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Welcome, everybody, to the second South Asia Seminar.

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My name's David Young, and that's a session anthropology.

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And then you have these become inexpensive seats in sit at the back.

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And. Today something interesting to me, because as a as an eco specialist,

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I'm very conscious of the fact that, you know, the nation state in South Asia is extremely young.

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And South Asia is a kind of natural experiment, if you like.

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The effects of the nation state on culture, which starts the same with maybe many different directions by different states.

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And that's one of the in my work, one of the statements has been very influential as the great French,

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Sanskrit and historian who wrote history back in 1905 when he knew he was very

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knowledgeable about the whole of South Asia and actually Asia as a whole. And he wrote this kind of much repeated, much cited epigram that.

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Sri Lanka is Ceylon cautiously called event is South Asia.

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Deviated 2000 years ago. Kashmir is India, South Asia itself.

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It has been through all the stages of South Asian history. Nepalese.

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India in the making of politics. If you want to see what medieval India was like pre-Islamic India, then then you have to go to Kathmandu.

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Exactly what he meant. So today's talk is very much, I think, in that comparison, kind of the title anyway.

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We have Pakistan and India, common origins and divergent trajectories, and it's based on his new book, which we have four copies here.

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For those of you who would like to buy one, it's £40.

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You've got £40 in cash and haven't been. You're welcome to take one home with you and the rest is amazing.

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Kind of. I suppose perhaps you only find this in South Asia nowadays.

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The Renaissance man, he's had two careers. Is this his Ph.D. in physics in M.I.T., is very distinguished scientist and in Pakistan.

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But he's also an extremely well-known public intellectual, which is in itself quite a brave thing to be.

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These days in South Asia.

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And if you look at the the list of luminaries who have endorsed this book, it just shows you how distinguished and how well-connected.

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Yes, We start with Noam Chomsky, Francis Robinson, Tarik Rahman, Rajiv Gandhi, by Philip Goldenberg, and finishing with our own Spies.

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So without further ado, thank you, Professor Gather.

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And thank you for setting up the theoretical background framework for this.

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You all know that Pakistan today is reported almost exclusively in terms of the crises that it's enduring.

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It has had to go to the IMF now for the 21st time.

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It is desperately seeking funds to survive the next few months from Saudi Arabia, from the UAE, from elsewhere.

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Politically, it is in turmoil. Its economy relies principally on unskilled labour.

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Exported to the Middle East, as well as the export of textiles, which is not a very high technology item.

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And on the other hand, we see that India is doing rather well for itself materially.

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It has now exports and high technology fields, software, computers, pharmaceuticals.

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It's got a space program that now is rather advanced, one being one of the few countries that has spacecraft circling Mars,

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recently sent a spacecraft to the moon and sent a lander on that.

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Now there is an enormous gap.

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That separates the two countries now. But this wasn't always there.

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1947 The difference wasn't all that great, in fact.

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Pakistan's economy was in the 1960s, growing faster than that of India.

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Its space program preceded India's.

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In fact, the first sounding rockets were launched in 1962 or 63.

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And that was before ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organisation, was formed.

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So what is it that has happened? How can we trace its historical roots for this?

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I think one should not go back just to 1947.

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One needs to go back far into the past. Well, where does Pakistan record its beginnings from?

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Ask any Pakistani kid and what he's learned there is that Pakistan was not made in 1947.

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It was made in 712 A.D. when the first Muslim conqueror Muhammad bin Kassem landed in sin.

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And that's when it all began, of course, is complete nonsense.

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But that's what. Kids are taught in our schools.

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But let me talk a little bit about the title of this stroke.

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Common Origins. Okay.

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So 712, let's keep that in mind.

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And this is about 70 years after after the death of the Holy Prophet, Prophet Muhammad.

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About 300 years after that comes.

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I'll be Rooney. Here is a scholar, a man who's a traveller, who's very interested in knowing about the world around him.

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And he comes with with another conqueror.

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This time a serious plunderer. Mahmoud Abbas.

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Nabi. Soledad. Muhammad. Mahmoud Abbas.

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Nabi. But Verone is not interested in going around with the Sultan.

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He's interested in learning Sanskrit. He's interested in learning about what's around him.

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And he spends 13 years of his life. Learning some scripture and learning what the ancients have in their books.

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The Brahmans principally. He looks at the.

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At the people over there. And although by now there is a substantial Muslim population, people who.

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Not like me and several others in the audience.

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He doesn't regard them as Muslims.

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Instead. He identifies someone as Iranian.

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Somebody as Afghan. Somebody as Turk.

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Somebody is coming from. Central Asia.

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The rest? People like me and many in the audience.

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He calls them angels. He doesn't differentiate between those who recite the Kalma and those who go to the temples.

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He calls them all Hindus. Why? Because there are people from all hidden.

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Now on the hill that comes from sin.

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Sin is a is a word.

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I don't know where that came from, but it's it's linked with the river, the Indus.

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It's called Sindhu Varia. And so he says.

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They're all Hindus. Now, that was the level at which people were actually at in those days.

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There was an enormous amount of syncretism.

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There was. Okay.

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There were shrines at which both Hindus and Muslims worship.

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There was the back movement, which lasted for several centuries.

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Every. I'm skipping over a lot of history.

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And if you want details, this is the first part of my book, The Five Parts.

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You had even up till the time of the balls. But the balls in the courts had.

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Hindus almost in equal numbers. And in fact, the generals that the bowlers employed were often Hindus.

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Furthermore, they married into the marriage. The Rajputs.

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In fact, no Mughal emperor is appeal is born after.

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As a muslim woman, it's. They have somebody has actually calculated the various percentages which go from one in 4 to 1 in 12, something like that.

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It becomes more and more marriages cross marriages, and so the purity is entirely lost.

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At this point, you could say that although there were wars between the and Shivaji in India, nevertheless there was a degree of uniformity of.

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Of being able to live together and not always was a comfortable.

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Particularly when there was very good and very religious, more than an emperor at the throne.

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And that was at the time of Aurangzeb. So we can this we have two polls.

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One is that of Akbar Akbar, the great Akbari Azam, as he's called.

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Who believed in syncretism, who in fact tried to start his own religion, called a lady.

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And in fact, try to incorporate Christianity and Buddhism in that as well.

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And he did that for pragmatic reasons, because if you have to rule over such a large part of India, you can't make religious enemies.

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So that was the time when the mobile empire spread was the most powerful, the most inclusive.

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The decline of the Mughal Empire comes about with Aurangzeb, and that's something like 100 years later.

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And that's when the insistence was that purity.

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Purity of belief. This was also the time when.

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Are Muslim purifiers. So purifiers of Islam gained strength like Chobani in the.

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So these are common origins, but now the common origins are to diverge.

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And remember that our ultimate goal is to understand why partition came about and why the two nation theory gained currency.

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And that, in fact, is the the thread that runs through my book.

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While ruling India. The mullahs were.

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People who enjoyed hunting, looking after their lambs.

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They like poetry, singing, dancing, all that.

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Who are interested in intellectual pursuits. They left business, finance, accounting all to those at the thought.

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That is, this is not a very decent thing proposal to do.

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So yeah, they did learn Arabic and Persian and Urdu was developing at that time.

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But. In the courts. There was not much discussion, not much curiosity about the world around them.

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In fact, this is the time of the European Enlightenment and the and the scientific revolution.

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And the ambassador, the English ambassador comes and he presents various scientific gadgets to the court of Emperor Jahangir.

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And everybody, of course, made me interested in the spectacles that he's brought as he brought big Jess.

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It's filled with all these gadgets. It was a telescope, not a telescope, and inspired a lot of curiosity in Europe, but here in the world.

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People took a peek here, Peek there? Yeah, great. But they didn't try and understand.

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What made it what? They didn't try to duplicate it. And so.

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Now I'm going to skip a large fraction of that history and come to the coming of the British.

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So the British bring with them the ideas of the Enlightenment, the ideas of the scientific revolution.

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Of course they came. Initially to train and then through the British East India Company.

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Makes its way into. Into India.

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Initially it is just to trade goods, but then they gain more and more influence.

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They didn't fight any big wars except for two. They were not a huge awards, but in time they took over all of India.

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At no time were the more than 50,000 of them, and they knew that in order to rule such a big subcontinent, they would need support.

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They would need administrative support from.

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An educated class over there. And so. This is around the time of 1835.

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Lord, my colleague comes up with his. Educational reform.

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And this basically says that.

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The bachelor's. The guru calls the book clubs and the madrassas.

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And these are the traditional. Educational institutions for Hindus and Muslims, respectively.

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He says we're not going to fund them. We're going to fund schools where they teach science, English, math.

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Geography, the stuff that is going to be helpful to us or ruling India.

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Here is where I think. The.

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Beginnings of the two nations. Is.

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That's the real starting point. You know, in history, you can't look at any one point.

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But I think this was extremely significant because of the very different reactions from the Hindu community.

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So the. And those were and it was a strong reaction against it, but in only certain parts.

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However, a grant had been prepared for.

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For adjustment to modernity. So Rajab, Mohammed VI, Bravo, Samaj and other people like that had put their weight behind it.

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And so there was grudging acceptance at the beginning, but later on more and more and they said, okay, you British.

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You better give us more schools. More colleges, universities.

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And so they took off in a certain direction.

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But. Muslims have, by and large, a very different reaction.

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And this reaction was exemplified by the protest that the Ulema made in Bengal soon after 1835.

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I think just in the months after the make all the reforms were announced in which 8000 some.

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800. Mullah Omar.

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They wrote in protest at this and said, We don't want your education.

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Keep it. We have our book. Which has got divine guidance and which is better than anything that you can teach us.

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And so. No, thank you. Well, that was.

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Maybe not so clearly expressed by other Muslims across India, but it was expressed well enough.

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There was resistance to that learning. And.

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There are only a few instances where this was resisted and where there was a different outcome.

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So you had Ahmed Hunt. He was a muslim reformer, like.

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The Bravo Samaj like Rajaratnam. Right.

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But you see, there are many others among the Hindus.

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Among Muslims, he was the only one. And by the way, one of my chapters is about him.

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And it turns out that he's a. These are very interesting.

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Get it? Extremely interesting character. About which, About whom?

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Everything is hidden except for one thing.

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That he's the one who invented the two nation theory.

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Well, he sort of did, but not in the sense that it is understood in Pakistan today.

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Also, what is hidden from public view is that he was a radical reformer of Muslim theology.

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In fact. To an extent that nobody else anywhere in the world, including Egypt, including Turkey, has gone so far as this map did.

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But all that is hidden from the Pakistani public.

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So that's why actually I had to write this book because it so much so many things that are hidden from

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our people that an honest version of history had to be written anyway to continue on what I was saying.

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So the education gap between Hindus and Muslims widened.

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If you look at the statistics in this book, they are absolutely appalling.

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The University of Calcutta, which was the first university established by the British on the subcontinent.

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And this was in 1856. It had several hundred Hindu applicants.

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And they've had just a handful of Muslim applicants.

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And when the first graduating class emerged, it was a few hundred kiddos who had graduated and just two Muslims, just two.

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And if you consider the size of the Muslim population.

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Ben? Well, it wasn't 2 to 100. Or several hundred.

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It was like more like one, two, three.

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But what is the flaw? I don't know exactly how much. So then the question is.

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Why were the Muslims? Resisting.

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Modern knowledge, science, math and so forth.

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When in fact it was the Muslims who were the only ones doing physics and math and science and astronomy, astronomy and medicine.

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From the ninth through the 13 centuries. And that was the golden age of Muslim science.

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And why did that percolated here onto the Indian subcontinent?

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Well, there are. Several hypotheses that one could give of a first.

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The period of the flowering of Muslim science, of the Muslim golden age.

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That was inspired by Greek learning.

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And so if one looks at. The rise of Muslim learning.

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It happens 150 years after the death of the Prophet.

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And it happens in Baghdad and it happens through the translation of Greek works into Arabic.

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Now. The translation was the first part. Most of the translators were not.

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But not Muslims. But gradually the translators also became more and more Muslim and the Muslims, they started making genuine new contributions.

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And this was actually possible because in the course of the caliphs, people like.

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Khalif OLBERMANN, Abdul Rahman, Haroon Rashid, etc.

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You had Jews and Christians. You had Muslims all working together.

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And it is true that intellectual ferment, that new ideas were generated.

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This lasted a long time for centuries.

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Well, you could argue for centuries plus or minus half a century, but still a very long time.

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And then why did it die out? Well, you know, this is a a this is well travelling around.

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Everyone has their theories on it. But what I see and I and I think it's pretty clear why it happened.

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It's happened because of the resurgence of the orthodoxy.

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The mullah triumphed over the scholar.

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The mullah triumphed over the Over the businessman.

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Over the traveller. Over merchants.

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You see Arab merchant merchants in those days used to go all around the world and they very adept at this.

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And they brought back new ideas, new knowledge and.

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They were very highly sought after by the Celtics.

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But then the caliphs started looking for for legitimacy and who could provide legitimacy better than the clinics.

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If you are if you're truly sanctioned by God, then you are far.

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And so the mullah. Displaced all the others and became the most important element of the port.

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And so this continued on. What one sees in the three empires that were more or less at the same time, the Ottoman Empire,

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the Safavids and the Mongols was that they were they had strong components of the clerics surrounding the ruler.

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And consequently there was less new ideas and less intellectual ferment over there.

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And that, to me, explains why it all went down.

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In Islamic civilisation in general. But then this had serious consequences for what would happen to the future of India.

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So comes. But 20th century.

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And the 20th century now sees political movements emerge because the British are going to be leaving pretty soon.

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This was clear. But can I have some water?

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It was. Not rush but by any type the that it was even before the First World War,

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it was pretty clear that the British would not be able to rule a continent which is so big.

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And it became obvious when the first when the Second World War started.

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Now. This is the time when. The existing differences could be leveraged.

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Thank you. And. They would leverage very effectively.

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By. By.

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Two different. Leaders sets of leaders.

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One was. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League.

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But then the other was. And that's gold.

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Volker And we have Sobotka. Who?

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Where and who really are the ideologues of Hindutva today.

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And they argued for there to be two separate nations which could never live together in peace.

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Okay. Since I've posed the question and I sort of answered, I got to wrap up with the summary.

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So comes 1947. You see that?

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The. Hindus are vastly more educated than the Muslims.

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In fact, if you see a Nobel Prize being awarded in the CV in Ireland, and I think this is 1920 something you see.

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You hear of names like Sahar.

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And so many others. The quantum physicists.

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Among Muslims. There were some, but very few educated people.

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So comes partition. What happens is that Pakistan inherits just one university, which was Punjab University in Lahore,

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and most of its good teachers, professors were in those who had fled to India.

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Subsequently, those positions were filled up. Those academic positions were filled up.

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By those who really weren't very competent. But anyway, they took those positions.

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The number of universities multiplied. And it is constantly multiplying.

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We have 300 today. Unfortunately, they produce very little because unless you have an academic tradition.

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It doesn't matter how many buildings you build or how many labs you make.

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I mean, look at Saudi Arabia. It's got all the resources in the world.

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It's got the most you know, it's got the biggest imports faculty from the United States of the UK, everywhere.

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And yet they haven't managed to produce very much in terms of academics, in terms of science.

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I could say the same for much of the other Arab countries as well.

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So. In a nutshell. In a world that is defined by knowledge.

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India has. Hugely outpaced Pakistan.

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That doesn't make India any kind of an ideal.

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It is way, way behind China. Way, way behind Europe.

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Unfortunately, that has given India a hubris that.

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Gives it the right to to be a civilisational state.

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To say that it was the superiority of our faith, of our culture, which has enabled us to get this far.

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That's not really true, because if you look at other countries, if you look at the if you look at South Korea,

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if you look at Vietnam now, Vietnam is such a great example of this,

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because he is a country that was really brought back to the Stone Age by the Americans back,

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which today produces mathematics students which are better than Americans.

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And the Americans are afraid of the Chinese. The Chinese are afraid of the Vietnamese.

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We humans are all endowed with similar qualities.

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It's only that some political systems, some cultures don't allow those qualities to be manifest or to be developed.

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What I'm hoping is that at some point Pakistan,

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but more generally the Muslim world will realise that shutting itself out to the rest of the world is a bad idea.

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A really bad idea. Not just because you lose out on on.

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Ideas in anthropology or history or mathematics, but because you lose out then politically.

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You lose out in terms of economic power. Because this is a world that is built on knowledge.

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Knowledge equals power. I guess I've saved enough.

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Thank you very much for listening to me.

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I know what I've said is going to rile up some people, but, you know, we've got to face the truth at some point.

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Thank you very much.