Abstract
This paper examines the life and times of a remarkable twentieth-century figure, Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul (1908–2001), the first and only Muslim woman in independent India’s Constituent Assembly which drafted the country’s Constitution. In doing so, it critically engages with the genre of autobiographical writing—the limits it imposed and the particular vantage points it offered. By drawing upon Begum Rasul’s private papers, her autobiography and her speeches in the Constituent Assembly debates from 1946 to 1950, this paper unpacks the ways in which she sought to negotiate her multiple and intersecting identities of class, gender and religious background. Her acts of self-fashioning provide critical insights into how Muslim women negotiated their identities in post-colonial India often in resistance to, and conformity with, the national status quo.
Introduction
In the early years of Independence, Muslim women in India bore a dual burden of marginalisation. They not only found their positions constrained by the conflation of Muslims with political separatism in the aftermath of Partition,Footnote1 but also had to contend with the stereotypical constructions of Muslim women as victimised, mute subjects of history—the backward, invisible ‘other’ of the ‘Indian modern’.Footnote2 While the presumed inactivity and quietism of women in India during the first decade of Independence is a broader problem within the historiography of the women’s movement in India, the historiographical silence is particularly acute when it comes to Muslim women. Recent work that challenges the narrative of post-Independence quietism has largely focused on Hindu women, allowing relatively elite and middle-class women to gain visibility as active agents—as activists, social workers and primary breadwinners.Footnote3 In sharp contrast, the role of Muslim women in the annals of power continues to be a major historiographical oversight.
This article brings to the fore a much-neglected political figure of the twentieth century, Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul (1909–2001), who was the first and only Muslim woman in the Constituent Assembly of India (). Given that the debates in the Constituent Assembly determined the future contours of national life, as well as the fate of ‘minorities’ in India, exploring Rasul’s role in the assembly can provide critical insights into the role played by elite Muslim women in post-colonial nation-building. This is not to argue that Begum Rasul’s interventions and actions were representative of the pattern of political participation available to Muslim women in post-colonial India. Her life and times, and her autobiographical self-fashioning, however, do provide valuable insights into the challenges and possibilities of public life for women who had to negotiate the dual burden of gendered marginalisation and minoritisation in post-colonial India.
Table 1. List of women members of the Constituent Assembly of India.
Begum Rasul began her political career as an elected member of the Muslim League (in the United Provinces) in 1937. Whilst most members of the opposition moved to Pakistan in the aftermath of Partition, Begum Rasul stayed on in India and joined the Indian National Congress. Her autobiographical narrative provides an evocative account of an elite Muslim woman ‘coming-out’ of purdah and becoming one of the architects of an independent nation. The purpose of this article, therefore, is twofold: first, when we think about nation-building in post-colonial India, certain key political figures are remembered and memorialised, whilst others remain hidden, often forgotten lest they complicate the sanitised version of mainstream nationalist history; this article seeks to redress this politics of forgetting by drawing attention to the life and times of a remarkable twentieth-century figure in Indian politics. Second, it explores the public history of Rasul’s actions and interventions in national life. In doing so, the article revisits the complex relations between Muslim belonging, minority Muslim women’s rights, and secular politics in India’s early post-colonial life. It explores how Rasul’s skilful negotiation of multiple interstices of identity, both in resistance to, and conformity with, the national status quo in post-colonial India, can provide critical insights into the limits to and possibilities for Muslim women’s participation in national life in post-colonial India.
The first section of this article will focus on the politics associated with particular modes of self-fashioning and representation through the genre of an autobiography in the twentieth century. In critically reading Rasul’s autobiography, From Purdah to Parliament: The Memoirs of a Muslim Woman in Indian Politics, this article will underline the significance of the historical conditions under which the text was written, and the discursive forms it adopts in wrestling the exclusions of ‘male-stream’ history.Footnote4 Although Rasul, through her autobiography, seeks to insert herself into India’s national story, she is also prescient about the difficulties of claiming her status as a rightful historical subject in India’s national life. The second section will extend the discussion on autobiographical writing by focusing on the dilemmas and particular challenges that inhibited the choices of South Asian Muslim women, their compromises and the innovative ways in which they negotiated identity and belonging. The final section will focus on Rasul’s speeches in the Constituent Assembly of India. Her vehement opposition to separate electorates and reservations for Muslims and women speaks of an ambivalence regarding what it meant to be a religious minority in the post-colonial context, which in turn mirrored the ambiguities surrounding the meaning of secularism in independent India. By drawing upon Rasul’s speeches in the Constituent Assembly debates, her private papers and autobiography, this article will seek to understand the limits and possibilities of women’s interventions in politics in newly-independent India, as well as Muslim women’s self-fashioning in the mid twentieth century.
‘The Two-faced Begum’: From purdah to parliament
Autobiography as a genre is crucial to marginalised groups such as women, religious converts and Dalits as a means of ‘embodying subjectivity’ or ‘talking back’. It has been a crucial medium of resistance to hegemonic structures of power.Footnote5 Sharmila Rege, for instance, speaks of the collective representation of suffering in the context of Dalit women’s autobiographies, calling them ‘testimonios’ or witnesses to a community’s oppression. Acutely aware that the representation of pain should not become a spectacle, Rege emphasises the significance of the ‘collective voice’ against what she refers to as ‘bourgeois individualism’ in exploring the possibilities of an emancipatory Dalit feminism in politics and pedagogical structures.Footnote6 Given this context, one needs to exercise caution in writing about an elite Muslim woman’s autobiography, and her ‘bird’s eye view’ of history, culture and politics. Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul’s memoirs, From Purdah to Parliament, could indeed be read as what Janet Frame calls ‘the luxury of reminiscence’,Footnote7 yet in assessing the historical significance of her elite status, especially in terms of the gender politics it entailed, one can find significant links between her class status and immobility (staying on in India post-Partition) as critical to the kind of history she was able to write. Her structural location as a minority albeit elite Muslim woman—the limits it imposed and the particular vantage points it offered—gave her the opportunity to critique the promises of a modern nation-state, and to historicise the paradoxes of being a ‘modern’ Indian/Muslim woman. In a sense then, Begum Rasul’s autobiography is an interweaving of her personal recollections with a public account of the major historical events that gave social and political meaning to nation-building in post-colonial India.Footnote8
Born in 1909—92 years before the 2001 publication of her autobiography, and also her death in the same year—Rasul’s political career spanned almost the entire twentieth century. As a member of the Muslim League, Rasul was elected to the United Provinces (UP) Legislative Council in 1937; she was one of the few women to successfully contest from a non-reserved seat. She was re-elected several times and made deputy president of the UP Legislative Council in her first term. In 1947, she became a member of the first Constituent Assembly and Legislative Assembly from July 1946 to November 1949 (as secretary of the Muslim League), before its adjournment on 24 January 1950 when the Constitution of India was formally signed. Jawaharlal Nehru nominated her as a member of the first Rajya Sabha in 1952. She held official positions as a member of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council until 1990 and was elected chairperson of the Uttar Pradesh Minorities Commission (1969–71). She was also the president of the Indian Women’s Hockey Federation for nearly twenty years. In 2000, quite belatedly, a year before her death, Rasul was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in recognition of her contributions to social work.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Rasul begins her autobiography with a eulogy to M.K. Gandhi and Nehru, and writes herself into the historic moment of 15 August 1947 as ‘one among the 74 women’ who presented the national flag to the chairman of the Constituent Assembly, Dr. Rajendra Prasad.Footnote9 Despite Rasul’s long and illustrious career in Indian politics, I was struck by how little I was initially able to discover about her and her role in India’s constitutional history. One finds traces of her elusive presence in the footnotes of scholarly writings on provincial politics in the United ProvincesFootnote10 and Constituent Assembly debates,Footnote11 but only a few scholars have engaged, albeit marginally, with Rasul’s contributions to nation-building in twentieth-century India.Footnote12 In the subsequent sections of this article, I will provide a ‘potted biography’ of Rasul’s interventions in the political arena, especially with regard to land reform and minority rights in Uttar Pradesh, to show how the self that emerges from her autobiographical writing is that of a political agent who operated with and against structural and institutional forms of exclusion and marginalisation.
Begum Rasul, daughter of Sir Zulfiqar Ali Khan,Footnote13 and descendant of the ruling family of the Malerkotla princely state in Punjab, was born at a time when Indian society was deeply polarised by communal politics, when special provisions for representation in the legislature had been first introduced by the colonial state via the constitutional reforms of 1909 which granted separate electorates to Muslims. The reified representations of Muslims, as people essentially shaped by Islam, grew out of the classificatory regimes of the colonial period: colonial enumeration,Footnote14 the gradual processes by which communities solidified along caste and religious lines, and the role of Hindu and Muslim revivalists in further cementing these categories into fixed markers of community identities.Footnote15
Belonging to a ‘political family’ in a former princely state which famously remained peaceful in the midst of Partition violence,Footnote16 Rasul worked with her father, as his secretary, which brought her into close proximity with prominent nationalist figures, colonial officials, intellectuals and politicians of the 1920s. She describes her father as a ‘great nationalist at heart’ who tacitly supported the Swaraj Party, but was unable to join it because of his connections with an Indian state and fear of his properties being confiscated, thereby ‘depriving his children of their inheritance’.Footnote17 I return to Rasul’s invocation of her father’s ‘nationalist’ position in the final section of this article to emphasise Rasul’s own precarious and ambivalent positionality vis-à-vis ‘nationalist Muslims’Footnote18 in post-colonial India.
Though her marriage in 1929 to Nawab Aizaz Rasul, a taluqdar (member of the landed gentry) in the United Provinces and her subsequent life at his ancestral home in Sandila meant a very strict adherence to purdah, it ‘did not irk’ her.Footnote19 While Rasul reminisces about the peace and leisure of the days in purdah and the ‘dancing and singing girls’ of Sandila, as well as the mushaira and qawwali sessions, her ‘Rajya Sabha days’, she notes, were equally rewarding.Footnote20 By focusing on courtly culture, on rituals, food and dress, she allows us to enter the inner quarters of princely life in Malerkotla, but never in the context of sexual relations and intimacies. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley argues that most, if not all, Muslim women authors who refused to speak about sexual intimacy were part of South Asia’s first generation of elite women to leave purdah and experience unprecedented levels of mobility. The result seems to have been often at the cost of silencing their sexuality.Footnote21 However, I conjecture that Rasul’s reticence in writing about her ‘private’ experiences should be read as a deliberate political strategy to present a clean ‘public’ image, what Ania Loomba calls ‘starched sari’ narratives often deployed in communist women’s autobiographies.Footnote22 In this sense, then, she assumes a sense of propriety over what she intends to reveal to a public audience and what is concealed in her autobiographical writing. By shifting attention away from examining ‘texts of memory’ or previously silenced subaltern testimonies, Rasul’s autobiography can be read as a ‘text about memory’—how memories are constructed, manipulated, maintained, and the stakes involved in these processes.Footnote23 This approach gains salience as Rasul’s autobiography was published in 2001, no less than 51 years after the Constituent Assembly debates. It is likely that multiple layers of remembering fashioned the final text of the autobiography, making it a particularly interesting document that can illuminate the author’s investment in careful self-fashioning.
Rasul’s ‘political baptism’, as she calls it, took place when she won the 1937 Provincial Assembly elections in the United Provinces.Footnote24 She formally ‘came out’ of purdah during the elections to the UP Legislative Council in 1936.Footnote25 However, there were exceptions, as in the case of her frequent visits to Sandila. When Rasul travelled from Lucknow, where she lived with her husband and children, to Sandila to visit her mother-in-law, the narrative recounts an odd juggling of rival expectations born of inhabiting multiple public and private domains. Rasul would walk up the platform at Lucknow, without a veil, but at Sandila, her mother-in-law would send a curtained palanquin that would be placed next to the train compartment from which Rasul would alight. This caused much ‘amusement’ to her fellow travellers on the train, she notes deprecatingly, and apparently the media called her the ‘Two-faced Begum’.Footnote26 Here, it is interesting to note the ways in which Rasul negotiated her purdah status in her conjugal household and her non-purdah status in public: both positions informed her politics of simultaneously drawing upon shifting registers of identification conditioned by her gender, class and religious affiliation.
Contesting the UP Legislative Council seat, which Rasul describes as ‘a man’s seat’, she notes that her electorate comprised educated government servants and income tax and revenue-paying people, though ‘there were hardly any women among them’.Footnote27 She faced two formidable male opponents: Nawab Sadiq Ali Khan from Sheesh Mahal of Lucknow and Habib Ashraf, a barrister from Sitapur. A fatwa (religious edict) was issued by the ulema on the grounds that it was ‘un-Islamic’ to vote for a non-purdah Muslim woman. However, the fatwa had little effect. She campaigned in her constituency of Hardoi, Sitapur and Kheri, and her political canvassing strategy involved three Ps: petrol, postage and publicity. Despite a resolute backlash from conservative forces, Rasul recalls, ‘I was elected by a thumping majority which only showed that Muslims were not really as orthodox as they were made out to be…[after] my debut in politics and when I came out of purdah, I had told my husband that I would not accept invitations from people who kept their ladies in purdah. This applied to both Hindus and Muslims as most of the taluqdars did not bring out their wives’.Footnote28
It is interesting to note, however, that Rasul did not, in fact, give up veiling altogether. In her private papers, one finds her writing evocatively about the ‘benefits of being a two-faced Begum’: ‘This apparent double standard was made capital use of by my political opponents in their election campaigns against me, but they did not succeed…. Revolution, be it political or economic, must have strong roots; otherwise it will be wiped out by a counter revolution. And so I blended orthodoxy and modernism harmoniously, yielding without compromise and uncompromising with rancour’.Footnote29
The desire to identify with what it meant to be free for both a purdah life and a non-purdah life forces the narrative to perform balancing acts, which prove to be untenable. Begum Rasul suggests in her memoirs that her change in status as a Muslim woman who moved from purdah to parliament, from a life of seclusion to a public world of political activism, was facilitated by her ‘secular, Indian, Islamic’ upbringing.Footnote30 There seems to be an inherent contradiction here which makes the fulfillment of these terms ‘secular, Indian, Islamic’ unattainable. Yet, it is through these subtle yet crucial narrative acts that the identity of a ‘self’ is crafted in tune with the values of the (Indian) nation-to-be. The modern, liberal, unmarked rights-bearing individual, who became the hallmark of independent India’s official policy, is deftly brought into being in the autobiographical narrative. Rasul views her life, as implied clearly in the title of her autobiography, From Purdah to Parliament, as having ‘progressed’ with the times, as having become more ‘modern’. Yet, her narratives of coming out of purdah fail to conceal the deeply contradictory nature of post-colonial modernity itself.Footnote31 She complicates the ‘zenana’ as a site of cultural authenticity whilst simultaneously appropriating coming out as an expedient act of self-formation in response to the demands of the nation. Her positionality tells us much about the ways in which the public and the private, the home and the world, were being challenged and reconfigured in twentieth-century India.Footnote32
When the Congress ministries resigned in 1939, Rasul remained a member of the Legislative Council, which was indissoluble. Her husband, Nawab Aizaz Rasul, who was the general secretary of the United Provinces Muslim League, introduced her to M.A. Jinnah in April 1941. Though there were ‘pressures’ on her to join the League, she was ‘holding out’, and Jinnah, she writes, was aware of it.Footnote33 Her main concern was what would happen to Muslims in minority provinces such as her own. She was also not convinced by the idea of Pakistan. In her words, was Pakistan ‘viable financially?’Footnote34 Although Rasul did join the Muslim League’s Women’s Sub-Committee as secretary, her ‘lack of support’ for the pro-Pakistan movement left her feeling deeply divided. Her dilemma was shared by other Muslim women in electoral politics in the mid twentieth century, albeit with differing political predilections.Footnote35
Autobiographical dilemmas and memory-making
In the chapter entitled ‘The Road to Partition’, Rasul writes empathically about her decision to stay on in India after Partition: ‘I received many messages from Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, and others to migrate and demand anything I wanted. Yet, my husband and I decided that we would not leave our home and we stuck to our decision…[my] mother, my brothers and sister were in Lahore and were naturally quite anxious that we should join them. My mother was especially anxious about our safety’.Footnote36 The mobility that some of her political contemporaries, such as Shaista Suhrawardy IkramullahFootnote37 and Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz,Footnote38 sought in the aftermath of Partition, and Rasul’s decision to stay on in India, despite possessing the ‘mobility capital’Footnote39 to migrate to the ‘right’ side of the border, involved particular challenges of negotiating their positionality in relation to their linguistic, cultural, religious and national identities.
Muslim women in the realm of formal politics used different political languages, with varying degrees of allegiance to the nationalist past. Their modes of self-representation often colluded with or went against the grain of the dominant nationalist narrative, albeit in deeply conflicting ways. Here I propose to juxtapose Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah and Rasul’s ‘memory work’Footnote40 to examine how, as post-colonial subjects, both negotiated their identities as women and as ‘Muslims’ during moments of contested debates over definitions of a self in relation to a community and a nation. Both women wrote differently, at different moments in time, strained by particular social, political and cultural circumstances. Ikramullah’s autobiography, also titled From Purdah to Parliament, was first published in 1963 by a London publisher, Cresset, and, subsequently, a revised edition was published by Oxford University Press in 1998 and 2000. Rasul’s autobiography was published by a local publisher only in 2001, the year that she died.
In reading the autobiographies of these women, it is clear what was at stake for elite Muslim women writing in English as they tried to manage the political implications of the past, and laid claim to a certain kind of historical voice by weaving together their personal memories with nationalist histories. Unlike other South Asian Muslim authors who wrote in Urdu, for instance Anis Kidwai’s moving account of life in Muslim refugee camps,Footnote41 political memoirs in English addressed different kinds of audiences, and therefore their autobiographies were marked by different narrative requirements. For a genre that is inherently ‘confessional’—an artifice insofar as it is about self-fashioning—the idea of performance teases out the choices made in terms of the forms and narrative strategies employed and the audiences addressed.Footnote42
In other words, if we look at autobiographical practice as a ‘self in performance’, we begin to appreciate the historical, social and cultural milieu in which the self was imbricated, and what enabled gendered subjectivity and speech.Footnote43 For Rasul, describing her ‘self’ as a ‘modern Muslim woman’ was a rite of passage into the modern Indian nation-state. While Ikramullah tries to establish her ‘modern’ profile in ‘Muslim Pakistan’, simultaneously distancing her ‘self’ from her past in ‘Hindu India’, Rasul crafts her identity as a minority Muslim woman, albeit elite, in ‘secular’ India. Both selves work primarily at performing their identities as ‘modern Muslim women’ by erasing questions of sect, language and geography in order to establish coherent modern selves in relation to the nation.
Here, I argue that the way in which these two women positioned themselves is marked by a crucial dissimilarity: while Ikramullah ‘stages’ her autobiographical identity based on religious homogeneity in extending her allegiance to the Pakistani state, Rasul’s narrativisation is marked by ambivalence and dissonance, whereby the ‘self’ in her text engages in a concerted struggle to belong to the (Indian) nation, changing from being a seemingly ‘communal subject’ to becoming a ‘modern’ ‘secular’ citizen. In this sense then, Rasul’s ‘self’, the ‘author of the text’ and the ‘author in the text’,Footnote44 gets caught ‘in-between’ two conflicting nationalist histories. Rasul’s former affiliation to the Muslim League made her perennially suspect in India’s mainstream nationalist history, while her disloyalty to the cause of Pakistan obscured her presence in Pakistan’s nationalist history. I argue that it is this very ‘absent presence’Footnote45 in India’s post-colonial life that Rasul’s autobiography militates against. In memorialising herself and enshrining her personal and political life in India’s nationalist history, she claims visibility and the legitimacy of her contribution as an ‘Indian’ woman to nation-building in the twentieth century.
In her autobiography, Rasul also provides a photographic record of her career in Indian politics. Dressed in cotton or often silk sarees, at crucial political events she stands alongside prominent leaders of the Congress such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Sarojini Naidu, Vijayalakshmi Pandit and Rajiv Gandhi, among others. By using the ‘camera as witness’ and inserting her photographs with national figures into her autobiography, she seeks to reclaim her presence in India’s national history.Footnote46
Rasul’s canniness about the political stakes involved in the undifferentiated categorisation of an unmarked Muslim ‘self’ comes through in her writing as she tries to emerge as a historical subject who was intimately connected with the political events that shaped the history of her nation. Her simultaneous identification with Islamic traditions, yet her disavowal of visible markers of ‘Muslimness’, captures the rifts and fissures involved in making subjects into national citizens. As Sidonie Smith points out, ‘the performance of a unified coherent self is bound to be a failure because the autobiographical subject is amnesiac, incoherent, heterogeneous, interactive’.Footnote47 It is, therefore, in the ruptures between who we are and what we are expected to be that the potential for grasping an agential self lies.Footnote48
A common thread binds the lives of these two elite Muslim women together—they were both brought up in political families. They inhabited dual worlds: Anglicised education and an Islamic upbringing where veiling was mandatory for women. They negotiated purdah restrictions within the family, used their kinship networks to enter politics, and maximised electoral opportunities to their advantage.Footnote49 Yet as women of the post-Independence generation, their life stories were shaped by narrative choices that lent themselves to the expedient demands of the nations-to-be, expressed through competing performances of belonging.
Self-referential narratives, however, are not performative only in terms of the conscious or unconscious messages or images they carry, but also in terms of what and how they enact, conceal and reveal.Footnote50 In presenting the ‘right’ version of the self for consumption by a larger public, autobiographies emerge out of complex processes of selection, interpretation and creative invention.Footnote51 From this perspective, Rasul’s autobiography reads as a eulogy for the ‘tall men’ and women of India’s nationalist elite.Footnote52 By inserting herself into the genealogy of national figures whose significance is undisputed, Rasul seeks to rescue her almost forgotten self from relative obscurity. Given that Rasul’s autobiography was published late and was, therefore, also likely to have been written late, it is possible that Rasul had a lived experience of her own marginalisation within mainstream national memory. In resurrecting her figure as the only Muslim woman in the Constituent Assembly of India, Rasul embeds her recollections in the context of a transitioning India from a colony to a nation-state, and her involvement in the making of India’s Constitution. Her political alignments with the Indian National Congress and the All India Women’s Conference, along with her simultaneous distancing from members of the Muslim League, determines who and what is being remembered in her autobiography.Footnote53 In repeatedly invoking the names of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Nehru and Gandhi, her narrative posturing offers scope for reading a woman’s perspective on male pronouncements and positions in Indian politics.
Through her autobiography, we become privy to a rapidly changing social and political landscape of provincial politics in post-Independence India: the renaming of the ‘United Provinces of Agra and Oudh’ to Uttar Pradesh; the gradual marginalisation of Urdu; the institutional decay and internal factionalism within the Congress in the 1960s; the growth of regional political parties; the resurgence of Hindu nationalism; and the ‘creeping’ Muslim ghettoisation in the state.Footnote54 One notices a narrative shift in Rasul’s autobiography, especially from the mid 1960s, as it starts to read more like a charge-sheet than a eulogy, riven with stories of sabotage and subterfuge, especially by Indira Gandhi.
As a Muslim woman in politics, Rasul had the choice of representing or advocating for Muslims and for women in general, or for Muslim women in particular. In her autobiography she does not present herself as a clear advocate for or representative of any one of these groups. Rasul chose to remain tight-lipped about the Shah Bano case in 1986, possibly because she was unwilling to compromise her political allegiances with the Congress.Footnote55 Instead, her autobiography copiously underlines her interventions in state policy and makes much of other non-controversial areas of engagement such as becoming the president of the All India Women’s Hockey Federation in 1954.Footnote56 With a keen interest in sport, she even donned men’s whites to bat for the President’s XI vs. the Prime Minister’s XI goodwill match in 1952.
Though she undoubtedly presents herself as a modern Muslim woman, she does not necessarily craft herself as an advocate for Muslim or minority concerns in independent India. Yet, she cannot fully escape engaging with this specific issue. Of particular note are Rasul’s repeated attempts to ‘resolve’ the Babri Majid ‘controversy’. However, she does so via the oblique method of getting the mosque listed as a ‘protected monument’ under the Archaeological Survey of India Act, instead of advocating directly for the rights of the Muslim minority.Footnote57 This resolution of the Uttar Pradesh Minorities Commission was endorsed by the Central Commission in a meeting in 1987, but ‘the matter did not gain much traction…the Prime Minister brushed it off with a remark that it was a state matter’.Footnote58
Given that, in her autobiography, Rasul chose to highlight her role and presence in the Constituent Assembly debates, it becomes important to engage with her interventions as a member of the Constituent Assembly. I have chosen to focus particularly on her speeches on the minority question, largely because they can provide an important corrective to or corroboration of her autobiographical juggling act around being both Muslim and Indian. This can also provide an important historiographical intervention as received wisdom has so far privileged the voices of men within the Constituent Assembly.Footnote59
Being ‘secular, Indian, Islamic’: The ‘minorities question’ in the Constituent Assembly debates
While some voices were more audible, their presence and politics more visible within the Constituent Assembly debates, others occupied a more restrained and deferential position adopting a secular nationalist discourse, which was the least threatening to national unity. However, as the following section will show, Rasul’s inhibited position on minority rights cannot simply be read as ‘conformist’, but rather her support for Urdu and her simultaneous disavowal of reservations for Muslims, attempts to expose the internal instabilities emerging from the national project of making citizens.Footnote60
When the issue of separate electorates and political safeguards for minorities was being debated in the Constituent Assembly in 1948, Rasul, the ‘feisty female member from the United Provinces’,Footnote61 spoke against separate electorates and reservations for religious minorities. In her words:
To my mind reservation is a self-destructive weapon which separate[s] the minorities from the majority all the time. It gives no chance to the minorities to win the good-will of the majority. It keeps the spirit of separateness and communalism alive which should be done away with once and for all…. I feel that it is in the interests of the minority to try and merge themselves into the majority community. It is not going to be harmful to the minorities…. To my mind it is very necessary that the Muslims living in this country should throw themselves entirely upon the goodwill of the majority community, should give up separatist tendencies and throw their full weight in building up a truly secular state.Footnote62
This excerpt undoubtedly seems assimilationist in tone: asking Muslim stayers-on in India to shed their Islamic moorings and ‘Hindu-ise’ their ways. But Rasul goes on to say: ‘Besides, once the principle of joint electorates is accepted, reservations become an act of charity’.Footnote63 Instead, by putting the onus on the majority community, ‘on its honour, it will be up to [the majority community] to retain its prestige and honour and return to members of the minority community what is rightfully theirs…for the interests of Muslims in secular democracy is absolutely identical with those of other citizens’.Footnote64
In imploring the Indian state to grant equal citizenship rights to Muslims rather than charitable provisions that distinguished them from other social groups, Rasul deftly inverts the debate on the allocation of political safeguards for minority communities solely on the basis of religion. Her insistence on recognising Muslim stayers-on as rightful beneficiaries of the Indian state subverts the victim–perpetrator binary. In the case of the East Bengali Hindu refugees in West Bengal, Joya Chatterji elaborates on the ideological differences between the relief offered by the state to Bengali refugees in the years following Partition and that demanded by the refugees themselves. She shows that what the government perceived as a charitable act for ‘victims’ of Partition, refugees claimed as a right for having sacrificed their interests for the sake of Bengal.Footnote65 It can be argued, in a similar vein, that Rasul’s rejection of separate electorates was a similar rejection of what she perceived to be a charitable concession from the majority towards a minority. It seems she found such concessions to be incompatible with equal citizenship.
In raising the issue of loyalty to the country, Rasul points out that religion and loyalty do not go together; rather, the Muslims who have ‘decided’ to live in India have the interests of their country ‘foremost’.Footnote66 In her account, it is the responsibility of the majority community to ‘infuse’ confidence and goodwill because it is ‘not the asking for it that makes for [loyalty]’, rather it is the ‘condition of peoples’ minds that create[s] loyalty’.Footnote67 Rasul very carefully addresses the sensitive issue of separatism as ‘a feeling of separatism prevalent amongst the communities in India today’.Footnote68 While she may passionately and repeatedly exhort Muslims to ‘throw themselves entirely upon the goodwill’ of the majority community, her speech also acknowledges ‘changed conditions’ that demand a shift in the ‘attitude’ of the Muslim electorate, for Rasul was aware that ‘even a broken knife’ found in ‘those times’ in a Muslim house could condemn a family to jail.Footnote69
The historical context in which these speeches were made is significant. With Gandhi’s assassination, the political mood in the country changed.Footnote70 The dissolution of the princely states, diminishing influence in government services, and subsequent evacuee property ordinances came as what Attia Hosain calls ‘death blows’ to elite Muslim groups.Footnote71 Furthermore, with the dissolution of the Muslim League, it was important for Muslim politicians to reiterate secular positions, opposing the mixing of religion with politics lest they be accused of harbouring separatist tendencies. In this regard, Mushirul Hasan has shown how Muslim political figures who stayed in India were often co-opted by the Congress Party.Footnote72 Therefore, those holding the reins of leadership had to refashion themselves and find answers to post-Partition dilemmas within secular and democratic frameworks in seeking adjustments not as Muslims per se, but as members of the larger Indian republic. However, this political manoeuvre of representing Muslims as ‘unhyphenated Indians’Footnote73 was one among several articulations of belonging that found expression in the Constituent Assembly debates. Although the early years soon after Partition were marked by ‘anxious’ claims to belonging, Taylor Sherman, Ornit Shani and Rohit De have shown how many competing, often overlapping, expressions of belonging existed in the post-colonial period when Muslim communities resisted exclusionary political discourses by using creative strategies to assert their right to belong to the Indian nation.Footnote74
The demand for separate electorates and for reservation in the ministries and the government services for Muslims was ultimately given up. No attempt was made in the Constitution-making process to devise an alternate mechanism to ensure political safeguards for religious minorities. More importantly, as Rochona Bajpai has argued, ‘in the case of both religious minorities and the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, political safeguards were intended to be self-liquidating, as creating conditions for their own extinction. In the nationalist scheme, the role envisaged for political safeguards for minorities was to facilitate the eradication of distinctions between groups rather than to preserve or encourage distinctions’.Footnote75
Rasul’s speech in the Constituent Assembly opened up a long-standing dilemma: since independent India was to be a democracy, secularism was a fait accompli—it was essential for the proper functioning of democracy that communalism should be eliminated from Indian life.Footnote76 The Constitution-makers, therefore, were faced with the conundrum of how to ‘create a secular state in a religious society’.Footnote77 Two competing positions sought to resolve this dilemma. First, some members of the Constituent Assembly proposed to draw a strict line of separation between religion and the state, relegating religion to the private sphere, and further proposing that ‘no person shall have any visible sign, mark, or name, and no person shall wear any dress whereby his religion may be recognised’.Footnote78 The second position advocated the principle of religious liberty, but held that in a society like India, where religion was such an important part of people’s lives, this principle entailed respect for all religions alike. This principle of equal respect for all religions was described as characteristically representative of ‘Indian secularism’.Footnote79 Cutting across both positions, many members declared that the need of the hour was to strengthen the identity of Indians as rights-bearing citizens of the Indian state rather than members of a particular community or religious group.Footnote80 In creating a modern nation-state, religion was regarded as obscurantist and divisive. The modernising national elite, exemplified by Nehru, considered religion and ascriptive affiliations as vestiges of a premodern era that only modernisation and development would make redundant. The opposition to minority safeguards was, therefore, couched in the language of justice, equality and fair play. Located within this broader context, Rasul’s rejection of separate electorates for Muslims can be read as a form of advocacy for her Muslim constituents, instead of an act of distancing herself from Muslim issues.
In her interview transcript and private papers, one finds a reiteration of her ancestral legacy and ‘shared culture’Footnote81 in Malerkotla. According to her: ‘the Sikhs have great respect for the members of the ruling family in Malerkotla. In fact, it is also written in the Guru Granth Sahib that as long as Sikh Panth (sic) is alive and Malerkotla State survives, there shall be amity and good relations between them. The Sikh Panth can never forget the services and kindness shown by my ancestor, Sher Mohammad Khan, the Nawab of Malerkotla’.Footnote82 As Anna Bigelow’s Sharing the Sacred on the history of Malerkotla suggests, the story associated with the nawab of Malerkotla’s protest against the Mughal execution of Guru Gobind Singh’s children in the early eighteenth century was crucial to the ways in which the residents and pilgrims promoted a collective identity and perpetuated ritualised forms of peace in Malerkotla.Footnote83 In situating herself in this web of ‘connective memories’ of religious pluralism, Rasul skilfully appropriates the language of ‘shared culture’ in asserting her position not as a ‘nationalist Muslim’ but as an ‘unhyphenated Indian’.Footnote84 And yet, I argue that this position itself was precarious, unstable and subject to negotiation because of her liminal status of being caught between two competing nationalist histories.
Whilst vehemently opposing separate electorates and reservations for religious minorities, Rasul took a strong position in support of linguistic rights: ‘Any minority residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language and script shall be entitled to have primary education imparted to its children through the medium of that language and script’.Footnote85 She was not alone in expressing her support for Urdu speakers. Zakir Husain, head of the Anjuman-i-Taraqqi-e-Urdu, also insisted on recognising Urdu’s legacy as a ‘secular language’ before Independence.Footnote86 In the post-Partition climate, the only way ‘to preserve the language and culture of the Muslims in North India’, as Brass has shown, was to exorcise Urdu’s association with Muslims and uphold its secular character.Footnote87
The strong defence in support of Urdu sparked a debate in the Assembly about regional languages. Along with the vigorous promotion of Hindi came acerbic attacks upon Urdu and its status as a language of the people of the United Provinces.Footnote88 Rasul proposed that there should not be any bar to religious instruction in educational institutions, not even in those exclusively run by the state, as long as no one was compelled to accept such instruction. If religious instruction was imparted in this manner by the state, then it would in no way contravene state neutrality. This position was opposed by women representatives such as Renuka Ray, who spoke against ‘denominational religious instruction’ in state-run schools.Footnote89
The Assembly finally arrived at a compromise: ‘the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script’, but for ‘fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement’ (Article 343 of the Indian Constitution). Protagonists of Urdu such as Rasul tried in vain to garner recognition for it as a regional language of UP under Article 574 of the Constitution. There was great hostility to the idea of accommodating Urdu as the country’s second language since it was looked upon as a ‘Muslim language’, identified with separatism and the ‘Pakistan movement’. On 8 October 1947, the Uttar Pradesh government formalised the use of Hindi as the official language.Footnote90 Despite Rasul’s plea on behalf of Urdu speakers, the state government in Uttar Pradesh instructed the Linguistic Minorities Commission in 1964–65 that it would not open more Urdu high schools because it was simply ‘not inclined to provide secondary education through the mother tongue of linguistic minorities’.Footnote91 Despite her inability to gather support for Urdu, Rasul remained a committed advocate. As the chairperson of the Minorities Commission in Uttar Pradesh (1979–89), Rasul pushed for proposals demanding the appointment of Urdu teachers, additional loan grants for junior high schools, and coaching classes for Muslim students.Footnote92
While the Constitution prohibited religious instruction in state-run institutions, it protected the right of minorities to establish and administer their own educational institutions.Footnote93 The ‘minorities question’ in the Constituent Assembly, therefore, remained unresolved in the face of conflicting and often overlapping positions on religious freedom and citizenship rights. There is a synergy between the lack of resolution of the minorities question and the ambivalence that runs through Rasul’s autobiography. Rasul’s narrative sought to construct an unmarked coherent self in an attempt to belong to the Indian nation-state, while in the Constituent Assembly debates, questions on minority rights remained unresolved.
Conclusion
There is a particular urgency at the present moment to seriously reflect on the resurgence of virulent forms of religious nationalism and its implications for minority lives in India. With the steady erosion of liberal democratic frameworks in the face of rising intolerance towards marginalised communities, it has become imperative to critically engage with questions of belonging. Looking back at the formative period of the Indian nation-state reveals that belonging was no less fraught an issue for minorities during the 1950s. Using Rasul’s political career as an analytical framework, this article has sought to provide a nuanced perspective on the entangled relationship between religion, secularisation and democratic politics.
Rasul’s ‘in-between’ position, in advocating for the right to speak in one’s ‘mother-tongue’ while simultaneously opposing any political safeguards for minorities, reflected her own ambivalent position which mirrored the paradoxes and ambiguities surrounding the meaning of secularism in the Indian context. While seeking to uphold a liberal democratic state through common, secular citizenship, the Constitution did not provide for the effective production of such citizenship, but created devices that affirmed and further ossified religious and caste identities. Legal rights were structured through gendered constructions of religious communities, where political categories such as ‘Indian Muslim’ or ‘Muslim woman’ sought to obscure the heterogeneity of Muslim communities. While the Assembly members debated ways to ‘reform’ Hindu society (for example, debates on the Hindu Code Bill), the drafters of the Constitution did not want to hurt the religious sensibilities of Muslims or Christians, and to a lesser degree Sikhs, allowing Muslims, for instance, to retain their personal laws.Footnote94
Dwelling on Rasul’s private life and her broader political work as a parliamentarian has opened up possibilities for understanding self-formation as an act of resistance to counter-hegemonic structures of exclusion even while being deeply involved in existing power relations.Footnote95 By resurrecting the life story of a key political figure in twentieth-century Indian politics, this article has sought to emphasise the inherently selective and thus constructed nature of autobiographical writing, and its tactical deployment by Muslim women to claim visibility in the making of India’s national life.
Acknowledgments
The first iteration of this paper was presented at the conference entitled ‘Women, Nation-Building and Feminism’ held at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in September 2018. I would like to thank the organisers, Dr. Anjali Bhardwaj Datta, Dr. Uditi Sen and Dr. Mytheli Sreenivas for giving me the opportunity to present my work at the conference, and to all the panellists and participants for their critical responses and feedback on my paper. Many thanks to the anonymous South Asia reviewers for their invaluable comments; this article has benefited a great deal from their suggestions. All errors are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim Be an Indian?’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 41, no. 4 (1999), pp. 608–29.
2. Mahua Sarkar, Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
3. Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Anjali Bhardwaj Datta, ‘“Useful” and “Earning” Citizens? Gender, State, and the Market in Post-Colonial Delhi’, in Modern South Asian Studies, Vol. 53, no. 6 (2019), pp. 1–32, doi:10.1017/S0026749X18000562.
4. Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (London: Oxford University Press, 2003).
5. Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of a Modern Autobiography (New Delhi: Kali, 1999).
6. Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006), pp. 9–91.
7. Janet Frame, An Autobiography (New York: Brazillier, 1991), p. 9.
8. Antoinette Burton, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
9. Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament: The Memoirs of a Muslim Woman in Indian Politics (New Delhi: Ajanta Publishers, 2001), p. 1.
10. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Mobilization in a Mass Movement: Congress “Propaganda” in the United Provinces (India), 1930–1934’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 9, no. 2 (1975), pp. 205–26; Zoya Hasan, Dominance and Mobilization: Rural Politics in Western Uttar Pradesh, 1930–1980 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1980); and Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
11. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi (Basingstoke/Oxford: Macmillan, 2007), pp. 103–23; and Rochona Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011).
12. Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 196–203; Mushirul Hasan, The Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860-1923 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Gyanesh Kudaisya, Region, Nation, ‘Heartland’: Uttar Pradesh in India’s Body Politic (Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006).
13. Nawab Sir Zulfiqar Ali Khan was a member of the Imperial Legislative Assembly (1909–20). He was elected to the Central Legislative Assembly in 1926 after the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, and in 1928 he was one of the two Muslim politicians appointed to the Central Committee of the Simon Commission.
14. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On the Construction of Colonial Power: Structure, Discourse, Hegemony’, in Sudipta Kaviraj (ed.), Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 141–58.
15. Nida Kirmani, Questioning the Muslim Woman: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality (New Delhi: Routledge, 2016).
16. Anna Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
17. Transcript of interview of Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul conducted by Dr. Hari Dev Sharma on 2 July 1974 for the Oral History Project, archived in Manuscripts Section, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi.
18. Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim Be an Indian?’, pp. 608–29.
19. Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 22.
20. Ibid., p. 25.
21. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, ‘To Write of the Conjugal Act: Intimacy and Sexuality in Muslim Women’s Autobiographical Writing in South Asia’, in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 23, no. 2 (2014), pp. 155–81.
22. Ania Loomba, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India (New York: Routledge, 2019), p. 8.
23. J. Edward Mallot, Memory, Nationalism and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 2
24. Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 32.
25. Begum Rasul was one among the many educated, urban, elite Muslim women in the early twentieth century to ‘come out’ of purdah, many of whom came from families of social reformers and activists engaged in social work, reform and politics themselves: Gail Minault, ‘Coming Out: Decisions to Leave Purdah’, in India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 23, no. 3/4 (1996), pp. 93–105.
26. Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 43.
27. Begum Aizaz Rasul private papers, IOR, MSS F431/155, British Library, p. 4.
28. Ibid.
29. Begum Rasul private papers, IOR, MSS EUR F341/155, p. 3
30. Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 15.
31. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’, in Representations, no. 37 (1992), pp. 1–26.
32. Geraldine Forbes, ‘A Time of Transition’, in Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 189–222.
33. Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 57.
34. Ibid., p. 58.
35. Shahida Lateef, Muslim Women in India: Political and Private Realities, 1890–1980s (London: Zed Books, 1990); and Sita Anantha Raman, Women in India: A Social and Cultural History, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Praeger, 2001), pp. 123–7.
36. Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 122 (emphasis added).
37. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah (1915–2000) was born in Bengal and migrated to Pakistan in 1947. She was actively involved with the Muslim League in the 1940s, and she worked closely with her cousin, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who was the general secretary of the Muslim League’s Bengal branch.
38. Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz (1896–1979) was avowedly ‘a born Muslim Leaguer’. She won a seat in the Punjab Legislative Assembly in the 1937 elections and served as a parliamentary secretary in the Unionist provincial government. Following Partition, she became a member of the Pakistani Constituent Assembly in Karachi and was elected vice-president: Jahanara Shahnawaz, Father and Daughter: A Political Autobiography (Lahore: Nigarishat, 1971), pp. 106–7, 156–70.
39. Joya Chatterji, ‘Dispositions and Destinations: Refugee Agency and “Mobility Capital” in the Bengal Diaspora, 1947–2007’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 55. no. 2 (2013), pp. 273–304.
40. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 274.
41. Anis Kidwai, In Freedom’s Shade, English translation of her memoir, Azadi Ki Chaon Mein, written in 1949 and first published in 1974 by Ayesha Kidwai (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2011).
42. Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance, and Autobiography in South Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 1–24.
43. Ibid., p. 2.
44. Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 94, no. 5 (1979), pp. 919–30; and Tanika Sarkar, ‘On Re-Reading the Text’, in Words to Win: The Making of a Modern Autobiography (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2013), pp. 248–58.
45. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, in Archival Science, Vol. 2, no. 1 (2002), pp. 87–109.
46. Willem van Schendel and Joy L.K. Pachuau, The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
47. Sidonie Smith, ‘Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, and Resistance’, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), p. 108.
48. Ibid.
49. Wendy Singer, A Constituency Suitable for Ladies and Other Social Histories of Indian Elections (New Delhi/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
50. Antoinette Burton, ‘Archive Fever, Archive Stories’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 8.
51. Bart Moore-Gilbert, The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets (London: Verso, 2014), pp. 115–35.
52. John Harriss and Stuart Corbridge, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 43.
53. Peter Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Peter Burke (ed.), Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 23–42.
54. Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurent Gayer (eds), Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalization (London: Hurst, 2012); Kudaisya, Region, Nation, ‘Heartland’; William Gould, ‘From Subjects to Citizens? Rationing, Refugees and the Publicity of Corruption over Independence in UP’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, no. 1 (2011), pp. 35–56; and Joya Chatterji, ‘Of Ghettos and Graveyards: Muslims in West Bengal. 1947–67’, in Joya Chatterji (ed.), Partition’s Legacies (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2019), pp. 358–401.
55. The issue at stake in the Shah Bano case was the preservation of a Muslim identity, symbolised by Shariah law, which many Muslims believed was under attack by secularising forces: Zoya Hasan, Forging Identities: Gender, Communities, and the State in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 1994).
56. Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, pp. 155–6.
57. Ibid., pp. 222–3.
58. Ibid., p. 222.
59. Udit Bhatia, The Indian Constituent Assembly: Deliberations on Democracy (New Delhi: Routledge, 2017).
60. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 18.
61. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi (London: Macmillan, 2008), p. 108.
62. Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. VIII, 25 May 1949, pp. 300–3.
63. Ibid., p. 302.
64. Ibid. (emphasis added).
65. Joya Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947–50’, in Joya Chatterji (ed.), Partition’s Legacies (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2019), pp. 177–218.
66. Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. VIII, 25 May 1949, p. 303.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid. (emphasis added).
69. Ibid., p. 304.
70. Ashis Nandy, ‘Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi’, in At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 70–98.
71. Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1987), p. 288; and Taylor Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
72. Mushirul Hasan, ‘In Search of Integration and Identity: Indian Muslims since Independence’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 23, no. 45/47 (1988), pp. 2467–78.
73. Laurence Gautier, ‘A Laboratory for a Composite India? Jamia Millia Islamia around the Time of Partition’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 54, no. 1 (2020), pp. 199–249, doi:10.1017/S0026749X18000161.
74. Ornit Shani, ‘Conceptions of Citizenship in India and the “Muslim Question”’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 1 (2010), pp. 145–73; Rohit De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); and Taylor Sherman, ‘Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–1956’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, no. 1 (2014), pp. 81–107.
75. Rochona Bajpai, ‘Constituent Assembly Debates and Minority Rights’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 35, no. 21/22 (2001), pp. 1837–45.
76. B. Shiva Rao, The Framing of India’s Constitution—Selected Documents, Vol. IV (Nasik: Government of India Press, 1968), p. 593.
77. Jawaharlal Nehru, cited in T.N. Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 245.
78. Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. VII, 18 November 1948, p. 819.
79. K.M. Munshi, Indian Constitutional Documents, Vol. I (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1967), p. 309.
80. Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. II, 24 January 1947, p. 312.
81. Jawaharlal Nehru’s political vocabulary drew upon similar notions of ‘mushtarakah kalchar’ or shared culture in underlining cultural pluralism in princely states: see Karen Leonard, ‘Indo-Muslim Culture in Hyderabad: Old City Neighbourhoods in the 19th Century’, in Alka Patel and Karen Leonard (eds), Indo Muslim Cultures in Transition (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 165–88.
82. Begum Aizaz Rasul, interview transcript, NMML, p. 2.
83. Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred, p. 37.
84. Gautier, ‘A Laboratory for a Composite India?’, p. 51; and Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim Be an Indian?’, pp. 608–29.
85. Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. VII, 8 Nov. 1948, pp. 305–7.
86. Kavita Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013).
87. Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 182–235.
88. Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 342.
89. Rao, The Framing of India’s Constitution, p. 263.
90. Hasan, The Legacy of a Divided Nation, pp. 156–65.
91. ‘Report of the Commissioner for Seventh Linguistic Minorities, 1965’ (Ministry of Home Affairs), cited in Steven Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 116.
92. Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, pp. 208–9.
93. James Chiriyankandath, ‘“Creating a Secular State in a Religious Country”: The Debate in the Indian Constituent Assembly’, in Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Vol. 38, no. 2 (2000), pp. 1–24.
94. Zoya Hasan, ‘Gender Politics, Legal Reform, and the Muslim Community in India’, in Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (eds), Resisting the Sacred and the Secular: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia (New Delhi: Kali, 2001), pp. 71–88.
95. Srila Roy, ‘Changing the Subject: From Feminist Governmentality to Technologies of the (Feminist) Self’, in Stephen Legg and Deane Heath (eds), South Asian Governmentalities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 200–24.