A System of Life

The year 1937 was an anxious one for Muslims in British India. Congress Party governments were in place in seven of the eleven provinces, rejecting any power sharing with the Muslim League and treating non-Hindus with indifference. In the United Provinces (UP), for example, Muslim boys were ordered to salute Gandhi’s portrait. The police looked the other way during attacks on mosques and Muharram tazias. In the Central Provinces (CP), new educational policies were introduced that closed down schools based on the Urdu medium, made the Hindu hymn, Vande Mataram compulsory and required pupils to wear dhoti. Jinnah captured the anxiety perfectly: “we do not want to be reduced to the position of the Negroes of America”. An exception was the province of Punjab, with a Muslim chief minister from the empire-loyalist Unionist Party, but tension and disunity were in the air there too, because of opposition from the Muslim League and the street protests of the Khaksar movement. In May 1937, Muhammad Iqbal, residing in Lahore and no friend of the Unionists, suggested a separate federation of Muslim provinces in the north-west and north east of India to the Muslim League’s leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.