behind other religious communities in some areas—notably the Bengal—they were in an advantaged position elsewhere.
The figures for 1871-72 for education are as follows:
Muslims % Muslims
at School
Madras 6 4.4
Bombay 15.4 8.2
Bengal and
Assam 32.3 14.4
North Western
Provinces 13.5 17.8
Oudh 9.92 5.3
Punjab 51.6 34.9
The North Western Provinces and Oudh constitute the present Hindi belt. They were amalgamated in 1877 and from 1902 they came to be called the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (U. P for short). As the movement for the creation of Pakistan was the strongest in U. P. It is significant to note that the Muslims of this province had a higher share in education, employment and the possession of land than their numbers warranted.
Yet, the movement for educational uplift, which went hand in hand with the movement for the preservation of Muslim culture and autonomy (both economic and political), was born and flourished in U. P., the reason for this could be that former elites, especially in a period of loss of power, see themselves as being besieged by majorities which they fear. Thus the movement for empowerment are initiated among such elites.
One such movement was the creation of The All India Muslim Educational Conference in 1886. This institution, about which Abdul Rashid Khan has published a study entitled The All India Muslim Educational Conference (OUP 2001), was the educational arm of the Muslim League. The presidential addresses of the conference point to the fact that the Muslim League’s point of view was reflected by the presidents, many of whom were also associated with the League, and that all efforts were made to spread ideas of Muslim solidarity through education.
The head office of this body was at Aligarh but there was a Central Standing Committee in every major part of India. This network enabled the Muslim leadership to respond to the policies of the British administration as well as Hindu competitors. The struggle for the creation of a Muslim University, which went on from 1898 to 1920, was an example of such a response. The idea was to take advantage of British good will to create a university which could produce graduates who would penetrate the bureaucracy. The Muslim League supported the policy and Aligarh students proved to be workers for the Pakistan Movement in the years to come. Mr. Jinnah was welcomed at Aligarh as a hero and the students went from city to city, and even to small towns, to campaign for the League. Indeed, it was this pro-Pakistan activism which cost the university much after the creation of Pakistan.
The Muslim League also supported Urdu as symbol of Muslim identity, second only to Islam itself, in India. Thus, efforts by Hindu language activists to substitute Hindi in the Devanagari script for Urdu in public domains were seen as a threat to the Muslim community in India. The controversy went on from 1860 till 1947—and goes on in a different way even now in India—but during the 1930s the Muslim League took cognizance of it at many levels. In a speech of 1938 M. A. Jinnah said:
Take next the case of Hindi-Hindustani…..Is there any doubt now in the mind of anyone that the whole scheme of Hindi-Hindustani is intended to stifle and suppress Urdu
The Quaid-i-Azam’s reference is to Gandhi’s advocacy of ‘Hindi-Hindustani’ on 24 April 1936. While the Muslim League supported Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script throughout, it was the educational domain in which real changes were made. The Muslim Educational Conference commissioned the Anjum Taraqqi-e-Urdu to preserve and promote Urdu. The Anjuman translated books from English to Urdu, published dictionaries, combated efforts to substitute Hindi for Urdu and generally promoted the use of Urdu among Indian Muslims. Even in Bombay, where Urdu was not the mother-tongue of most Muslims, it was made the medium of instruction in schools in 1915. However, this was changed under pressure and it became an option. Even so, the University offered B. A. and M.A. level examinations in Urdu in 1924.
The Conference took the leading role in supporting the Muslim League in its resistance to the Congress. When the Congress ministries ruled CP and other provinces in 1937, the Muslims protested against its policies. The Report of the Kamal Yar Jang Education Committee (1939) sum up these protests. One of them relates to education. The main theme of the protest is that Muslim children will be Hinduized by increasing Hindu culture-specific contents in the curricula and by decreasing, or doing away with the role of Urdu in education. In 1939, when the Congress ministries resigned, the Muslim League celebrated it as a victory. It was, however, a pyrrhic victory because it left behind so much antagonism between the Hindu and Muslim elites that compromise became almost impossible.
It is arguable that the Muslim elite’s real interest was in Western education and English. It was only because of symbolic or political concerns that so much energy was spent on Urdu and the preservation of Islamic traditional institutions of learning. This split in the educational philosophy of the Muslim League in particular and Indian Muslims in general created the kind of fractures which remain with us even today.
Our educational policies, much like the Muslim Educational Conference, promoted the concept of creating modern, technically trained and English-educated Pakistanis. However, for political and largely symbolic reasons, the policy also kept paying attention to the spreading of Urdu (vemacularization) and creating ideological support for policies of militarization and homogenization. This meant, in practice, Islamization of the curricula and creating an aggressive nationalism which suppresses ethnicity and remains in ideological dispute with the ‘Other’ of India.
This split is also connected with a class-based apartheid which comes to us as a legacy of our two-faced educational aims. The modern Westernized, English-educated members of society became the new elite in British India. They dominated the elitist services of the state. Now once again, they are the new elite dominating the corporate sector and the most powerful NGOs in addition to the upper echelons of the state. The other stream, the one subjected to politically-inspired, symbolic education, goes through madrassa and vernacular-medium schooling and remains confined in most cases to lower economic positions in society.
The Indian Muslims developed a split, schizophrenic, educational policy and now, as a consequence, they are suffering in both India and Pakistan. In India most are either not educated at all or have to pay the price of erosion of cultural capital, especially the Urdu script, if they attend state institutions. In Pakistan symbolic concerns threaten to dominate education in such a manner that the liberalizing influences of modern education might well be eliminated. It is time that a new educational policy—one which is in the interest of the common people of Pakistan as well as the creation of a tolerant, pro-peace society—is created.
— The writer is Distinguished National Professor, National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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