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Sent: Saturday, November 05, 2011 11:11 PM
Subject: H-ASIA: REVIEW Mir on Singh, 'Jinnah: India, Partition,
Independence'
> H-ASIA
> November 5, 2011
>
> Book Review by Farana Mir on Jaswant Singh. _Jinnah: India, Partition,
> Independence_
> **********************************************************************
> From: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
>
> Jaswant Singh. Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence. New York
> Oxford University Press, 2010. xv + 550 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN
> 978-0-19-547927-0.
>
> Reviewed by Farina Mir (University of Michigan)
> Published on H-Asia (November, 2011)
> Commissioned by Sumit Guha
>
> Tempest in a Teacup?
>
> Jaswant Singh's _Jinnah_ takes up a familiar theme of late
> nationalist politics in India, in an attempt to ask an equally
> familiar question: how--or rather why--was India partitioned in 1947?
> If this historical terrain is well worn, then so is Singh's
> historiographical approach; this is unapologetically a study of high
> politics. It could only be so given Singh's description of the book
> as a political biography of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a task that requires
> a reconsideration of the shifting relationships through the first
> half of the twentieth century between the All India Muslim League and
> the Indian National Congress (INC), on the one hand, and the colonial
> state and Indian nationalist leaders and political parties, on the
> other. These relationships, and this era of nationalist politics,
> have been well covered before in synthetic works on modern Indian and
> South Asian history, research monographs, biographies, and popular
> histories.[1] One could be excused for thinking therefore that now,
> some sixty odd years after independence, little could be added to
> existing debates. Yet the publication of Singh's _Jinnah_ resulted in
> a political firestorm in India. Singh surely appears to have treaded
> onto contentious ground with this study. But has he broken new ground
> in his analysis of Jinnah and late nationalist politics in this book?
>
> The release of _Jinnah_ in India in August 2009 (it was officially
> released in Pakistan in April 2010) made headlines there almost
> immediately, as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reacted by expelling
> Singh from the party. Had Singh been a minor player in the party,
> this would hardly have caused a ripple. But he was not; Singh was one
> of the BJP's leading politicians. Though not an ideological
> hardliner, Singh played a leading role in BJP-headed governments and
> coalitions, serving as finance minister, external affairs minister,
> and defense minister, respectively. His status in the party did not
> insulate him from public criticism, however. Arguing that the "views
> expressed by Jaswant Singh in his book ... do not represent the views
> of the party," the BJP dissociated itself from Singh's book
> immediately upon its publication. This was apparently not strong
> enough censure for some, so the following day Singh was expelled from
> the party for his portrayal of both Jinnah and Sardar Vallabhai
> Patel.[2] The latter portrayal caused Singh an additional and
> somewhat different problem, as it led the BJP government of Patel's
> home state, Gujarat, to ban the book.[3] All of this--the book's
> release, the BJP's disassociation from it, Singh's expulsion from the
> BJP, and the banning of the book in Gujarat--took place in the span
> of less than one week (August 17-19, 2009).
>
> If Singh's expulsion garnered immense attention, then the ban on the
> book in Gujarat led to even more widespread notoriety. But as is
> often the case with such bans (even when subsequently lifted, as this
> one was[4])--including Joseph Lelyveld's _Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi
> and His Struggle with India_ (2011; banned in Gujarat), Taslima
> Nasrin's _Dwikhandita_ (2003; banned in West Bengal), and James
> Laine's _Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India_ (2003; banned in
> Maharashtra)--bans produce controversy that often obscures careful
> analysis of the books in question on their own terms. The author's
> intellectual aims get lost in the controversy of the response to the
> book. Analysis of the book's content gets skewed toward answering the
> question of whether the charges against it (or the author) are
> warranted or simply a tempest in a teacup. Leaving such questions
> aside for the moment, then, let me address how Singh's _Jinnah_ fares
> in an already crowded field.
>
> At the broadest level, _Jinnah _is about how and why India was
> partitioned at its independence from British rule. In this context,
> Singh seeks to reevaluate Jinnah's role in order to understand "how
> and why this 'ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity', the liberal
> constitutionalist, and Indian nationalist--Mohammad Ali Jinnah,
> become[s], in Viceroy Lord Wavell's phrase, a 'Frankenstein monster',
> working to dismember that very world which had so generously created
> him?" (p. 5). Singh seeks neither to celebrate nor to demonize
> Jinnah. Rather, through a painstakingly detailed analysis of high
> politics from World War I to independence, set out in nine of the
> book's eleven chapters (2-9), Singh aims to show how Jinnah's
> politics emerged in the context of, and from his interactions and
> exchanges with, both the INC and the British. These chapters are the
> scholarly heart of this book and demonstrate Singh's considerable
> erudition. Singh is well versed in much of the secondary scholarship,
> has taken pains to examine primary sources where possible, and uses
> memoirs of both key and not-so-key players extensively to add depth
> and texture to his analysis. He revisits all of the key political
> events of the period--World War I and the Lucknow Pact, the rise of
> mass nationalism, the Simon Commission, the Nehru Report, Round Table
> Conferences, the 1936-37 provincial elections, the Cripps Mission,
> the 1945-46 elections, the Cabinet Mission, etc.--providing more
> insight in some cases than in others.
>
> The crux of Singh's copiously detailed retelling of these events is
> that contrary to claims in much of the previous scholarship, Jinnah
> was not a separatist seeking an independent state. Rather, in the
> context of democratization in India, Jinnah sought protection from
> majoritarianism, while in the endgame of empire, he was denied this
> protection for India's Muslims. Partition, Singh writes in no
> uncertain terms, was caused as much by the INC--which he describes in
> caustic terms at one point as displaying "poverty of thought, lack of
> statesmanship and absence of flexibility" (p. 226)--and the British.
> Rejecting the thesis of Jinnah as the architect of partition, Singh
> writes: "My own hypothesis is rather different; namely that the
> product-mix of British, Muslim and non-Muslim Indians (both Hindu and
> others), and not Jinnah alone, created Pakistan" (p. 384).
>
> One of the more interesting aspects of Singh's analysis of the events
> leading to the partition is his interpretation of the formation of
> INC ministries following the 1936-37 elections. He interprets the
> INC's decision to "go it alone" in the United Provinces (UP) as an
> example of precisely the kind of majoritarianism that Jinnah feared
> in an independent India: "Once it [the INC] had achieved a majority
> on its own, it then saw no need to make any concessions to electoral
> allies, numerically smaller, therefore now redundant. This was
> unalloyed majoritarianism, arguable somewhat perhaps in theory,
> disastrous in consequences" (p. 195). The INC won a majority in the
> UP elections, but Singh suggests that it had little if any legitimacy
> to claim representation of Muslims since it had fared abysmally in
> Muslim constituencies. This is one example of Singh's sustained
> criticism of the INC through this period--criticism leveled mostly at
> Jawaharlal Nehru (while Mahatma Gandhi is consistently praised), who
> Singh appears to hold in contempt. In the closing pages of the book,
> he charges Nehru with having exhibited at times "totally
> incomprehensible tactlessness ... [and] often childish impetuosity
> bordering on the na??ve." Indeed, Nehru plays a central role in
> Singh's account: "What certainly pushed the situation towards
> partition was Nehru's inability to restrain himself, to always give
> his views to the press, and in a manner that almost on every occasion
> generated huge contention and multiple controversies, wiping out all
> earlier achievements. Time and again this happened prior to
> Independence" (p. 431). Singh is certainly not the first to voice
> criticism of the INC or Nehru, nor is he the first to point out the
> INC's lack of legitimacy vis-??-vis the Muslim vote in the 1936-37
> elections.[5] What makes these positions interesting, of course, is
> Singh's subject-position as an important contemporary politician (and
> an eight-term member of Parliament).
>
> Singh's analysis of some episodes, however, is less than
> satisfactory. His depiction of the "great Calcutta killing" of
> November 1946 is a case in point. Here one sees little evidence of
> either a deep engagement with primary sources or current
> historiography. Instead, Singh provides the reader with familiar
> tropes: "Muslim hooligans got busy ... near total chaos reigned all
> over the city ... the only vehicles seen on the streets were the
> Muslim League lorries and jeeps loaded with hooligans, shouting
> pro-Pakistan slogans and inciting the mob to violence" (p. 331). Such
> a depiction is difficult to sustain in the wake of Joya Chatterjee's
> reassessment of that event away from popular tropes of it as simply a
> bloodletting by Muslims.[6] Other regrettable tropes emerge in the
> book as well, pointing to tension between its scholarly moorings
> (which include providing twenty-six appendices, mostly of primary
> source material) and its tendency toward more general political
> commentary. The latter emerges most clearly in the introduction and
> last chapter of the book, "Introduction: A Complex Beginning" and "In
> Retrospect." Both employ generalizations and statements grounded more
> in ideology than scholarly analysis. In the introduction, for
> example, Singh writes that "Islam had come to India principally with
> the invading Islamic forces" (eliding the very different history of
> Muslim migration to South India) and of Muslims "who came in those
> centuries in a frenzy of Islamic zeal destroying whatever non-Islamic
> symbol, structure or image fell their way" (p. 3). Opening his
> historical narrative of the partition with the Prophet Muhammad in
> Arabia (the first sentence of the book) and medieval Muslim invasions
> is, perhaps, not an unrelated problem. In the final chapter, one
> finds a number of statements about Pakistan for which Singh marshals
> no evidence. He writes, for example, that "a reasoning and credible
> national identity eludes it [Pakistan] still," and that "from
> becoming an Islamic state, Pakistan ultimately, again perhaps
> inevitably, had to become a 'jihadi state'" (p. 426). Both positions
> have their proponents. But here we see no argument or evidence to
> sustain these claims; they are simply pronouncements.
>
> This is a long and detailed book, and although it does not radically
> alter our understanding of how the partition came about at the level
> of high politics, it makes for interesting reading. Not--to my
> mind--because of the controversy that surrounded its publication.
> That the Gujarat government should be up in arms because Patel is not
> celebrated and the BJP leadership up in arms because Jinnah is not
> vilified are a footnote, at best. What is more compelling about the
> book is Singh's perspective. Singh's long-standing position close to
> the heart of BJP power (until this book was published, at any rate,
> though it should be noted that he has rejoined the party[7]) makes
> his perspective noteworthy and absorbing in two ways. One, he should
> be noted for his intellectual independence: Singh's narrative does
> not dovetail neatly with any nationalism, Hindutva or otherwise, and
> he presents no "party line" on Indian history. And two, although
> Singh never lays this out explicitly, contemporary politics is latent
> throughout the book--whether in raising the issue of the INC's
> secularism or speculating on how to accommodate minorities
> politically. In drawing these links, Singh provides us with insights
> about India's present as much as its past.
>
> Notes
>
> [1]. See, for example, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf, _A Concise
> History of Modern India_, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
> Press, 2006); Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, 3rd ed. (New York:
> Routledge, 2011); Ayesha Jalal, _The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the
> Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press, 1985); Stanley Wolpert, _Jinnah of Pakistan_ (New
> York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Larry Collins and Dominique
> Lapierre, _Freedom at Midnight_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).
>
> [2]. "BJP Dissociates Itself from Jaswant's Book on Jinnah," _The
> Hindu_, August 18, 2009,
> http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article5085.ece; and "BJP
> Expels Jaswant Singh," _The Hindu_, August 19, 2009,
> http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article5370.ece.
>
> [3]. "Gujarat Bans Jaswant's Book on Jinnah," _The Hindu_, August 19,
> 2009, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article5794.ece.
>
> [4]. "Jaswant Hails Court Order," _The Hindu_, September 4, 2009,
> http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article15336.ece.
>
> [5]. See Mushirul Hasan, "The Muslim Mass Contact Campaign: An
> Attempt at Political Mobilisation," _Economic and Political Weekly_
> 21, no. 52 (December 27, 1986): 2273-2275, 2277-2282.
>
> [6]. Joya Chatterjee, _Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and
> Partition, 1932-1947 _(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
> 232-233.
>
> [7]. "Jaswant Singh Rejoins BJP," _The Hindu_, June 24, 2010,
> accesshttp://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article483895.ece.
>
> Citation: Farina Mir. Review of Singh, Jaswant, _Jinnah: India,
> Partition, Independence_. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. November, 2011.
> URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30415
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
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