The Indian political landscape often witnesses fiery debates on the issue of the “Two Nation Theory”. Even after more than 75 years of partition the frivolous allegations and counter-allegations regarding the origin of the theory continue between the ruling BJP and the combined opposition. The left-liberal intelligentsia tries to pin the blame on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, leader of Hindu Mahasabha during the partition. On the other hand, the right-wing goes back to citing the speeches of Syed Ahmad Khan, founder of Aligarh Muslim University, where he spoke about the two communities; that is the Hindus and the Muslims, being two separate nations in themselves.^[1]
However, the futility of finding the origin propagator of the theory is reflected in the fact that two nations are a reality and so is the theory.

Congress under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi wilfully turned a blind eye to it. They chose not to acknowledge the two streams of nationalism flowing in the country. Rather without acknowledging they placated one and suppressed the other. Broadly those can be titled “The Islamic nationalism of Muhammad Iqbal” and “The Hindu nationalism of Sri Aurobindo”.

 

The Demand of Muslim India

The year 1930 was the time when the only name that reverberated from the political arena of India, not only domestically but also globally, was that of Mohandas Gandhi. His form of moderate territorial nationalism based on communal harmony and civil disobedience was the most encapsulating phenomenon. During such a time, communal parties like Muslim League saw themselves to be losing relevance and ground support. To their rescue came the old stalwart Iqbal who had a love-hate relationship with active politics. In his presidential address to the annual session of the All-India Muslim League delivered on December 29, 1930, at Allahabad (modern-day Prayagraj), he gave a new direction to the debate on nationalism to the League.

Iqbal started with an emphasis on Islam and its manifestation in the Indian subcontinent as a culture. The description touched upon the distinct way of life practiced by Muslims giving them a unique identity in a land full of diversity.
He said, “In India, as elsewhere, the structure of Islam as a society is almost entirely due to the working of Islam as a culture inspired by a specific ethical ideal. What I mean to say is that Muslim society, with its remarkable homogeneity and inner unity, has grown to be what it is, under the pressure of the laws and institutions associated with the culture of Islam.”

He then acknowledged the impact of modern education which was influencing Muslim youth and bringing them closer to European thought. Though the impact was not merely restricted to the upcoming generation but rather Islam itself. The interaction of the Islamic faith with modern European values and its consequences was something Iqbal refrained from predicting. Therefore he moved on to a critical analysis of the development of modern European values and their emergence from a Christian socio-political affair.

He said, “In Europe, Christianity was understood to be a purely monastic order which gradually developed into a vast church organization. The protest of Luther was directed against this church organization, not against any system of polity of a secular nature, for the obvious reason that there was no such polity associated with Christianity. And Luther was perfectly justified in rising in revolt against this organization; though, I think he did not realize that in the peculiar conditions which -‘obtained in Europe, his revolt would eventually mean the complete displacement of universal ethics of Jesus by the growth of a plurality of national and hence narrower systems of ethics.”

Highlighting the unintended consequence of the Lutheran revolt against the Catholic Church was the development of plurality of national ethics and hence overpowering of the core universal values of Jesus, his argument can be presented as that the absence of universal religious identity gave birth to nation-state wars which are the offshoot of ethnic and racial conflict. Blaming thinkers such as Rousseau, whom he held responsible for relegating religion to other-worldliness and hence paving way for territory being the only parameter for political solidarity, Iqbal believed that political solidarity on the basis of religion is possible specifically in the case of Islam, as it doesn’t bifurcate between matter and spirit.

He elaborated, “In Islam God and the universe, spirit and matter, Church and State, are organic to each other. Man is not the citizen of a profane world to be renounced in the interest of a world of spirit situated elsewhere. To Islam matter is spirit realising itself in space and time… mistaken separation of the spiritual and the temporal has largely influenced European religious and political thought and has resulted practically in the total exclusion of Christianity from the life of European States. The result is a set of mutually unadjusted States dominated by interests not human but national. And these mutually ill-adjusted States, after trampling over the moral and religious convictions of Christianity, are today feeling the need of a federated Europe, i.e. the need of a unity which the Christian church organization originally gave them, but which, instead of reconstructing it in the light of Christ’s vision of human brotherhood, they considered it fit to destroy under the inspiration of Luther.”

It must be remembered that the speech was delivered a decade after the First World War and the global world was constantly trying to form organizations and groups like the League of Nations that could pave the way for a united humanity. Therefore he proposed the idea that a Luther-like phenomenon is impossible in Islam due to an absence of church-like structures rather the religion could pave the way for greater brotherhood going beyond territorial and other boundaries. However, the primary reason for that was the rejection of the separation of the temporal and spiritual worlds in Islam.
Iqbal further said, “The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore the construction of a policy on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principles of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.”

That unique characteristic further bolstered his demand for a Muslim India when he began attacking the territorial nationalistic approach of the Congress in its fight against colonial rule. Using the words of the Nehru report which spoke about ‘fullest cultural autonomy, and communalism in its better aspect’ he then asserted, “The units of Indian society are not territorial as in European countries, India is a continent of human groups belonging to different races, speaking different languages and professing different religions. Their behavior is not at all determined by a common race consciousness. Even the Hindus do not form a homogeneous group. The principle of European democracy cannot be applied to India without recognising the fact of communal groups. The Muslim demand for the creation of a Muslim India within India is, therefore, perfectly justified.”

Interestingly, he used the argument of diversity to counter the opposition of the Congress, whom he saw as representative of Hindus, to his idea by saying, “The Hindu thinks that separate electorates are contrary to the spirit of true nationalism because he understands the word nation to mean a kind of universal amalgamation in which no communal entity ought to retain its private individuality. Such a state of things, however, does not exist. Nor is it desirable that it should exist. India is a land of racial and religious variety.”

Finally, he gave a call to his fellow Muslims to pursue the cause of religious nationalism as he believed, “At critical moments in their history it is Islam that has saved Muslims and not vice-versa.”

 

Dharmic Nationalism

On May 30, 1909, revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose was invited to address a crowd of ten thousand at the Jaikrishna Public Library, Uttarpara. The organizer of the meeting was “Sanatana Dharma Rakshini Sabha“. Aurobindo’s family had migrated to England in his childhood and he received his formal education there. In the year 1893, he came back to India and within a decade got involved with the revolutionary activities of Anushilan Samiti. His single-minded focus was the liberation of the country from colonial rule. Inspired by the European idea of nationalism he embarked on covert anti-British activities. His stature among the revolutionaries grew over time. However, he was soon caught by the authorities; who charged him with criminal conspiracy and sent him behind bars. A year of isolated incarceration brought a radical change in his outlook. It seemed that he had reached a stage of enlightenment where he could witness the divine light guiding him. The doer, the man of unbridled fire and the ever-raging revolutionary within him was left behind as he surrendered entirely to the Supreme Deity.

Sri Aurobindo addressed the gathering, “He placed the Gita in my hands. His strength entered into me and I was able to do the sadhana of the Gita. I was not only to understand intellectually but to realise what Sri Krishna demanded of Arjuna and what He demands of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion and desire, to do work for Him without the demand for fruit, to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high and low, friend and opponent, success and failure, yet not to do His work negligently… I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me in his shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover.”

These were not the words of a hot-headed revolutionary eager to wage a war but that of a calm and composed saint who not only understood the limits of human effort but also experienced the unending power of the higher entity. He elaborated the divine words, “This is the young generation, the new and mighty nation that is arising at my command. They are greater than yourself. What have you to fear? If you stood aside or slept, the work would still be done. If you were cast aside tomorrow, here are the young men who will take up your work and do it more mightily than you have ever done. You have only got some strength from me to speak a word to this nation which will help to raise it.”

His mind had awakened to a new form of nationalism that emanates from a loftier ideal of Dharma than mere territorial boundary. He recognised the life-giving entity of Indian Nationalism as Sanatan Dharma. For him, the religion and its significance grew paramount. He said, “the protection of the religion, the protection and upraising before the world of the Hindu religion, that is the work before us. But what is the Hindu religion? What is this religion which we call Sanatan, eternal? It is the Hindu religion only because the Hindu nation has kept it, because in this Peninsula it grew up in the seclusion of the sea and the Himalayas, because in this sacred and ancient land it was given as a charge to the Aryan race to preserve through the ages.”

Hindu religion for him became the only hope for humanity. It is the final resort to end the perpetual cycle of conflicts by raising consciousness so that it can enable the realization of truth. “It is the one religion which impresses on mankind the closeness of God to us and embraces in its compass all the possible means by which man can approach God. It is the one religion which insists every moment on the truth which all religions acknowledge that He is in all men and all things and that in Him we move and have our being. It is the one religion which enables us not only to understand and believe this truth but to realise it with every part of our being. It is the one religion which shows the world what the world is, that it is the Lila of Vasudeva. It is the one religion which shows us how we can best play our part in that Lila, its subtlest laws and its noblest rules. It is the one religion which does not separate life in any smallest detail from religion, which knows what immortality is and has utterly removed from us the reality of death.”

He prophesied the paramountcy of Sanatan Dharma was to be the way forward for the Indian nation. Sri Aurobindo concluded, “This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma; with it, it moves and with it, it grows. When the Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatan Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatan Dharma it would perish.
The Sanatan Dharma, that is nationalism.”

 

Where have we reached?

Sri Aurobindo and Iqbal both understood the futility of European nationalism in the context of the Indian subcontinent and with respect to their religions. A region that has witnessed endless conflict between the two faiths for more than a thousand years. Therefore the separation of faith from the nation’s political dynamics was seemingly impossible. However only one of the two communities paid heed to their respective thinkers and that was the Muslim community. Within 10 years of Iqbal’s address to the Muslim League, the party had developed an entire framework and movement with the demand of a Muslim state and in its next 10 years, it was a reality. On the other hand, the Hindus ignored the advice of Sri Aurobindo and rallied behind Congress which not only considered itself to be a secular party but also had a disdain for religion and its influence in the political sphere. The same disdain is still there in the mind of an average Hindu and that is evident when he chooses territorial nationalism over Sanatan Dharma.

Reference:

^[1] http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_sir_sayyid_meerut_1888.ht