Hamid Dalwai was a journalist and social activist, who, in the early 1970s, led a one-man crusade to reform contemporary Muslim society. He sharply criticised the community for its backwardness and hoped that the spirit of critical introspection would suffuse Indian Muslims and strengthen the country’s secular and national order and defuse the nascent Hindu chauvinism.
Hamid Dalwai,
Muslim Politics in India,
Penguin Random House (2023)
Dalwai’s presence in Indian affairs (though largely confined to Maharashtra) was comet-like. Born in 1932, he passed away in 1977, at the age of 44 years. His writings have had a chequered history. A few articles by him were published in 1968; a slightly larger collection came out in 1972. The additional material in the latter was largely derived from conversations Dalwai had with the Marathi poet and critic, Dilip Chitre, which the latter transcribed and then rendered into English. Thus, the text in this book is over 50 years old.
From an early age, Dalwai was a social reformer. He joined the Socialist Party, but disagreed with it strongly for its failure to “take up a clear, hard line on Muslim communalism”. Dalwai frequently denied he was an intellectual or an academic, making up in fervour what he lacked in learning. His short foray in public life was consistently controversial as he asserted his views on Muslim obscurantism with vigour and self-confidence.
Dalwai’s thinking
Dalwai’s views were simple and clear. Indian Muslims were clinging to outdated traditions and had failed to obtain modern education. They, thus, had failed to integrate with the broad stream of national life; they in fact saw the Hindu and Muslim communities as autonomous and parallel societies. Hindus, on the other hand, had opted for modern education, with leaders like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, and had, over time, developed a healthy liberal humanist tradition.
It was Muslim separateness and obduracy that had led to Partition, with Muslim leaders conniving with British officials to obtain the vivisection of the country. But Partition was only the first step in the Muslim agenda: their ultimate goal was to make the entire sub-continent Muslim. Hindu communalism was never very strong and was entirely a response to Muslim communalism. In any case, Hindu obscurantism was tempered by its liberals, however few they might be, but the Muslims had no-one to moderate their beliefs.
The root cause of the Muslim malaise, Dalwai believed, was Islam itself: Muslims believed that theirs was the perfect faith, and hence they clung to its medieval and obsolete traditions. In fact, Muslim backwardness was inherent in “the make-up of the Muslim mind”, which could be traced to their conviction that theirs was a perfect society and they were “superior to all other communities in India”.
Also read: Rare Interview of Hamid Dalwai Gives Insight Into the Social Reformer’s Thinking
Dalwai deeply disliked most contemporary Muslim movements and organisations, blaming them for keeping the community backward. Thus, he asserted that the seminary at Deoband had forced Muslims to reject modern education; that the Jamaat-e-Islami, described as “an anti-Hindu Wahhabi organization”, was the dominant influence on Muslims all across north India; and the Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind, earlier associated with the Congress and the freedom movement, “gradually adopted an obscurantist and communal posture”.
Enigmatic personality
Half a century later, Dalwai remains an enigmatic figure. His forceful pronouncements date back to the early 1970s, a decade before the Vishwa Hindu Parishad took up the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and heralded the inauguration of the nationwide Hindutva project. But, despite this, it is surprising that he completely missed the powerful and influential presence of Hindu nationalism, as exemplified by the RSS, headquartered at Nagpur, and the Hindu Mahasabha, at one time led by Veer Savarkar, in Mumbai.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
He also shows no knowledge of assertions of a separate Hindu identity that had been shaped over the previous century by Swami Dayanand Saraswati and his Arya Sabha movement, and the substantial ideological contributions of ideologues such as Savarkar, Golwarkar and Hedgewar. Their writings viewed Hindu identity as having distinct cultural and ethnic moorings and saw the Muslim as the “Other”. As early as 1909, Lala Lajpat Rai had described the Hindus as a “nation in themselves, because they represent a type of civilisation all their own”.
Even if we were to excuse Dalwai’s lack of knowledge about the century-old wellsprings of Hindu nationalism in India on account of his lack of formal education, it is astonishing that Dalwai makes only a fleeting reference to the communal riots in Bhiwandi and neighbouring towns in May 1970. The riots caused the deaths of over 250 people. The Justice Madon commission, which investigated the riots, stated that 142 Muslims and 20 Hindus had been killed in Bhiwandi alone. The enquiry commission criticised the police for anti-Muslim bias in the aftermath of the violence, and also criticised the Shiv Sena, then in its early days, for its role in the riots.
Limited intellectual foundations
Dalwai spouted his self-assured views on a wide variety of subjects, but on most of them he was ill-informed – obviously, he had little knowledge of Islam the faith; Muslim history; debates in India in the 19th and early 20th centuries on the shape of the national order after independence; communal politics that led to Partition, or even the wellsprings of communalism in India after independence.
His uni-focal lens, pointed at Muslim follies and shortcomings, blinded him to the broader national scenario in which large sections of the majority community solely blamed Muslims for Partition, rejected the national secular order, engineered communal riots regularly to cow down Muslim minorities, and, over time, had sought to marginalise Muslims in the national political, economic and social order.
During his active period, Dalwai was vilified by Muslims for his one-sided castigation of the Muslim, with few and feeble references to Hindu communalism. Many then thought he was the mouthpiece of Hindu extremist groups. This might not have been the case; while today, a decade of Modi-raj has encouraged some Muslims to join the Hindutva bandwagon, largely for personal advantage, 50 years ago this was unusual – most Muslims, liberal and traditional, basked in the national secular order that gave them security, opportunity and dignity.
Explaining this publication
It is likely that Dalwai was a stand-alone maverick who truly believed what he said and desperately wanted his community to shed its obscurantism, become introspective about its shortcomings, and grasp the values of liberalism and secularism.
A more interesting area of enquiry is: why has a leading publishing house, Penguin Random House, felt the need to reprint the 50-year old fulminations of this obscure activist who made hardly any mark in his short life and remains unremembered over the last several decades. (Notably, the word “secular” before “India” has been removed from the publication of 1972.) It is again surprising that this reprint has no fresh ‘Foreword’ or ‘Introduction’ that would place the publication in a contemporary context and explain the need to revisit Dalwai’s writings after five decades.
Dalwai’s thinking on most matters that he agitated in public was puerile, crude and rudimentary. The issues he addressed, particularly those pertaining to Muslim politics, Partition, communalism in India, and Hindu nationalism, have over the years been explored in depth by several far better scholars, exposing most of his observations as both uninformed and cringe-worthy.
The only explanation for this publication that makes sense is that Dalwai’s simplistic views are fully in accord with the foundational thinking of present-day Hindutva acolytes. You can’t do better than restate them through the five-decade old writings of a Muslim, however shallow and ignorant he might have been. Surprisingly, Penguin have made themselves complicit in this sordid project.
Talmiz Ahmad, a former diplomat, holds the Ram Sathe Chair for International Studies, Symbiosis International University, Pune.
