The subcontinent was not unfamiliar with foreign invasions. Fortunately, it had strong shock absorbers; vast and rich. Proud of its civilisation, it could take alien things in, chew them like cuds and store them in its big belly as new source of energy. We know how seamlessly it ‘Indianised’ things Iranian and Greek. But the Muslim invasion really proved a hard nut to crack. The Muslim forces that intruded into Indian space were nourished by diverse civilisational sources despite sharing a monolithic faith. Notwithstanding the indignity it suffered at the hands of foreign Muslim elite, the community of converts aping the Muslim elite gradually began to set their sight on alien lands in search of a fresh source of strength.

Three new centres emerged for the converts to look to for help to materialise their dream of a better non-Indian life. And they were Arabia, Iran and Central Asia. Arabia was the place where the faith came from. It emphasized the oneness of God, a strict monotheistic doctrine underpinned by hatred of paganism, egalitarian social life and conditional acceptance of human equality. So it was a religious model to follow. Iran that shared much with India in ancient times was now looked up to as a model of culture, literature and architecture, reflecting the Muslim refinement and glory.

Central Asia from where the warlike people descended on India was imagined as the snow-clad land with mountainous terrain of mythical raw power that could so easily overwhelm old sub-continental civilisation. Central Asians driven by insatiable bloodlust, out for plunder, looked like titans to be emulated. Added to it was Central Asia’s contribution to Islamic religious knowledge. So the converts living in India, their ancestral home, would tend to sleepwalk into the imagined homelands of their co-religionist rulers. A number of Muslim tribes and castes including a few segments of artisans go through a charade of tracing their origins to Arab lands, Iran and Central Asia.

With the advent of colonialism, things began to change rapidly. The Muslim community of ordinary converts didn’t lose much but the elite that had huge estates and innumerable perks and privileges shuddered at the sight of their future in a Hindu majority country ruled by the Hindu elite. Muslim absentee landlords were islands in a Hindu sea, which could drown them in its swell in the days to come. The Muslim elite greatly feared the Hindu elite; the latter had greater business acumen, was more brainy, more educated and better acquainted with the art of survival than the parasitic aristocrats and nobles who were the last vestiges of old Muslim royal courts. In the changed scenario when forced to compete, they would end up as little more than the dregs of society. The fear of being irrelevant or insignificant in the post-colonial setup drove them further to hold onto a religious vision of their identity.

In such historical conditions lie the origins of two nation theory or the Muslim separatism. The proponents of two nation theory were originally scattered across Hindu heartland in the Gangetic region as a tiny minority. Most of the regions that eventually became a part of the new Muslim state were the last to join the Muslim separatist movement as their elites firmly ensconced on top of Muslim majority in their areas had much less fear of the Hindu domination. The separatist movement was able, without much struggle, to get carved out of united India, a faith-based state called Pakistan in 1947 in the wake of Indian freedom struggle, the decline of British colonialism, the threat of Communist Soviet Union and the rise of the United States of America as a world power.

After the emergence of Pakistan, Mr. Jinnah, its founder, dreamed of building a quasi-secular state forgetting that faith was its raison detre. It is a strange quirk of history that religious forces, which opposed the creation of a Muslim state declaring Islam non-territorial, took the helm undeterred the moment it came into being. The very logic of the state’s existence supported such a move. If the state has to be faith-based, the custodians of faith would determine its composition and future direction. Now the process of moving away from the historical roots defined by geography came to fruition. It manifested itself in the state-sponsored denial of the long and rich history of the peoples that inhabited Pakistan. Such a feat, if it’s one, has been achieved through the relentless ideological drumming of the Muslim exclusiveness, fear of Hindu dominated India’s ascendency, rejection of shared historical heritage, and emotional and cultural identification with foreign Muslim lands, which share with Pakistan little more than faith. The stuff carrying these elements has been made an essential part of official history books, textbooks, cultural institutions and the media using incentives and coercion. The great Harappa civilisation and Gandhara Culture have been abandoned as jetsam and flotsam.

Deprived of glorious civilization, ancient culture and long history the society feels lost and rudderless in a wasteland that tries to see itself flourishing somewhere else. The people, brainwashed and conditioned, behave like aliens in their own land and want to be on someone else’s land. They are unhappy for being what they actually are. They are unhappy for their geography for being what it is. They are unhappy with their neighbours. They constantly hear in their hallucinatory dreams a disembodied voice calling them to paradisiacal somewhere, which is actually nowhere.

Dr. Ayub Awan, a remarkable poet of Punjabi language, clearly hints at our ideological malady: “…Wisdom coming from a new minister: End illiteracy, educate the adults / The class is now regularly held in the public square / In my opinion it was Tipu Sultan who had a dream before Iqbal, the wise / Look at his wisdom / He took us in his English boat to London, to Berlin, to Cordoba / He even took us to Italy to be blessed by Mussolini’s incantation / The Master of Konya (Rumi) built a celestial dream-horse / It shook Persia / Hovering over Istanbul it came to Quaid (Jinnah) via Kabul…”

Iqbal is considered the prime ideologue of our state who was a revivalist trapped in the past of Arab-centric Muslim history with a fascination for the part of the West that was regressive. Haunted by the loss of hazy past glory and lured by airy promises of imagined future, our displaced society looks suicidal as it erases its footprints on its own land and blindfolded embarks on a journey that would end in self-exile. — soofi01@hotmail.com (Concluded)

Published in Dawn, June 12th, 2023