The two-nation theory was an ideology of religious nationalism that advocated Muslim nationhood, with a separate homeland for South Asian Muslims within a decolonised British India, which ultimately led to the partition of India in 1947. Its various descriptions of religious differences were the main factor in Muslim separatist thought in the South Asia, asserting that Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations, each with their own customs, traditions, art, architecture, literature, interests, and ways of life.
The theory was adopted and promoted by the All-India Muslim League and Muhammad Ali Jinnah and became the basis of the Pakistan Movement. Quoting Jinnah: "Islam and Hinduism are not religions in the strict sense of the word, but in fact different and distinct social orders, and it is only a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality.... To yoke together two such nations under a single state ... must lead to a growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state." Hindu Mahasabha under the leadership of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) supported the Two-nation theory. According to them, Hindus and Muslim cannot live together so they favoured India to become a religious Hindu state. The Two-Nation theory argued for a different state for the Muslims of the British Indian Empire as Muslims would not be able to succeed politically in a Hindu-majority India; this interpretation nevertheless promised a democratic state where Muslims and non-Muslims would be treated equally. The two nation theory sought to establish a separate state for Muslims from the northwestern provinces and Bengal region of colonial India. Pakistan claims to be the inheritor of the traditions of Muslim India, and the heir of the two-nation theory. Buddhist and Dalit activist, B R Ambedkar supported the theory and partition of India in the interest of safety of India. According to Ambedkar, the assumption that Hindus and Muslims could live under one state if they were distinct nations was but "an empty sermon, a mad project, to which no sane man would agree". Congress rejected the two-nation theory and opposed it even after the creation of Pakistan.
Apart from Congress, the opposition to the two-nation theory also came from a number of Hindus, and Muslims. They conceived India as a single Indian nation, of which Hindus and Muslims are two intertwined communities. The Republic of India officially rejected the two-nation theory and chose to be a secular state, enshrining the concepts of religious pluralism and composite nationalism in its constitution. Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region three-fifths of which is administered by the Republic of India, and the oldest dispute before the United Nations, is a venue for both competing ideologies of South Asian nationhood.
Pre-Modern India
Pakistani historians such as Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi base the two-nation theory on the distinctiveness of medieval Indo-Muslim culture or civilization. It is described that by assimilating many aspects of Indian culture in customs, social manners, architecture, painting and music, the Muslims of India established a new distinct Indo-Muslim culture or civilization, which not only maintained its separate identity from other Muslim peoples such as the Arabs and the Persians, etc., but also simultaneously maintained the distinctiveness of this new culture from the former Hindu India by being essentially Indo-Persian in character. This is seen as a conscious decision of the Muslims of India. According to Qureshi, the distinctiveness of Muslim India could only be maintained by the political domination of the Muslims over the Hindus. Any sharing of political power with the Hindus was considered dangerous and the first step towards the political abdication of the Indian Muslims.
It is generally believed in Pakistan that the movement for Muslim self-awakening and identity was started by Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), who fought against emperor Akbar's religious syncretist Din-i Ilahi movement and is thus considered "for contemporary official Pakistani historians" to be the founder of the Two-nation theory,Arthur Buehler, "Ahmad Sirhindī: Nationalist Hero, Good Sufi, or Bad Sufi?" in Clinton Bennett, Charles M. Ramsey (ed.), South Asian Sufis: Devotion, Deviation, and Destiny, A&C Black (2012), p. 143 and was particularly intensified under the Muslim reformer Shah Waliullah (1703–1762) who, because he wanted to give back to Muslims their self-consciousness during the decline of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the non-Muslim powers like the Marathas, Jats and Sikhs, launched a mass-movement of the religious education which made "them conscious of their distinct nationhood which in turn culminated in the form of Two Nation Theory and ultimately the creation of Pakistan."M. Ikram Chaghatai (ed.),Shah Waliullah (1703 - 1762): His Religious and Political Thought, Sang-e-Meel Publications (2005), p. 275
Roots of Muslim separatism in Colonial India (17th century–1940s)
M. S. Jain and others have traced the origins of the two nation-theory to Syed Ahmed Khan and the Aligarh Movement, consisting of his followers such as Mohsin-ul-Mulk. Syed Ahmed Khan was the grandson of the Mughal Vizier of Akbar Shah II, Dabir-ud-Daula, while Mohsin-ul-Mulk belonged to a family that played an important part in shaping the fortunes of the Mughal Empire, known as the Sadaat-e-Bara, who had been de-facto sovereigns of the Mughal Empire in the 1710s.
This feudal Indian Muslim service gentry, which performed both clerical and military service for the Mughal Empire and the British, provided cultural and literary patronage, which acted even after the fall of Muslim political power, as preservers of Indo-Persian traditions and values. They consisted of a group of feudal elites with an interest in preserving their power and position in relation to Hindus and the British. The resistance of Hindus towards the Urdu language prompted Syed Ahmed Khan and his associates to view Indian Muslims as not only having their own separate culture, but belonging to a separate nation, using the Urdu word, "Qawm". Syed Ahmed Khan provided a modern idiom in which to express the quest for Islamic identity,Akbar Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The search for Saladin, Routledge (2005), p. 121 His concept of Indian Muslim identity placed great importance on nativity and the cultural values of Muslim India, and his writings became a dissemination of ideas about a national identity that was both Muslim and Indian.
Thus, many Pakistanis often quote modernist and reformist scholar Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) as the architect of the two-nation theory. For instance, in 1876, Syed Ahmed Khan exclaimed when speaking at Benares:
In their view, Indo-Muslim culture had participants from certain sections of Hindus as well, who had been influenced a great deal by Indo-Muslim culture and had adopted some Muslim traditions during Muslim rule. However, the cultural ties with Hindus were scuttled due to Hindu revivalism after the advent of the British. The formation of the Indian National Congress was seen politically threatening and he dispensed with composite Indian nationalism. In an 1887 speech, he said:
In 1888, in a critical assessment of the Indian National Congress, which promoted composite nationalism among all the castes and creeds of colonial India, he also considered Muslims to be a separate nationality among many others:
In 1925, during the Aligarh session of the All-India Muslim League, which he chaired, Justice Abdur Rahim (1867–1952) was one of the first to openly articulate on how Muslims and Hindu constitute two nations, and while it would become common rhetoric, later on, the historian S. M. Ikram says that it "created quite a sensation in the twenties":
More substantially and influentially than Justice Rahim, or the historiography of British administrators, the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) provided the philosophical exposition and Barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1871–1948) translated it into the political reality of a nation-state.
Some Hindu nationalists also tended to believe Hindus and Muslims are different peoples, as illustrated by a statement made by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1937 during the 19th session of the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmedabad regarding two nations:-
The All-India Muslim League, in attempting to represent Indian Muslims, felt that the Muslims of the subcontinent were a distinct and separate nation from the Hindus. At first they demanded separate electorates, but when they opined that Muslims would not be safe in a Hindu-dominated India, they began to demand a separate state. The League demanded self-determination for Muslim-majority areas in the form of a sovereign state promising minorities equal rights and safeguards in these Muslim majority areas.
Many scholars argue that the creation of Pakistan through the partition of India was orchestrated by an elite class of Muslims in colonial India, not the common man. A large number of Islamic political parties, religious schools, and organizations opposed the partition of India and advocated a composite nationalism of all the people of the country in opposition to British rule (especially the All India Azad Muslim Conference).
On the other hand, Ian Copland, in his book discussing the end of the British rule in the Indian subcontinent, precises that it was not an élite-driven movement alone, who are said to have birthed separatism "as a defence against the threats posed to their social position by the introduction of representative government and competitive recruitment to the public service", but that the Muslim masses participated into it massively because of the religious polarization which had been created by Hindu revivalism towards the last quarter of the 19th century, especially with the openly anti-Islamic Arya Samaj and the whole cow protection movement, and "the fact that some of the loudest spokesmen for the Hindu cause and some of the biggest donors to the Arya Samaj and the cow protection movement came from the Hindu merchant and money lending communities, the principal agents of lower-class Muslim economic dependency, reinforced this sense of insecurity", and because of Muslim resistance, "each year brought new riots" so that "by the end of the century, Hindu-Muslim relations had become so soured by this deadly roundabout of blood-letting, grief and revenge that it would have taken a mighty concerted effort by the leaders of the two communities to repair the breach."Ian Copland, India 1885-1947: The Unmaking of an Empire, Pearson Education (2001), pp. 57-58
Relevant opinions
The, "Two Nation Theory", has become the official narrative in Pakistan for the creation of the state and key to how Pakistan defines itself, based on religion; seeking a separate homeland for Muslims, Jinnah had said in a speech in Lahore leading up to the partition that Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions, neither intermarrying nor eating together, belonging to two different civilisations whose ideas and conceptions are incompatible. Quote="Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions." The theory rested on the view that Muslim Indians and Hindu Indians were two separate nations due to being from different religious communities. It asserted that India was not a nation. It also asserted that Hindus and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent were each a nation, despite great variations in language, culture and ethnicity within each of those groups.
British officials