Religious and Gandhian Discourses in Karnataka

In July of 1921, Congress workers, as part of the national Noncooperation movement inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, picketed a liquor shop in Dharwar, a district in the southern part of the Bombay Presidency (now in modern Karnataka). Two young men had earlier fined an untouchable man for public drunkenness (as part of a local Congress temperance campaign) and were arrested by the police for looting and sentenced to six months' hard labor. The charge and the sentence were both commonly seen as unfair, and the Congress was working to organize opposition to the capricious punishment. Emotions were therefore raised and the pickets were larger than they had ever been in Dharwar. The police indiscriminately opened fire on the crowd that had gathered in Khilafat Maidan, and when the dust settled after the ensuing riot, three people were dead and several more injured (Narayan 1988, 112).

Gangadhar Rao Deshpande (later dubbed the “Lion of Karnataka” for his efforts in the movement for Indian independence and Karnataka unification) had rushed from Belgaum, where he had been organizing similar pickets at Gandhi's behest, to research the events on behalf of the All India Congress Committee and to preside over the funeral procession. He and 29 other Congress and Khilafat party members were arrested on trumped up charges of arson and looting in Dharwar; Deshpande and a few others were acquitted, since they had not actually been present, but most of the other activists were imprisoned, despite efforts by the party and its lawyers to mount a defense (Halappa and Krishna Rao 1964, 127).

These words open the final scene of Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. Bakha, the young untouchable sweeper, puzzles over the contradictory responses he has to his harrowing day (comprising multiple fights with and humiliations from caste Hindus) and the confusing excitement he feels from having heard the Mahatma speak at a rally against untouchability.

Nationalist Politics and Delhi

By 1940, when Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi was published, it would have been increasingly difficult, though not impossible, to be a Muslim and a nationalist in the united Provinces. a few important figures had managed to navigate the problem of communal loyalties: Shibli Numani, Abul Kalam Azad and the Ali brothers had all publicly defended and made alliances with the Indian national Congress (Lelyveld 2004). In 1941, Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind (later Jamaat-e-Islami), a relatively powerful collective of Muslim ulama from North India, would also come out in defense of an undivided India in opposition to Jinnah and the Muslim League and their “two nation theory” (Sarkar 1989). Furthermore, the Congress paid lip service to the idea of speaking for all of India by raising the slogan that Muslims were welcome under its large tent Jalal 2001). Still, the contradiction between a Muslim identity and a nationalist one would have been palpable. Muslims appeared to give up longstanding internal debates and fall into rank behind the Muslim League by the 1942 elections, while the Muslims in the Congress were more and more seen as Muslims in name only, and were thoroughly critiqued for their heterodoxies. Leading Muslims in the Congress were devout, but the larger chunk of the Muslim membership would have been composed of secular, Western-educated, professional and left-leaning individuals. The Communist Party, when it entered into the Congress, brought with it thousands of young, secularized Muslims who were hostile to religiosity and saw only the trappings of orthodoxy in it.

In much of the thinking of the Socialist and Communist Left in the 1920s and 1930s, anticolonial liberation was connected to the development of the struggle for international Socialism. If the Russian Revolution inaugurated an international belief in the possibility of “non-Western” and underdeveloped nations to successfully conclude revolutionary processes, then anticolonial activists across the world sought to find ways of replicating this in their own countries, of engaging the fight against imperialism and strengthening the movement for Socialism at the same time. This was not only aspirational but theoretical, as the international Communist movement organized under the Comintern regularly debated whether it was possible to overthrow imperialism in the colonies without also unleashing the collective power of the proletariat and the peasantry. This became the source of inspiration for much of the radical thinking in India, in particular, where a number of Socialists and Communists attempted to understand how the processes that would liberate the nation from colonialism might also inaugurate a whole series of dynamics, resulting in a more egalitarian society. In so doing, Indian leftists were sometimes inheriting and sometimes inventing new theoretical tools in order to understand the process by which the radical reorganization of production by the direct producers might be possible. They did so under great strain - with the repressive apparatus of the British colonial government highly sensitive to any signs of Bolshevik activity - but were ultimately unable to develop the organizations or the social forces that might have led to different conclusions than the compromised solution that was the negotiated independence signed between the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League and the British government.

Most readers of nationalist and anticolonial literature are drawn towards this material because of the radical worldview and affect that it contains. The list of writers who deployed nationalism and anticolonial themes is long and has now become the standard syllabus in most courses on postcolonial literature in universities. In the first half of the twentieth century, literature became an important tool in the hands of anticolonial nationalists who sought not only to understand the processes by which entire swaths of humanity had been enslaved and dominated by primarily European powers, but also to imagine into existence the conditions under which that enslavement and domination could come to an end. This was not a process unique to literary inquiries and experiments: the entirety of the colonized intelligentsia was engaged with trying to imagine what the consequences of colonialism were on a subject population and what alternative political and social arrangements might do for the welfare of the people in general. If we take Gregory Jusdanis's definition, that “[Nationalism] is a revolutionary, progressive, and utopian doctrine, seeking the transformation of the inherited, and quite often, unjust and oppressive order,” it becomes easier to understand why this literary corollary to the independence movement was, in fact, inspiring (2001, 10). The fact that writers from the Indian subcontinent could also rely on an anticolonial figure with as global a reputation as Gandhi plays no small part in the creation of this attractive, politicized canon.