THE MAKING OF EXILE Page 3
Having acted as administrators to the Talpur Mirs (and the Kalhoras before them), the Amils now transferred their loyalties to the British. Turning away from Persian and the Muslim-style dress they wore to the Talpur court, they now learnt English, took to western schooling in great numbers, and started wearing western clothes. They dominated education in Sindh, with the majority of the students, teachers and schools being Hindu. Given their edge in education, they cornered the lion’s share of senior posts in the colonial government and courts of justice by the turn of the century.
On the other hand, Muslims in Sindh were slow to adapt to the new regime. Earlier, the Talpurs had patronised traditional Muslim schools and colleges, the maktabs and madrassas, spread out over the villages and towns of Sindh. Now the British discontinued this support, thus ruining this educational system, as well as the syeds and akhunds, the traditional teachers. Many Sindhi Muslims did not take easily to western education, and it was only in 1885, that the Sind Madrasatul Islam was established in Karachi. This high school, modelled on the lines of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh,15 went on to become the premier school for the children of Sindh’s Muslim elite. But the Muslims’ sparse numbers in education also translated into relatively sparse numbers in the provincial government, an important source of power.
Communal Tensions
This reversal of the power equation – with the once-restrained Hindus now enjoying power out of proportion to their small numbers, and the Muslims, who had ruled the province for centuries, now on the back foot – had serious implications for Sindh as a whole.
The loss of their estates – even partial – was a serious blow to the Sindhi Muslim waderos, who were greatly attached to their land. As one early colonialist had commented, as early as 1846:
The natives of Scinde are particularly attached to their own soil, and expatriation to them is the greatest of horrors… the ex-Ameers thought little of their being deposed compared to their being expatriated.16
This was exacerbated by the end of Muslim rule in Sindh after an unbroken stretch of 11 centuries. Also, the fact that Sindh was now part of the Bombay Presidency meant that Sindhi Muslims were, together with other Bombay Muslims, a religious minority.
On the other hand, the Sindhi Hindus – whether landowners or moneylenders, wealthy Sindhworki merchants or powerful bureaucrats – were eager to flaunt their newly acquired wealth and power. Part of the Hindu-majority Bombay Presidency, and capable of great hauteur, they looked down their noses at the Muslim populace, whom they called, derogatorily, jat. Although the term ‘jat’ was the name of a Muslim tribe, mainly camel herdsmen, the Hindus used it to denote an illiterate and crude country bumpkin: the Hindu stereotype for all Sindhi Muslims. A Hindu proverb went, ‘Bhalaai kar jat saan, jat phere harne pat saan’, meaning, if one would do any good deed for a jat, he would only turn around and throw it on the floor.
Consequently, resentment began to burgeon among the Muslims towards the Hindus – for taking over land from Muslim waderos, for lording it over the Muslims in schools, courts and government offices, for charging exorbitant rates of interest as moneylenders, for their conspicuous display of wealth, and for their sense of superiority.
If the Muslim stereotype in the Hindu mind was the backward jat, the Hindu stereotype in the Muslim mind was the avaricious vaanio.17 A Sindhi proverb reflects the attitude of the Muslims towards the Hindus: ‘Bhari berri mein vaanio garo’, meaning, in an overloaded boat, the heavy one is the vaanio, who should be thrown out.18
The stereotype of the Hindu moneylender became a much-reviled figure among Muslims in the Sindhi countryside, even though Hindus were also government officials, teachers, doctors, petty shopkeepers and wealthy merchants. In his memoir, Ghulam Murtaza Syed, arguably Sindh’s most popular and prominent grassroots political leader, describes various Hindus that he knew during his youth, and ascribes their general popularity to whether or not they were moneylenders.19 There were several instances of murders of Hindu moneylenders, allegedly orchestrated by waderos. Similarly, Hindu government officials were also resented, for their kaamorashahi, their high-handedness and misuse of power.
Khwaja Khizr
Once there was a wicked Hindu king, Dalu Rai, who ruled Sindh from Aror, the capital in the north. He and his brother, the evil Sasu Rai, had laid down a heinous law: Any newly married woman in his kingdom had to spend the first night of her marriage with the king.
One day, a pious Muslim merchant by the name of Shah Hussain was sailing down the Sindhu on a pilgrimage to Mecca, along with his beautiful daughter. In those days, the Sindhu flowed past Aror, and the two stopped there to break their journey. In no time, the beauty of Shah Hussain’s daughter became the talk of the town. Soon Dalu Rai demanded that she be sent to him as a concubine.
Father and daughter, both distraught, prayed fervently to Khwaja Khizr, the patron saint of the river, to save them from this terrible fate. The saint then appeared in a vision to the girl and commanded them to set sail. As soon as they did, the Sindhu changed its course and, abandoning Aror, it now began to flow past Rohri. Soon after, the city of Aror was destroyed.
When Shah Hussain awoke the next morning, he found his boat near an island in the Sindhu, off Rohri. There they disembarked and built a shrine to the river deity. For centuries, Khwaja Khizr has helped the Muslim boatmen of the Sindhu, and his shrine stands there to date.
Voluntary Conversions
Earlier, if a Hindu was forcibly converted to Islam, for example, the community downed the shutters of their shops in protest or complained to the rulers.20 Now, under the British, communal riots took place in response – although infrequently – all over Sindh, from Thatta and Hyderabad to Sehwan and Sukkur, from 1872 through 1901. These were triggered off typically by events like forced conversions, but also by the playing of music in temples and Muharram processions.21
Sindhi Hindus still feared conversions to Islam (and now, to a lesser extent, Christianity), but what they feared even more now was the phenomenon of voluntary conversions to Islam, especially among young Amil men, who often converted with their wives and children. As a minority community seeking to maintain the boundary walls of its identity, these voluntary conversions were often experienced by Sindhi Hindus as a great violation of their community’s integrity and caused much outrage and insecurity. While it is not clear what triggered these conversions, Maulana Taj Muhammad of Amrot, a prominent Khilafat leader and a charismatic orator, is said to have brought about hundreds of conversions. According to some writers, these voluntary conversions were the main factor contributing to Hindu-Muslim tension in Sindh.22
It did not help the Hindus that several well-known individuals in Sindh were either converts or related to converts. They included Deoomal Kripalani, the elder brother of J. B. Kripalani who converted around the turn of the century and became Shaikh Abdul Rahim.23 Growing highly active in Muslim politics, he later brought about the conversion of one of his younger brothers, apart from several other Amil boys. There was also Shaikh Abdul Majeed Sindhi, a prominent political leader, who converted at the young age of 18; and Sir Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah, representative of Sindh on the Bombay Legislative Council, Sindh’s first chief minister, and later, its first indigenous governor, who came from a family of converts.
The Hindus fiercely resisted the conversion of their sons, sometimes fighting ugly court cases in a desperate attempt to hold on to them or their families. Some Hindus reserved their strongest contempt for converts to Islam, as reflected in the saying, ‘Shaikh putta Shaitan jo, na Hindu-a jo, na Musalman jo’, meaning, a Shaikh is the son of the devil, neither Hindu nor Muslim. In turn, several new converts – who took the name Shaikh – harboured a deep hostility towards the Hindus, and also played a prominent role in further conversions, such as Shaikh Abdul Rahim. But not all converts were embittered; some Shaikh families maintained – and still maintain – relationships of affection and intimacy with their Hindu relatives.
Zindah Pir
It is said that once when Khwaja Khizr dived into the Sindhu at Sukkur in the north of Sindh, he came up at the town called Uderolal in the south of Sindh, where the temple to Jhulelal stands. And similarly, there is a story about Jhulelal, that once when he dived into the Sindhu at Nasarpur in the south, he came up on an island between the twin cities of Sukkur and Rohri, where the shrine to Zindah Pir now stands. The mujawars, the keepers of the shrine at Zindah Pir, also have been both Muslim and Hindu; the Muslims worship the Quran while the Hindus worship the eternal flame that burns there.
Even the pallo, the river salmon, the famed delicacy of the Sindhi table, that migrate upstream to spawn every year, swim up the river only as far as the shrine of Zindah Pir. This is said to be their annual ziarat, their pilgrimage, and as a mark of respect, they are careful never to present their tails to the island.
There is another temple to Zindah Pir, on the banks of the Sindhu. Inside the temple, stairs go down on one side of the sanctum sanctorum to an underground passage at the end of which are another set of stairs coming up. In the summer, the river swells and swells, and for 40 days this passage is flooded with water. Nobody knows how the water enters this passage; there are no channels or pipes, no visible entry point. But this, the chaaliho, takes place every year. Hindu devotees come from near and far to bathe in these subterranean waters, until the river is calm again.
Communalisation of Politics
Sindh had started to become politically active – like the rest of India – in the 1880s, and this process was only accelerated by the whirlwind in Indian politics in the early 20th century. The Home Rule movement of 1916, the Lucknow Pact between Hindus and Muslims at the end of that year, the Non-Cooperation movement of 1920-22 and the Khilafat movement of 1919-24: All these found great resonance in Sindh, where numerous Sindhis went to jail for participating in these movements.26 It was also a period of rare communal amity.
But in the early 1920s, this amity began to wither, with the winding down of the Khilafat movement and M. K. Gandhi’s move to call off the Non-Cooperation movement (after the violence at Chauri Chaura). It was around this time that the Arya Samaj began its shuddhi (purification) and sangathan (consolidation) movements, in an attempt to ‘bring back into the Hindu fold’ untouchables, Christians and Muslims through conversion. This brought about a corresponding response among the Muslims, in the form of the tabligh (preaching Islam) and tanzeem (organisation).
In Sindh, the Hindus had arranged for the Arya Samaj to open a branch in 1893, in a bid to foil conversions to Islam. Now, Shaikh Abdul Majeed Sindhi, a convert himself and keenly aware of the problems faced by converts, established the Anjuman-e-Nao-Musalman-e-Sindh in 1925 ‘to counteract the Hindu Mahasabha [Shuddhi] movement’.27 The Sindhi Hindus responded in 1926, by forming the Sindh Hindu Sabha to combat conversions to Islam.28
Through the late 1920s, communal disturbances broke out in several parts of Northern India: Delhi, Patna, Calcutta, Dacca and the United Provinces. In Sindh too, there were communal riots in the northern town of Larkana over conversions in 1928. This soon snowballed into a bitter controversy, which spread throughout Sindh, and was followed by communal riots in Jacobabad and Sukkur.
Around the same time, there were also great changes in the profile of the Hindu and Muslim political leaders in Sindh. Ghulam Mohammed Bhurgri and Harchandrai Vishindas, two close friends who had managed to bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims, both died in the 1920s. Most senior Congress leaders in Sindh leaned towards the Hindu right, and could be inimical towards the Muslims. Similarly, the Muslim leaders that succeeded Bhurgri did not have the same relationship with the Hindu community as Bhurgri did, and some of them were, on occasion, openly hostile to the Hindus. A rare exception was Allah Baksh Soomro, who wore khadi, and was unpopular among his Sindhi Muslim political peers for his sympathies towards the Congress and the Hindus.
The increasing friction between Hindus and Muslims in Sindh in the 1920s crystallised into the Sindhi Muslims’ demand for the separation of Sindh from the Bombay Presidency. Initially, both Hindus and Muslims in Sindh had campaigned for autonomy, given Sindh’s distance from Bombay, and the differences between the two regions. In the 1920s, however, the Sindhi Hindus realised that they would again become a religious minority in an autonomous Sindh, and so they began to fiercely resist the idea. The Hindu-Muslim face-off over this issue mushroomed into a communal controversy. Ultimately, pursuant to the Government of India Act, 1935, Sindh became an autonomous province on 1 April 1936. Ironically, the British government hoped that the separation of Sindh would contribute to communal harmony in the province. This was not to be.
Masjid Manzilgah
The Masjid Manzilgah controversy was a watershed in the Hindu-Muslim relationship in pre-Partition Sindh. This issue had been raked up by the Muslim League, as a means of establishing themselves firmly in Sindh.
Once Sindh became an autonomous province in 1936, new dynamics came into play. For the last two decades, Sindhi Muslim politicians had been united by the battle-cry for autonomy from British rule. But now, having achieved this objective, the Sindhi Muslim leaders became highly splintered in their race for personal power. During the first few years of Sindh’s autonomy, Sindhi Muslim politics witnessed much disunity, with rampant defections from one party to another. Thanks to this high level of political instability, Sindh went through six different governments in the decade between 1937 – when elections were first held in the province – and 1947.
In this situation, various Sindhi Muslim factions turned to the Sindhi Hindus for help to prop up their ministries. The Sindhi Hindu politicians, in their own turn, were only too happy to play this political game, which, combined with the minority weightage system,29 gave them importance as kingmakers, who could make or break governments from the margins.
After its poor showing in the 1937 elections, the Muslim League sought to expand its presence all over India. Despite having won over many Sindhi Muslim leaders to its fold, the Muslim League found itself hamstrung in Sindh by the ‘primacy of personalized politics … dominated by disputes and infighting stemming from personal pursuits of political power.’30
Casting around for an opportunity to consolidate its position in Sindh, the Muslim League soon homed in on a communal controversy in the town of Sukkur. The Manzilgah was a group of ancient buildings, dating back to the 17th century, which the British claimed was a disused travellers’ guesthouse, but which the local Muslims claimed as a mosque. The buildings were in possession of the British government. This would have remained a dispute between the government and the Muslims, except that the Hindus intervened. The Manzilgah, essentially two nondescript domed buildings, stood directly opposite the temple-island of Sadhbelo, sacred to the Hindus. The Hindus feared that large numbers of Muslims coming to pray at Manzilgah would interfere with their own access to Sadhbelo, and so objected to Manzilgah being handed over to the Muslims, thus creating a communal dispute. To make matters worse, Sukkur had a history of being more communally volatile than most other cities in Sindh.
Campaigning for the restoration of Manzilgah to the Muslims of Sukkur, Muslim League leaders started a movement, which they termed a satyagraha, on 1 October 1939, and occupied the building two days later. The British government, with Allah Baksh Soomro as the premier, then began protracted negotiations with the Muslim League.
Communal passions in Sindh were soon fuelled by other developments. On 1 November 1939, Bhagat Kanwar Ram, a Hindu Sufi singer, with both Hindu and Muslim followers, was assassinated at Ruk junction, close to Sukkur.31 Ayesha Jalal
tells us:
The Sind Provincial Hindu Conference [held in Sukkur from 12 to 14 November] attended by local Congressmen and presided over by Dr Moonje [the then all-India President of the Hindu Mahasabha], threatened retaliation in the Central Provinces if Muslims were not evacuated from the mosque.32
Negotiations between the government and the leaders of the Manzilgah agitation, however, had not led anywhere by 19 November 1939, when the government suddenly hardened its stance, and arrested G. M. Syed and other leaders of the Manzilgah agitation. The Muslims occupying Manzilgah were subjected to lathi charges and tear gas, and were driven out by force. The sight of the satyagrahis, returning to their homes with wounds from the lathi charge, inflamed the local Muslims and triggered off communal riots in Sukkur and its adjoining areas. The riots are said to have started when Hindus taunted the returning satyagrahis for having gotten what they deserved. Memories of the 1930 Sukkur riots were also very much alive in public memory.33
Muslims attacked Hindus in the villages surrounding Sukkur, and looted and set fire to Hindu homes, shops and timber yards. In Sukkur city, Muslims and Hindus moving about in ones or twos were attacked by groups of men from the opposite community.
The Manzilgah conflagration was the most serious communal riot that Sindh had witnessed in living memory. In terms of communal violence between Sindhi Hindus and Sindhi Muslims, it was far worse than Partition some years later. The Hindus suffered far more than the Muslims: 151 Hindus were killed as compared to 14 Muslims, and almost all the property destroyed belonged to Hindus.34 The controversy dragged on till 1941, when a government inquiry finally decided that Manzilgah was indeed a mosque, and the two buildings were handed over to the Muslims of Sukkur.35
The fires of the Manzilgah riots had scorched communal relations in Sindh. Some Hindu and Muslim leaders acknowledged their folly in being hardliners and regretted the violence that had occurred.36 Yet the Manzilgah episode did achieve its original aim in terms of popularising the Muslim League, especially in the Sindhi countryside, where the peasantry began to flock to the League in large numbers. When G. M. Syed took over as president of the Sindh Muslim League in 1942, he took great pains to increase the number of its branches and members all over Sindh. And so, when provincial elections were held in December 1946, the League came to power with a thumping majority; it won 82.1 per cent of Sindhi Muslim rural votes and 98.8 per cent of Sindhi Muslim urban votes.37