Muslims and changing India.
- New Delhi Trimurti Publications. 1972
- 294p.
This is a study dealing with British policy towards the Indian Muslims. It is based entirely on the Home Political and Confidential Records of the Government of India which were not accessible to research scholars until recently. With these records readily available, I have felt little need to rely on, or quote from contemporary books which were either written from memory or derived from secondary sources. By consulting instead almost all the documents dealing with Indian Muslims I have been able to examine at first hand in this study the changes effected in the political, social, educa- tional, religious and economic life of the Muslims in Modern India. An account of the Muslim League has been purposely left out of this study because most of the relevant documents have either been destroyed or are not available in India. Nevertheless the present volume will prove useful in this respect also, in so far as at least some of the chapters in it will persuade historians to reconsider the work of the Muslim League in the light of the new material that has emerged from records about several other Muslim political parties which not only opposed the Muslim League but threatened its very existence. One main point that emerges from this study may be emphasised here. The study as a whole reveals the British view that, despite the overt support and encouragement given to the Indian Muslims this community had proved itself unable to excel or even compete with the other communities in the country. Muslim backwardness in education, their extra-territorial sympathies or Pan Islamic ideas.