1981/06/01 by Ian Copland · 27 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East #South Asian Studies and Conflicts #Indian History and Philosophy #Islam #Political mobilization #Politics #Political science #Mobilization #Political Islam #Political economy #Religious studies #Sociology #Law #Philosophy #Theology #Democracy
paper · doi:10.2307/2757363
published in Pacific Affairs 54(2), 228-259 (University of British Columbia)
openalex publication_date 1981/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/11
H ISTORIANS OF SOUTH ASIA have long been interested in the interplay of politics and religion-and rightly so, for the recent history of the Subcontinent is strewn with the debris of sectarian conflict. Nevertheless, until recently few scholars have attempted to analyze their interaction systematically or in depth.' Thus, in the case of the Pakistan movement it is widely accepted that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was able to carry the day because the masses responded to his cry of Islam in danger! Maybe so; but the means by which the message was disseminated and the precise nature of its appeal to the community have yet to be determined. While Jinnah himself remains an enigma, newly published studies of movements in Kerala, Bombay, Bengal and Punjab2 have underlined the absurdity of Jinnah's claim that the Indian Muslims constituted a single, homogeneous nation welded together by a congruent set of beliefs and customs and galvanised by a common antipathy to the Congress. Viewed in local terms, Muslim fanaticism seems to have been as much a product of economic hardship and millenarian aspirations as an expression of zeal per se. Was religion, then, only a cloak for other concerns? Several British historians associated with the so-called Cambridge school have argued forcefully in this vein. Writing about Allahabad between 1880 and 1920, Christopher Bayly concludes that religious attributions were often banners under which different economic and social groups organised whose motives had little to do