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For many scholars, the simple answer lies in the negative legacies of British colonialism. It was the British that “constructed” modern Hindu and Muslim identities through mechanisms like the first scientific census of 1871. And it was the British that used a “divide-and-rule” policy to drive apart religious communities, thereby promoting violence between them. In this post, however, I will argue that this seemingly straightforward argument connecting British rule and modern communal riots is problematic for three reasons.
First, what do we know about Hindu-Muslim conflict before the British? While many scholars in the humanities have looked into precolonial religious identity and conflict, most social scientists are content to focus solely on “modern” India. But India’s history did not start with the British. Consider, for instance, the argument that Hindu and Muslim identities were constructed by British administrators. The work of scholars of Indian religions like David Lorenzen and Andrew Nicholson shows that there was a clear sense of difference between Hindu and Muslim communities long before British rule. Similarly, Hindu-Muslim riots in India date back to hundreds of years before any British official set foot on the subcontinent. In the fourteenth century, the famed Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta wrote about the state of Hindu-Muslim relations in the south Indian town of Mangalore: :
Explanation: