Welcome, everybody, to the second South Asia Seminar.
My name's David Young, and that's a session anthropology.
And then you have these become inexpensive seats in sit at the back.
And. Today something interesting to me, because as a as an eco specialist,
I'm very conscious of the fact that, you know, the nation state in South Asia is extremely young.
And South Asia is a kind of natural experiment, if you like.
The effects of the nation state on culture, which starts the same with maybe many different directions by different states.
And that's one of the in my work, one of the statements has been very influential as the great French,
Sanskrit and historian who wrote history back in 1905 when he knew he was very
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.
Sri Lanka is Ceylon cautiously called event is South Asia.
Deviated 2000 years ago. Kashmir is India, South Asia itself.
It has been through all the stages of South Asian history. Nepalese.
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.
Exactly what he meant. So today's talk is very much, I think, in that comparison, kind of the title anyway.
We have Pakistan and India, common origins and divergent trajectories, and it's based on his new book, which we have four copies here.
For those of you who would like to buy one, it's £40.
You've got £40 in cash and haven't been. You're welcome to take one home with you and the rest is amazing.
Kind of. I suppose perhaps you only find this in South Asia nowadays.
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.
But he's also an extremely well-known public intellectual, which is in itself quite a brave thing to be.
These days in South Asia.
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.
Yes, We start with Noam Chomsky, Francis Robinson, Tarik Rahman, Rajiv Gandhi, by Philip Goldenberg, and finishing with our own Spies.
So without further ado, thank you, Professor Gather.
And thank you for setting up the theoretical background framework for this.
You all know that Pakistan today is reported almost exclusively in terms of the crises that it's enduring.
It has had to go to the IMF now for the 21st time.
It is desperately seeking funds to survive the next few months from Saudi Arabia, from the UAE, from elsewhere.
Politically, it is in turmoil. Its economy relies principally on unskilled labour.
Exported to the Middle East, as well as the export of textiles, which is not a very high technology item.
And on the other hand, we see that India is doing rather well for itself materially.
It has now exports and high technology fields, software, computers, pharmaceuticals.
It's got a space program that now is rather advanced, one being one of the few countries that has spacecraft circling Mars,
recently sent a spacecraft to the moon and sent a lander on that.
Now there is an enormous gap.
That separates the two countries now. But this wasn't always there.
1947 The difference wasn't all that great, in fact.
Pakistan's economy was in the 1960s, growing faster than that of India.
Its space program preceded India's.
In fact, the first sounding rockets were launched in 1962 or 63.
And that was before ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organisation, was formed.
So what is it that has happened? How can we trace its historical roots for this?
I think one should not go back just to 1947.
One needs to go back far into the past. Well, where does Pakistan record its beginnings from?
Ask any Pakistani kid and what he's learned there is that Pakistan was not made in 1947.
It was made in 712 A.D. when the first Muslim conqueror Muhammad bin Kassem landed in sin.
And that's when it all began, of course, is complete nonsense.
But that's what. Kids are taught in our schools.
But let me talk a little bit about the title of this stroke.
Common Origins. Okay.
So 712, let's keep that in mind.
And this is about 70 years after after the death of the Holy Prophet, Prophet Muhammad.
About 300 years after that comes.
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.
And he comes with with another conqueror.
This time a serious plunderer. Mahmoud Abbas.
Nabi. Soledad. Muhammad. Mahmoud Abbas.
Nabi. But Verone is not interested in going around with the Sultan.
He's interested in learning Sanskrit. He's interested in learning about what's around him.
And he spends 13 years of his life. Learning some scripture and learning what the ancients have in their books.
The Brahmans principally. He looks at the.
At the people over there. And although by now there is a substantial Muslim population, people who.
Not like me and several others in the audience.
He doesn't regard them as Muslims.
Instead. He identifies someone as Iranian.
Somebody as Afghan. Somebody as Turk.
Somebody is coming from. Central Asia.
The rest? People like me and many in the audience.
He calls them angels. He doesn't differentiate between those who recite the Kalma and those who go to the temples.
He calls them all Hindus. Why? Because there are people from all hidden.
Now on the hill that comes from sin.
Sin is a is a word.
I don't know where that came from, but it's it's linked with the river, the Indus.
It's called Sindhu Varia. And so he says.
They're all Hindus. Now, that was the level at which people were actually at in those days.
There was an enormous amount of syncretism.
There was. Okay.
There were shrines at which both Hindus and Muslims worship.
There was the back movement, which lasted for several centuries.
Every. I'm skipping over a lot of history.
And if you want details, this is the first part of my book, The Five Parts.
You had even up till the time of the balls. But the balls in the courts had.
Hindus almost in equal numbers. And in fact, the generals that the bowlers employed were often Hindus.
Furthermore, they married into the marriage. The Rajputs.
In fact, no Mughal emperor is appeal is born after.
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.
It becomes more and more marriages cross marriages, and so the purity is entirely lost.
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.
Of being able to live together and not always was a comfortable.
Particularly when there was very good and very religious, more than an emperor at the throne.
And that was at the time of Aurangzeb. So we can this we have two polls.
One is that of Akbar Akbar, the great Akbari Azam, as he's called.
Who believed in syncretism, who in fact tried to start his own religion, called a lady.
And in fact, try to incorporate Christianity and Buddhism in that as well.
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.
So that was the time when the mobile empire spread was the most powerful, the most inclusive.
The decline of the Mughal Empire comes about with Aurangzeb, and that's something like 100 years later.
And that's when the insistence was that purity.
Purity of belief. This was also the time when.
Are Muslim purifiers. So purifiers of Islam gained strength like Chobani in the.
So these are common origins, but now the common origins are to diverge.
And remember that our ultimate goal is to understand why partition came about and why the two nation theory gained currency.
And that, in fact, is the the thread that runs through my book.
While ruling India. The mullahs were.
People who enjoyed hunting, looking after their lambs.
They like poetry, singing, dancing, all that.
Who are interested in intellectual pursuits. They left business, finance, accounting all to those at the thought.
That is, this is not a very decent thing proposal to do.
So yeah, they did learn Arabic and Persian and Urdu was developing at that time.
But. In the courts. There was not much discussion, not much curiosity about the world around them.
In fact, this is the time of the European Enlightenment and the and the scientific revolution.
And the ambassador, the English ambassador comes and he presents various scientific gadgets to the court of Emperor Jahangir.
And everybody, of course, made me interested in the spectacles that he's brought as he brought big Jess.
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.
People took a peek here, Peek there? Yeah, great. But they didn't try and understand.
What made it what? They didn't try to duplicate it. And so.
Now I'm going to skip a large fraction of that history and come to the coming of the British.
So the British bring with them the ideas of the Enlightenment, the ideas of the scientific revolution.
Of course they came. Initially to train and then through the British East India Company.
Makes its way into. Into India.
Initially it is just to trade goods, but then they gain more and more influence.
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.
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.
They would need administrative support from.
An educated class over there. And so. This is around the time of 1835.
Lord, my colleague comes up with his. Educational reform.
And this basically says that.
The bachelor's. The guru calls the book clubs and the madrassas.
And these are the traditional. Educational institutions for Hindus and Muslims, respectively.
He says we're not going to fund them. We're going to fund schools where they teach science, English, math.
Geography, the stuff that is going to be helpful to us or ruling India.
Here is where I think. The.
Beginnings of the two nations. Is.
That's the real starting point. You know, in history, you can't look at any one point.
But I think this was extremely significant because of the very different reactions from the Hindu community.
So the. And those were and it was a strong reaction against it, but in only certain parts.
However, a grant had been prepared for.
For adjustment to modernity. So Rajab, Mohammed VI, Bravo, Samaj and other people like that had put their weight behind it.
And so there was grudging acceptance at the beginning, but later on more and more and they said, okay, you British.
You better give us more schools. More colleges, universities.
And so they took off in a certain direction.
But. Muslims have, by and large, a very different reaction.
And this reaction was exemplified by the protest that the Ulema made in Bengal soon after 1835.
I think just in the months after the make all the reforms were announced in which 8000 some.
800. Mullah Omar.
They wrote in protest at this and said, We don't want your education.
Keep it. We have our book. Which has got divine guidance and which is better than anything that you can teach us.
And so. No, thank you. Well, that was.
Maybe not so clearly expressed by other Muslims across India, but it was expressed well enough.
There was resistance to that learning. And.
There are only a few instances where this was resisted and where there was a different outcome.
So you had Ahmed Hunt. He was a muslim reformer, like.
The Bravo Samaj like Rajaratnam. Right.
But you see, there are many others among the Hindus.
Among Muslims, he was the only one. And by the way, one of my chapters is about him.
And it turns out that he's a. These are very interesting.
Get it? Extremely interesting character. About which, About whom?
Everything is hidden except for one thing.
That he's the one who invented the two nation theory.
Well, he sort of did, but not in the sense that it is understood in Pakistan today.
Also, what is hidden from public view is that he was a radical reformer of Muslim theology.
In fact. To an extent that nobody else anywhere in the world, including Egypt, including Turkey, has gone so far as this map did.
But all that is hidden from the Pakistani public.
So that's why actually I had to write this book because it so much so many things that are hidden from
our people that an honest version of history had to be written anyway to continue on what I was saying.
So the education gap between Hindus and Muslims widened.
If you look at the statistics in this book, they are absolutely appalling.
The University of Calcutta, which was the first university established by the British on the subcontinent.
And this was in 1856. It had several hundred Hindu applicants.
And they've had just a handful of Muslim applicants.
And when the first graduating class emerged, it was a few hundred kiddos who had graduated and just two Muslims, just two.
And if you consider the size of the Muslim population.
Ben? Well, it wasn't 2 to 100. Or several hundred.
It was like more like one, two, three.
But what is the flaw? I don't know exactly how much. So then the question is.
Why were the Muslims? Resisting.
Modern knowledge, science, math and so forth.
When in fact it was the Muslims who were the only ones doing physics and math and science and astronomy, astronomy and medicine.
From the ninth through the 13 centuries. And that was the golden age of Muslim science.
And why did that percolated here onto the Indian subcontinent?
Well, there are. Several hypotheses that one could give of a first.
The period of the flowering of Muslim science, of the Muslim golden age.
That was inspired by Greek learning.
And so if one looks at. The rise of Muslim learning.
It happens 150 years after the death of the Prophet.
And it happens in Baghdad and it happens through the translation of Greek works into Arabic.
Now. The translation was the first part. Most of the translators were not.
But not Muslims. But gradually the translators also became more and more Muslim and the Muslims, they started making genuine new contributions.
And this was actually possible because in the course of the caliphs, people like.
Khalif OLBERMANN, Abdul Rahman, Haroon Rashid, etc.
You had Jews and Christians. You had Muslims all working together.
And it is true that intellectual ferment, that new ideas were generated.
This lasted a long time for centuries.
Well, you could argue for centuries plus or minus half a century, but still a very long time.
And then why did it die out? Well, you know, this is a a this is well travelling around.
Everyone has their theories on it. But what I see and I and I think it's pretty clear why it happened.
It's happened because of the resurgence of the orthodoxy.
The mullah triumphed over the scholar.
The mullah triumphed over the Over the businessman.
Over the traveller. Over merchants.
You see Arab merchant merchants in those days used to go all around the world and they very adept at this.
And they brought back new ideas, new knowledge and.
They were very highly sought after by the Celtics.
But then the caliphs started looking for for legitimacy and who could provide legitimacy better than the clinics.
If you are if you're truly sanctioned by God, then you are far.
And so the mullah. Displaced all the others and became the most important element of the port.
And so this continued on. What one sees in the three empires that were more or less at the same time, the Ottoman Empire,
the Safavids and the Mongols was that they were they had strong components of the clerics surrounding the ruler.
And consequently there was less new ideas and less intellectual ferment over there.
And that, to me, explains why it all went down.
In Islamic civilisation in general. But then this had serious consequences for what would happen to the future of India.
So comes. But 20th century.
And the 20th century now sees political movements emerge because the British are going to be leaving pretty soon.
This was clear. But can I have some water?
It was. Not rush but by any type the that it was even before the First World War,
it was pretty clear that the British would not be able to rule a continent which is so big.
And it became obvious when the first when the Second World War started.
Now. This is the time when. The existing differences could be leveraged.
Thank you. And. They would leverage very effectively.
By. By.
Two different. Leaders sets of leaders.
One was. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League.
But then the other was. And that's gold.
Volker And we have Sobotka. Who?
Where and who really are the ideologues of Hindutva today.
And they argued for there to be two separate nations which could never live together in peace.
Okay. Since I've posed the question and I sort of answered, I got to wrap up with the summary.
So comes 1947. You see that?
The. Hindus are vastly more educated than the Muslims.
In fact, if you see a Nobel Prize being awarded in the CV in Ireland, and I think this is 1920 something you see.
You hear of names like Sahar.
And so many others. The quantum physicists.
Among Muslims. There were some, but very few educated people.
So comes partition. What happens is that Pakistan inherits just one university, which was Punjab University in Lahore,
and most of its good teachers, professors were in those who had fled to India.
Subsequently, those positions were filled up. Those academic positions were filled up.
By those who really weren't very competent. But anyway, they took those positions.
The number of universities multiplied. And it is constantly multiplying.
We have 300 today. Unfortunately, they produce very little because unless you have an academic tradition.
It doesn't matter how many buildings you build or how many labs you make.
I mean, look at Saudi Arabia. It's got all the resources in the world.
It's got the most you know, it's got the biggest imports faculty from the United States of the UK, everywhere.
And yet they haven't managed to produce very much in terms of academics, in terms of science.
I could say the same for much of the other Arab countries as well.
So. In a nutshell. In a world that is defined by knowledge.
India has. Hugely outpaced Pakistan.
That doesn't make India any kind of an ideal.
It is way, way behind China. Way, way behind Europe.
Unfortunately, that has given India a hubris that.
Gives it the right to to be a civilisational state.
To say that it was the superiority of our faith, of our culture, which has enabled us to get this far.
That's not really true, because if you look at other countries, if you look at the if you look at South Korea,
if you look at Vietnam now, Vietnam is such a great example of this,
because he is a country that was really brought back to the Stone Age by the Americans back,
which today produces mathematics students which are better than Americans.
And the Americans are afraid of the Chinese. The Chinese are afraid of the Vietnamese.
We humans are all endowed with similar qualities.
It's only that some political systems, some cultures don't allow those qualities to be manifest or to be developed.
What I'm hoping is that at some point Pakistan,
but more generally the Muslim world will realise that shutting itself out to the rest of the world is a bad idea.
A really bad idea. Not just because you lose out on on.
Ideas in anthropology or history or mathematics, but because you lose out then politically.
You lose out in terms of economic power. Because this is a world that is built on knowledge.
Knowledge equals power. I guess I've saved enough.
Thank you very much for listening to me.
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.
Thank you very much.