Rallying Around the Qaum: The Muslims of the United Provinces and the Movement for Pakistan

by Venkat Dhulipala

This dissertation is a study of the critical role played by the Muslims of the United Provinces (UP) in the movement for the formation of Pakistan during the last decade of colonial rule in India. In this regard, it seeks to understand as to what Pakistan may have meant to the Muslim masses in the UP in order to explain their extraordinary support for its establishment. The dissertation argues that the UP Muslims overwhelmingly supported the demand for Pakistan for two reasons. First, Pakistan was seen s an Islamic utopia akin to the one that the Prophet had created in Medina nearly thirteen hundred years earlier. Second, Pakistan was also viewed by the UP Muslims as a Muslim dominated sovereign state bordering a Hindu dominated India which would act as the best guarantee for the protection of their political, economic and cultural rights an interests in the UP in post-colonial India.;While the existing partition historiography has insisted upon the vagueness of Pakistan in the public mind, and the consequent lack of active participation of the Muslim masses in the partition drama, my dissertation argues that the UP Muslims were clearly aware that the UP would remain in Hindu India and not be a part of Pakistan. This becomes evident from an examination of the intense and widespread public debates on the question of Pakistan in the public sphere through forums such as the popular press, public meetings and propaganda materials circulated by both the Congress and the Muslim League in the aftermath of the Lahore Resolution. The critical support of the UP Muslims for the formation of Pakistan therefore attests to the agency of the masses in the making of their own history. Given the intense and widespread public debates on the nature of Pakistan as a modern Islamic state, this dissertation also challenges the conventional wisdom in South Asian studies that the idea of the modern state with its origins in Europe has remained a diffuse concept in the public mind in South

Genres: Pakistan

396 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2011