Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India

This is a book written by an academin person and for academic person. Not for general audience like me.

'Satyameva Jayate--Truth alone triumphs in the end--is the national motto engraved into the official seal of India. The unvarnished truth about the creation of Pakistan is finally out in Creating a New Medina;\. And with what comprehensive authority!After reviewing in exhaustive detail the extant theories of the creation of Pakistan over hundreds of pages, the author zeroes in on one important aspect that others have mostly ignored, which is the central thesis of the book. And that is that Pakistan was envisaged as a modern-day Medina by a powerful section of the Deobandi Ulama who were advising Jinnah. This is an explosive truth whose ramifications, if properly understood, can reset the self-understanding of India and its foreign policy orientation in the next 25 years.The story goes that Prophet Mohammad, when he first began preaching in Mecca (the most prominent Arabian city of his time) after receiving his divine commandments, was rebuffed by the establishment that ruled Mecca. He then migrated to Medina, bided his time and built up his following, and an army, and went back later to conquer Mecca. The visionaries of Pakistan imagined a similar pattern for the holy warriors of Islam in India. They would create a smaller Islamic state at first, build a strong base there, and then would later come back to conquer the whole of the country. Votaries for Pakistan on the eve of Indian independence whipped up in subcontinental Muslims the nostalgia of centuries past when Islamic rulers ruled India and combined it with dreams of an Islamic utopia (like how Medina was when the Prophet ruled it) in order to create a frenzy of support for partition. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, initially. What the last chapter in the story of Pakistan will largely be up to India looking its own history with a clear eye.Congratulations to the author of this book for his courage, patience, 10 years of rigorous research, and his sacrifice for Truth. It is not an easy book to write, nor is it easy to read. But it ought to be quickly included in university syllabi as essential reading in the modern history of South Asia, for it lays bare the many distortions of the partition narrative that have come to be accepted as gospel truth in the last 60 some years. Some such popular distortions are that Jinnah was a secular man who intended for Pakistan to be a secular state (based on one speech he gave after "Direct Action Day" to mollify public sentiment). Or that it is Gandhi's and Nehru's perfidy in giving in to the Pakistan demand, as the historian Ayesha Jalal avers, that enabled its creation. Moving away from such "great man" view of history, Prof. Dhulipala shows that there was a groundswell, a movement for Pakistan at the grassroots in the United Provinces (today's UP) and other Muslim-majority provinces of India, such as Punjab, NWFP, and Bengal. And this groundswell was both a cause and a result of the spread of a global hegemonic Islamic ideology originating in Deoband, UP and also spread in Aligarh. These widespread debates often went into great length as to the definition and contours of the proposed new state. One such in-depth intervention was from Ambedkar who wrote a book called "Thoughts on Pakistan" replete with maps and possible boundaries.The creation of Pakistan, in other words, was a result of a massive give-and-take, reciprocity, energy transfer between the Muslim leaders of the subcontinent and their flock in the run up to the Partition. Pakistan was not merely created due to the demands of an intransigent Jinnah. He was merely channeling the ambitions of an awakening Ummah, who saw Pakistan as a successor to the defunct Turkish caliphate.----------------While what is truth is a question that can be debated endlessly and claims to historical truth are often contested and re-contested, the comprehensive corralling of information from diverse sources (spanning over 800 pages), the diverse voices which are given a patient hearing in the course of the book's central argument, the massive effort in locating original newspaper articles in Urdu, Hindi, and English from the 30s and 40s--all this gives Prof. Dhulipala's work a heft and an undeniable power that can only be ignored at the nation's peril. Prof. Dhulipala draws his conclusions with extreme care. He never overstates his case. He lets the data and the research speak for itself. And how it speaks!In the annals of Partition literature, this book will become a new touchstone. It's appearance is a welcome augury for India, the dawning of Indian common sense. The epoch of a new realism in Indian historical writing has started. Congratulations, once again, to the author! And much gratitude to you.

I am 2/3rds through this book and I must say it is one of the finest historical works I have read. Although the book is thick, it is not dense, the language is simple and the content informative and interesting. It was refreshing to see just how effusively the idea of Pakistan was dissected, debated, championed and challenged in the then 'United Provinces'. It really gets away from the notions that the creation of Pakistan was one man's genius/greed or a bargaining counter etc.In anything, Dhulipala shows that Pakistan was seen as a vehicle for security and regeneration by many Muslims of North India, while others thought it would be a crippling blow to Islam in India. At the end of the day, the vocal conservatives seemed to carry the day, but there was enough support for the other side to have been relevant throughout Pakistan's history. Why that hasnt been the case is perhaps a matter for another book.One last point: I dont think this book is any way anti-Pakistan, in fact if anything else it shows how politically vibrant India's Muslim community in the late colonial period. The book shows that the transformation of Pakistan into a conservative country was by no means an inevitable conclusion. Had the debates in North India been carried over to Pakistan, things might have panned out very differently.

Eye-opener to all Hindus, how Hindus were fooled by Indian Muslims and congress on the name of Secularism.

Brought to light a lot of facts that were previously unknown about this painful chapter

Goes a long way to dispel the myths generated by Ayesha Jalal's "Sole Spokesman,". Although it focuses mostly on U.P., providing a ton of data, the broader narrative of the story of Pakistan is well explained. If I have one complaint, it is that the period of discussion is very narrow, just a few years before partition. The role of Iqbal is not well explained, although it can be argued that is outside the scope of this focused work, which by itself has an immense amount of detail that needs to be understood by anyone interested in the history of this period, and the original thesis of "Pakistan," as a concept, by none other than its originators. I'd also recommend Akbar S. Ahmed's "The Search for Saladin" as a companion to this book.

In this meticulously written book on the 1947 partition of India, historian Dhulipala demolishes the widely held consensus in partition historiography that Pakistan was an ill-defined and vague idea that somehow swayed the Muslim masses; Jinnah never propagated partition as a final destination, but only as a leverage to bargain for a better future for Indian Muslims. Dhulipala, with copious details, convincingly argues that Pakistan was an idea that was fiercely debated by its opponents and proponents in public sphere. It was envisaged by the Muslim League with active support of a faction of influential Deobandi Ulama not just as a sanctuary for the subcontinental Muslims, but as an “Islamic utopia that would be the harbinger for renewal and rise of Islam in the modern world, act as the powerful new leader and protector of the entire Islamic world and, thus, emerge as a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate as the foremost Islamic power in the twentieth century.”

This book is a "must read" for students of Partition. It explodes many myths, including the one, floated in 1985 by Ayesha Jalal, which claimed that Jinnah's demand for Pakistan was, in reality, a bargaining chip for a better deal for the Muslims in a united India. This claim has been comprehensively demolished by Dhulipala, who provides a more authentic narrative for the partition of India; he cites many reasons to suggest that Partition was inevitable. Dhulipala's book should be read along with the book "The Untold Story of Partition" by Narendra Singh Sarila, to get a balanced view of Partition. His book spares no one, including many stalwarts of the independence movement, and sheds new light on the role of Dr B.R.Ambedkar, who was more prescient than Gandhi and Nehru about the Partition. Ambedkar, too, thought that Partition was inevitable, and was in the best interests of the Hindus and Muslims. He elaborated on this idea in his book "Thoughts on Pakistan," published a few months after the 1940 Lahore Resolution of the Muslim League, which demanded a separate state for the Muslims of undivided India. If only Gandhi and Nehru had listened to him, perhaps a great deal of bloodshed could have been avoided. This is an outstanding book by any standards. It should win many awards.

Arguably the most comprehensive book with mind boggling details on partition of India. The general perception created and perpetuated by mainstream Indian academia was that it was only Muslim League's demand to partition India and masses of Indian Muslims had nothing to do with it. Even though masses of India know that it was a false narrative the academia was keeping this perception in order to make Partition look very normal thing. In reality tye mainstream Indian Ulamas (Muslim clergy) were as much responsible for partition as Muslim league. Muslim league was head of the evil while Ulamas who provided manpower to execute the partition by street power was the body.