Reply #20: Pre-independence, Muslims were the "old elite", Hindus the "new"

[liberalpragmatist]

Prior to British rule, Muslims formed the ruling class. That meant that they were largely shut out of government when the British took over administration.

The break was especially sharp after the 1857 Rebellion (the British call it "Mutiny"; Indians call it the "First War for Independence"). Though the rebellion was largely non-religious in character, and although large numbers of Hindus took part, the leaders of the rebellion were largely the old Muslim landowners and princes.

Many of them were killed or exiled by the Brits when the rebellion was put down. Thereafter, the old Muslim elite was sort of shut out of power. When the British began cultivating an Indian "ruling class," it wound up being upwardly-mobile Hindus who largely benefited. That was partly through patronage, but similar in many ways to what happened in Europe, where in the 19th century much of the political space was dominated by conflict between the "new" bourgeoisie (merchants, professionals) and the old aristocracy. In India, this was also the case, only with Muslim landowners as the old aristocracy and Hindu civil servants, lawyers and merchants as the bourgeoisie.

This was actually a major source of the division between Hindus and Muslims. The Muslim leadership essentially felt shut out of political discussion because the political class was dominated by Hindus. Moreover, many of those Hindus came to embrace Socialist ideas like land reform which threatened the land holdings of the Muslim aristocracy.

Ironically, despite the fact that British rule is what shut out the Muslims in the first place, by the 1920s and 1930s, many Muslims began to see the British as protection against Hindu-majority rule, something they increasingly feared when they saw the the Indian National Congress was, despite some prominent Muslim members and a secular ideology, disproportionately Hindu.

Of course, the Muslim masses were largely poor. The Muslim community in India was somewhat bifurcated - there were low-caste Muslim villagers and the Muslim landowning elite. However, as is typical of political movements, political ideas were cultivated at the top and trickled down. Many Muslims genuinely began to fear for their future in a Hindu-dominated India. Active Hindu consciousness movements, such as attempts to ban cow slaughter, made them more suspicious. And Gandhi played an unwitting role as well - though he was highly tolerant, he still typically spoke of India having an essentially Hindu character and calling for a "Ram Rajya" -- rule of Ram or a kingdom of God. He meant this as paradise, but it left many Muslims cold and seemed to question their validity to the Indian experience.

So to answer your question, at least in the case of India, there was a sense of being shut out from their old power-center.

I've talked a lot in this reply about the Muslim landowning class -- interestingly, this has implications for today. Part of the reason that Muslims in India are overwhelmingly poor is because most of the middle-class and upper-class Muslims left for Pakistan.