Did the British Divide India?

I would honestly argue that the British didn’t create the partition intentionally; rather, their main contribution mostly stemmed from his incompentence in “how” the division happened, but they didn’t cause the “why”. Ajay Varghese, in his book “The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence,” points out that the British contributed more to the creation of caste and tribal tensions as opposed to communal tensions. It seemed that the British perceived the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 as principally being driven by religious conflict between the British and the Hindu-Muslim sepoys.

In the aftermath of the incident, the British mainly aimed to make policies that accommodated communal differences, including opening up government positions to members of different communities irrespective of religious origin. However, this often came at the price of worsening the conditions of lower caste induviduals (Muslim, Sikh, Jain, Zoroastrian, Christian and Hindu) and tribal groups. Ironically enough, the Princely states were communal in nature in contrast, since their rulers often relied on theological claims to maintain their position (think the Travancore royal family in Kerala’s mythological connection to Vishnu, for example). In fact, many princely states were open to including people from a wide caste background, but didn’t extend such offers to people from different religious backgrounds. In a sense, the “native” states were more communal, while the “foreign” British officials were more casteist or anti-tribal.

Furthermore, I would argue (this is my opinion) that there is a reason why the princely states were communal: specifically, religious crystallization in the aftermath of Aurangzeb’s Deccani conquest and the Maratha rebellion that ensued. Ajay Varghese, in an article, once pointed out that the regions today that suffer from communal riots tended to overlap with places where Maratha-Mughal battles took place (think Gujarat, Bengal, etc.). Furthermore, my all-time favorite academic on xenophobia, Gijis Kruijtzer, stated that communal relations between the two communities were already declining long before the British entered the picture. In fact, a minor example he talked about was the fact that the sultan of Mysore had once sent a threatening letter to a local Maratha ruler who wanted to prevent his friends intereligious marriage.

Also, it should be noted that the orthodox communities in both religious groups (who held sway in powerful places) often insulted and even encouraged actions against others. You had figures like Sirhind, Badayuni, etc., who are kinda infamous for their questionable views about non-muslims, especially Hindus and Sikhs. I still remember the incident where Ibrahim 2 of Bijapur had to literally write on his grave that he was not a jew, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, and most certainly not an idol worshipper, but he was a deeply devout muslim. Mostly due to the fact that he was very into classical music and generally very close with these Hindu vassals, in addition to his syncretism.

The Hindu side of the equation wasn’t different either. The Devalsmriti from (what is presumed to be) Arab Sindh includes many laws that explicitly forbid interactions with Muslims for long periods. Excessive interaction or living together would result in complex purification rituals and excommunication from the social community. Furthermore, Hindus (especially nobility) who converted to Islam were given a degraded social status; in fact, Hindu Rajputs would eat food given by Muslim Rajputs. Ironically enough, the muslim side was deeply suspicious of converts since sometimes an enemy Rajput king would convert to Islam and then revert immediately after the Mughal armies left.

Fascinatingly, every communal issue today has a long pre-colonial history. The consumption of cow meat and the entire fiasco that stemmed from it existed even back then. Also, Hindu texts explicitly called muslims “Mleccha,” i.e., foreign barbarian. They were even selective about it, with Maratha-era texts calling Mughals Mleccha, but not calling the Deccani sultans Mlecchas since they helped the Marathas. Hell, even the Sikh texts had a translation I saw in which the guru was talking to a muslim man about why he dresses like a non-muslim and does un-Islamic rituals at home despite publicly being muslim, which he referred to as the Mleccha religion. The reverse from the Muslim side isn’t exactly unfamiliar to everyone, including the bit where Alamgir beheaded a cow in a Jain shrine simply to spite the local mayor, who was Jain.

The British can be blamed for a lot of things, ranging from famines to, ironically enough, casteism and anti-tribalism, but religious violence is a pre-colonial thing. The British worsened the economic situation, introduced organized religious structures that crystallized religious identity, and made stupid orientalist interpretations that morphed people’s ideas of the past. Most of these things indirectly worsened an already bad religious situation.