Led by a section of Indian Muslim leadership in collaboration with M. K. Gandhi, the Khilafat movement (1919–22) defended the integrity of the Ottoman caliphate-empire following its defeat in the First World War. Scholarship on Hindu nationalism views this movement as a catalyst for the steep rise in popularity of the Hindu nationalism of V. D. Savarkar and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Bhatt Reference Bhatt2001, 47; Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot1999, 25). But this leap from Khilafat to Hindutva promotes the impression that the insecurity felt by many Hindus after the movement was the sole Hindu response during it. Certain scholars have noted the “remarkable Hindu-Muslim amity” and “fraternisation” during the movement and the participation of prominent Hindus—such as Lajpat Rai, Swami Shraddhanand, Madan Mohan Malaviya, and the Nehrus—in Khilafat-related protests, conferences, and deputations (Hasan Reference Hasan2010, 172; Jordens Reference Jordens1981, 124; Minault Reference Minault1982, 70–71, 77–78, 83; Zavos Reference Zavos2000, 145). But these Hindus appear as articulating no ideas in support of the Khilafat cause. Figures like Lajpat Rai still occasionally emerge as fearing Gandhi's effort to forge a Hindu-Muslim front (Tejani Reference Tejani2008, 178). Gandhi therefore appears as an exception in urging Hindus to champion the pan-Islamic cause of Muslims (Hasan Reference Hasan2010, 127–28; Minault Reference Minault1982, 68; Tejani Reference Tejani2008, 155, 171–78), an impression inadvertently reinforced by intellectual histories focused on Gandhi's thought during the Khilafat movement (Devji Reference Devji2012, 68–84; Skaria Reference Skaria2003, 978). This essay excavates Lajpat Rai's reasons for urging Hindus to support Muslims in their fight for their Khilafat. Pigeonholing Rai's entire oeuvre as “Hindu nationalism” obscures a historical-intellectual juncture when a prominent Hindu political figure, viewed by scholars and Hindu nationalists alike as a forefather of Hindutva, articulated a secular Indian nationalism that actively promoted trust between Hindus and Muslims and was comfortable with Muslim sympathies with the wider Muslim world.
At first glance, Lajpat Rai (1865–1928) appears to be an unlikely defender of the Khilafat. In 1901, he rejected the Congress's notion of an “Indian nationality” and claimed that India was composed of separate Hindu, Muslim, and Christian nationalities (Lajpat Rai [1901] Reference Lajpat Rai2003a, 4–9). In a 1902 article titled “Hindu Nationalism,” he strongly defended the concept of a Hindu nation, adducing as proof a history of ancient and medieval rule by “Hindu” kingdoms and Hindu resistance to “foreign” Muslim rule, and the claim that Hindus shared a “common name, a common history, a common religion, a common language, and a common future” (Lajpat Rai [1902] Reference Lajpat Rai2003b, 295–99). Intermittently ruminating on “Hindu nationality” in the intervening years (Lajpat Rai [1907] Reference Lajpat Rai2003c), Rai participated in the first conference of the Punjab Hindu Sabha in 1909. There, he forcefully reiterated that Hindus constituted a separate nation, as they shared thick bonds of “a certain type of culture” (Lajpat Rai [1909] Reference Lajpat Rai2003d, 158–59). Before 1915, Lajpat Rai frequently articulated what he himself called a “Hindu nationalism.”
While scholarship on Hindu nationalism views Rai's nationalism before 1915 as an embryonic stage of Savarkarite Hindutva or even its “virtual equivalent” (Bhatt Reference Bhatt2001, 2–4, 42–44, 48–55; Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot1999, 18; Reference Jaffrelot and Jaffrelot2011, 79, 113), it was, in fact, a distinct kind of “Hindu nationalism.” It overlapped with Hindutva in positing “Hindu culture” as the Hindu nation's essence and conceiving the historical relationship between Hindus and Muslims in antagonistic terms. But it differed significantly in imagining Muslim and Christian “religious nationalities” as flourishing alongside the Hindu nation rather than demanding their cultural assimilation into it. While Hindutva desires homogeneity, Rai's Hindu nationalism accepted religio-cultural diversity. It also differed in seeking the eventual unification of India's religious nationalities into a single “Indian” nation. Nevertheless, for Rai, the path to this future “Indian” nation lay “from below,” through the prior separate strengthening of India's Hindu, Muslim, and Christian nationalities (Lajpat Rai [1909] Reference Lajpat Rai2003d, 165). Reflecting its isolationism, Rai's Hindu nationalism saw the Hindu nation as sharing very little in common—historically, culturally, and, to some degree, even politically—with India's other “religious nationalities,” and he only rarely encouraged unity with them. Before 1915, Rai's energies were primarily directed toward sociopolitically uniting the “Hindu nationality.” Rather than an espousal of nascent Hindutva, it is Rai's prioritization of an isolationist Hindu nationalism before 1915 that makes his urging of Hindus to selflessly unite with Muslims during the Khilafat movement so striking.
Yet, Lajpat Rai's support for the Khilafat also takes us aback because of his association with the Hindu Mahasabha from 1924 until he died in 1928. Scholars argue that the Mahasabha acquired “a more clearly Hindu nationalist orientation in the 1920s” (Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot1999, 19) when it adopted Hindutva as its creed (Adcock Reference Adcock2013, 151). Lajpat Rai, too, is assumed to have espoused either Hindutva or the “stage” of Hindu nationalism immediately preceding it (Bhatt Reference Bhatt2001, 61). However, while as a Mahasabha leader, Rai engineered a Hindu politics, he neither returned to his pre-1915 Hindu nationalism nor turned to Hindutva. Instead, he espoused a secular Indian nationalism that saw Hindus and Muslims as equal members of a single Indian nation, desired their unity, and respected religious difference. Catch-all categorizations of Lajpat Rai's thought as “Hindu nationalist” have therefore muddled our understanding of his nationalism in three ways. The first is by trivializing its difference from Savarkarite Hindutva. The second is by mistakenly assuming a linear, teleological development from Rai's pre-1915 “Hindu nationalism” to his post-1924 Hindu Mahasabha phase. This obscures the distinctive “Indian” nationalist narratives that Rai articulated between 1915 and 1924—during the five years he spent in the United States (1915–20) and then, following his return to India, during the Khilafat movement (1920–22). The third is by mistakenly assuming a simplistic continuity from Rai's pre-1915 “Hindu nationalism” to his post-1924 Hindu Mahasabha phase. This conceals the significant distinctions between them.
Nevertheless, after 1922–23, the radically changed context of unprecedented Hindu-Muslim polarization and violence, and particularly the Kohat riot in the Muslim-majority North-West Frontier Province in late 1924, saw Lajpat Rai, a member of the Hindu minority in Muslim-majority Punjab, partly recoil from the secular Indian nationalism that he enthusiastically and painstakingly elaborated between 1915 and 1922. By late 1924, Rai regretted the Khilafat movement for mixing religion with politics, which he now believed was tearing Hindus and Muslims apart. Amid violence, and with the caliphate's abolition by the Turks in 1924, he came to view pan-Islamism as an irrational distraction from Indian nationalism, and occasionally even a threat to Hindus. Rai fearfully turned to the Hindu Mahasabha and a new, insecure, and hard-line secular Indian nationalism more hostile to both pan-Islamism and community-based politics. He would conceive the Mahasabha's Hindu politics as a temporary means to limit Muslim demands for communal representation (now seen as the root cause of Hindu-Muslim polarization) and as serving this hard-line secular Indian nationalism (Bhargav Reference Bhargav2022). Rai did not articulate a Hindu nationalism but moved away from the trust-based, other-embracing secular Indian nationalism of his Khilafat years toward a harsher secular Indian nationalism.
My aim in unveiling the textures of Lajpat Rai's Khilafat-era nationalism is not to deny that before 1915 Rai regularly articulated a Hindu nationalism (of a particular kind) or, after 1924, was spearheading a militant Hindu politics through the Mahasabha. I do not seek to project his Khilafat-era narrative onto his entire political-intellectual life or overemphasize its duration and significance. Yet, while acknowledging the relatively short period of its espousal, I wish to resist any methodological or hermeneutical approach that treats Rai's Khilafat-era position as intellectually insignificant. It remains important for two reasons. First, Rai's thought during these two years—not an insignificant period from the perspective of daily lived experience—constituted a substantial continuity from the Indian nationalism he articulated between 1915 and 1920. Moreover, it was part of a lasting shift in his thought. As mentioned, even after 1924, as a Mahasabha leader, Rai never returned to his earlier Hindu nationalism. This period left a permanent mark on Rai's thinking, changing his conceptual horizon and vocabulary irreversibly. Never again did he equate nationhood with religious identity, and henceforth he continued to grapple with the question of how to be Hindu, Indian nationalist, and secular simultaneously. Even after 1924, Rai only partly retracted his Khilafat-era position. Despite adopting a perilous, counterproductive path that threatened to undermine the very ideal he wished to realize, he aimed at effecting a secular Indian nationalism, which desired the long-term unity of Hindus and Muslims and respected diversity. Lajpat Rai's Khilafat-era narrative possesses integrity because it constituted a lasting change from his previous Hindu nationalism and had a residual effect on his Mahasabha-era thought. It is a mistake, therefore, to read his position during the Khilafat movement (and, before that, during the war) as an intellectually insignificant, short-lived exception to the more or less unchanging position that marked the rest of his life.
The second reason why exhuming Lajpat Rai's intellectual stance during the Khilafat movement remains important is that intellectual history is concerned not only with ideas as they appear in the minds of individuals but also with uncovering a history of argumentation and reasoning. The particular texture of Rai's Khilafat-era position, therefore, holds significance even if he had completely repudiated it. The shift of a “Hindu nationalist” like Rai toward a new “Indian” nationalism during the war, and then to a Gandhi-like position during the Khilafat movement, remains significant for the larger history of nationalism in India. It reveals the fluidity and complexity within Hindu thinking on nationhood. Rather than proponents of a rigid ideology, some Hindu politician-thinkers reconfigured their positions in response to certain contexts. It shows that certain staunch Hindu political actor-thinkers could and did once elaborate a secular Indian nationalism very much at ease with Islam and the Muslim world. In light of a new context of polarization and violence, Rai may have retrospectively recoiled, in part, from how he had mutually related Hindu identity, Indian nationhood, Islam, and the Muslim world during the Khilafat movement. But his Khilafat-era ideas became autonomous of his personal trajectory, contributing to and strengthening the emerging public discourse around a trust-based secular Indian nationalism. More importantly, we need not agree with Rai's retraction. Unearthing his intellectual stance during the Khilafat movement remains intellectually and politically significant despite Lajpat Rai's shift to a different position as Mahasabha leader. It highlights a position that can exist and be held by Hindus.
Background to Lajpat Rai's Khilafat Moment
Before turning to Lajpat Rai's thought during the Khilafat movement, we need to briefly understand what led him in 1915 to renounce his isolationist “Hindu nationalism” for an other-embracing “Indian nationalism.” Rai's prolonged stay in the United States between 1915 and 1920 afforded him a wider lens through which religious differences between India's Hindus and Muslims looked less significant. But if geographical remoteness triggered rethinking, it was greatly aided by the new political context that Rai keenly noted had emerged in India by 1915. This was the reorientation of India's Muslim leadership. From 1911, British policies within and outside India nudged a new generation of Muslim political actors to reorient their attitudes toward the British and the Congress. In India, the government's 1911 annulment of Bengal's partition, its refusal to accept a Muslim university at Aligarh without government control, and its mishandling of the 1913 Kanpur Mosque incident embittered this new Muslim leadership. Internationally, the Muslim leadership was upset by Britain's tacit approval of attacks in 1911–13 on the Ottoman Empire by Italy and the Balkan countries. This eventually resulted in the Ottomans ceding almost all European territories they had controlled for five centuries (Aydin Reference Aydin2017, 106–8). British ministers condoned the idea of Christian powers partitioning the Ottoman Empire (Owen Reference Owen1972, 568–70), raising fears regarding the fate of the Ottoman caliphate. Since the formal end of the Mughal Empire in 1857 (Minault Reference Minault1982, 5), many Indian Muslims had viewed the Ottoman sultan, the last remaining Sunni potentate, as the caliph of Islam, and the Ottoman Empire as its temporal embodiment. Unsurprisingly, Britain's declaration of war on the Ottomans in 1914 during the First World War deeply disturbed them. A combination of domestic and “pan-Islamic” reasons, therefore, caused this younger Muslim leadership to repudiate the Muslim League's policy of loyalty to the British and aloofness from the Congress. This politics aligned with men like M. A. Jinnah who strove for League-Congress collaboration on a joint constitutional scheme and demand for “self-government.” Such political realignments were accompanied by the rise of a new Muslim political discourse that saw Hindus and Muslims not as separate nationalities but as constituting a single Indian nation. Observing these developments from the United States in 1915, Lajpat Rai overlooked the domestic factors that also compelled this new Muslim leadership to turn against the British and toward the Congress. He credited this new “national” attitude mainly to their pan-Islamic sympathies (Lajpat Rai [1916] Reference Lajpat Rai2003k, 319–21). Nevertheless, significantly, he welcomed their pan-Islamism as beneficial for “Indian nationalism” and responded by abandoning his own conceptualization of Hindus and Muslims as separate “religious nationalities.”
Lajpat Rai's intellectual shift was also enabled by the new international perspective he acquired as a result of the First World War. For Rai, the war more thoroughly delegitimized the Eurocentric imperial world order (Lajpat Rai [1914] Reference Lajpat Rai2003e, 55–56; [1916] Reference Lajpat Rai2003f, 111–12; [1916] Reference Lajpat Rai2003g, 77–78; [1916] Reference Lajpat Rai2003i, 125), leading him to view India and other Asian and African countries as fellow victims of European exploitation (Lajpat Rai [1916] Reference Lajpat Rai2003h, 104–5; [1916] Reference Lajpat Rai2003j, 195). It also created the possibility of a more egalitarian postwar international order. Rai now believed that India urgently needed to join other Asian countries to establish this new order (Lajpat Rai [1916] Reference Lajpat Rai2003f, 111; [1916] Reference Lajpat Rai2003h, 104–5; [1916] Reference Lajpat Rai2003k, 319–20). This made him see religious differences between India's Hindus and Muslims as politically trivial; fellow victims of British imperialism, they needed to end their quarrels, unite, and join other world forces to overhaul the entire global imperial order. A new internationalist perspective led Lajpat Rai to shun the idea of Hindus and Muslims as separate “religious nationalities” and to conceive them as one “Indian” nation.
Rai's reimagination of nationhood was reinforced by his prolonged stay in the United States. The impression of America as a country with a “great free mixture of nationalities” that had still constituted itself into a political community may have been on his mind when he wished India to assimilate some of America's ideals (Lajpat Rai Reference Lajpat Rai1916, 368; [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003o, 63). Rai also immersed himself in American liberal and socialist circles (Manela Reference Manela2007, 87–89; Rathore Reference Rathore1965, 115–16; Raucher Reference Raucher1974, 92–96), which included, among others, NAACP founders W. E. B. Du Bois and Oswald Villard, African American educationist Booker T. Washington, and several intellectuals from Columbia University, the Rand School, Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley. This probably exposed him to an inclusivist, egalitarian strand of American progressive thought (Hovenkamp Reference Hovenkamp2017, 947–1001) and encouraged his reimagination of nationhood in India. Although Rai shared an uneasy relationship with them, he occasionally interacted with Ghadar revolutionaries in the United States. Encounters with the broad Ghadarite worldview, with its emphasis on universalist internationalism, democracy and egalitarianism, and deliberate tolerance and fraternization across religious lines (Ramnath Reference Ramnath2011, 17–94, 165), may have reinforced the new nationalism that Lajpat Rai articulated in light of changing Indian and global contexts.
The years between 1915 and 1920 saw Rai elaborate, for the first time, an intricate Indian nationalism that endowed Hindus and Muslims with bonds of common belonging, including to a common “Aryan-Mongolian” mixed race. He attempted to fashion a pluralist public “Indian” national culture that explicitly celebrated diversity and sought to “combine” the best of Hinduism and Islam; advocated Hindustani as India's national language; and reimagined India's “Muslim” history to emphasize peaceable coexistence rather than conflict between Hindus and Muslims (Bhargav Reference Bhargav2018, 101–26). Already by 1915, Lajpat Rai saw the rising pan-Islamic fervor among Indian Muslims as beneficial for Indian nationalism. Returning to India in February 1920, Rai's optimism about pan-Islamism and his newly-imagined “Indian” nationalism made him receptive to the Khilafat agitation that had been occurring since 1919.
Lajpat Rai's Discourse during the Khilafat Movement
Since the nineteenth century, Indian Muslim sympathy for the Ottoman caliphate-empire had coexisted with loyalty to the British Empire. But this loyalty was under strain from 1911 because of British policies in India and toward the Ottomans. When Britain declared war on the Ottomans in 1914, it attempted to allay Muslim anxieties by promising that, given the war's political and nonreligious nature, Britain would leave the Ottoman caliphate and Muslim holy cities untouched, and thereby not interfere with the religious duties of its Muslim subjects. Indian Muslim leadership clarified that their loyalty was conditional upon this assurance (Aydin Reference Aydin2017, 108–19). But their loyalism eroded rapidly when, as it marched toward victory, Britain disregarded its promise by supporting an Arab revolt against the Ottomans and cutting off the Ottomans’ physical link with Mecca and Medina. This undermined a key pillar of the Ottoman claim to the caliphate—the sultan's sovereign rule over these holy cities. By 1917, Britain had wrested not just Mecca and Medina from Ottoman control but also Jerusalem.
When the war ended in 1918 with Turkey's defeat, and peace terms were negotiated in early 1919, it became clear that Indian Muslim fears about the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire were coming true. Now, the pan-Islamic Indian Muslim leadership, including the Ali brothers and Abul Kalam Azad, joined hands with Gandhi to organize the mass-based Khilafat movement, which was aimed at pressuring the British to preserve the boundaries of the Ottoman caliphate-empire and keep the Arabian Peninsula containing Muslim holy cities under the Ottoman caliph's control.
The existence of the Ottoman caliphate-empire and the caliph's custodianship over Islamic holy sites were considered by many Indian Muslims as integral to Islam. But apart from religious-theological reasons, the pan-Islamic sympathies of Indian Muslims with the Ottoman caliphate-empire had arisen in response to colonial humiliation, as a means to elevate Muslim self-esteem in the face of British imperial ideas about the superiority of Western civilization and the racial-civilizational inferiority of Muslims (Aydin Reference Aydin2017, chaps. 1, 3, 4). The Ottoman caliphate-empire was the last remaining independent Muslim power in a world dominated by Europe, the symbol of the past glory of Islamic civilization, a source of Muslim self-confidence. It gave Indian Muslims comfort as they faced the prospect of their marginalisation in Indian politics (Minault Reference Minault1982, 7). An important symbol and source of Muslim self-confidence was threatened, and the Khilafat movement sought to thwart it.
The pan-Islamism of Khilafat leaders often fused with an intensifying anticolonialism that challenged the Eurocentric imperial world order to generate a new postwar world that accorded India and Muslim countries equality vis-à-vis European nations (Aydin Reference Aydin2017, 120–25; Devji Reference Devji2012, 73; Jalal Reference Jalal2007). The Khilafat movement was simultaneously pan-Islamic and increasingly anti-imperial. Anticolonial sentiments were exacerbated by British policies in India, affecting Hindus and Muslims alike. In early 1919, the Khilafat campaign intertwined with Gandhi's Rowlatt Satyagraha, which saw thousands of Muslims and Hindus nonviolently protest the draconian Rowlatt Acts, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and brutal government repression in Punjab (Hardiman Reference Hardiman2018, 181–83; Minault Reference Minault1982, 69–70). Widespread Muslim-Hindu cooperation during the Satyagraha—symbolized by Muslim dignitaries inviting Swami Shraddhanand, a Hindu sanyasi, to speak from Delhi's Jama Masjid—was witnessed throughout the year in joint mass meetings on “Khilafat Day” and Khilafat conferences attended by Hindu leaders (Minault Reference Minault1982, 70–78). The demand for swaraj (self-rule) by Khilafat leaders was often rooted in both pan-Islamism and British injustices in India (Hasan Reference Hasan2010, 59–62, 90–91; Muhammad Reference Muhammad1980b, 81–96; Rodrigues Reference Rodrigues, Roy and Becker2020, 136).
By February 1920, when Lajpat Rai returned to India, Gandhi had promised Hindu support for the Khilafat movement, which he believed aimed to safeguard an endangered Islam. For Gandhi, supporting this movement meant supporting universal religious truth. His support resulted equally from his vision of an Indian nation that could be strengthened only when Hindus and Muslims participated in a common struggle for truth and an everyday moral politics of friendship that entailed sharing each other's suffering (Devji Reference Devji2012, 44, 50–55, 68–84; Skaria Reference Skaria2003, 955–86). Gandhi spent the better half of 1920 negotiating with Muslim leaders and Congressmen over the precise program of “noncooperation” against the British (to protest the Khilafat and Punjab wrongs and demand swaraj). Lajpat Rai expressed doubts over the plan to boycott government-funded educational institutions. But these remained independent of his stance on the Khilafat. He publicly offered many reasons why Hindus must morally and practically support Muslims on the Khilafat question by joining their movement to withdraw cooperation from the government.
Hindu-Muslim Unity, Pan-Islamism, and the Indian Nation
Lajpat Rai emphasized the importance of “Hindu-Muslim unity” as the “foundation” of India's swaraj. Having once championed a politics aimed at strengthening the “Hindu nation,” he now argued that by hankering after “crumbs” for their respective “communities,” Hindus and Muslims facilitated collective oppression by the British and prevented the attainment of nationhood. To end this subjugation, narrow, rivalrous religious community-based politics needed to be transcended. United political action was required to “take the whole loaf together,” a metaphor for the collective struggle for self-government, the latter being beneficial for both Hindus and Muslims as constituents of the Indian nation (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003l, 28–29). Lajpat Rai urged both to unite by sacralizing two events of the previous year: Shraddhanand's speech at the Jama Masjid and the heroic “martyrdom” of Hindus and Muslims at Jallianwala Bagh (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003l, 25–28; [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003s, 3; [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003t, 25). Hindus and Muslims were exhorted to turn Jallianwala Bagh into a permanent memorial to the “martyrs” and make it a holy place of “political pilgrimage” to engender common contemplation and veneration of the Indian nation and remind them to end their quarrels and unite politically in its service.Footnote 1 Jallianwala Bagh, where the “mingled blood” of Hindus and Muslims had flowed, symbolized the common suffering and sacrifice of Hindus and Muslims under the British. The consciousness of shared experience of suffering under British colonialism would produce a common national sensibility in Hindus and Muslims.
Lajpat Rai's emphasis on Hindu-Muslim unity was not guided simply by an instrumentalist desire to win self-government. At the welcome meeting held in his honor as he landed in India in February 1920, he proclaimed,
My friends, I must tell you that henceforth we should recognise it as a fundamental doctrine that unity of Hindus and Mohammedans will be a great asset to our political future. In this unity we shall not be guided by temporary benefit of this community or that. We shall not adopt it as a measure of political expediency. But we shall adopt it as a fundamental doctrine of our faith to stick to it, to our deathbeds, until we win our freedom. Not till then only, but thereafter too, we shall live in this country as brothers determined to win. That is one of the fundamental doctrines that we must adopt as the first article of our political faith. (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003r, 152)
Hindu-Muslim unity was a normative end valued for its own sake, encouraged on moral grounds regardless of convenience, advantage, utility or profitability. Rather than a cold, contractual alliance between the two “communities,” it must be a felt unity infused with the consciousness of a single nation. By underlining that Hindu-Muslim unity was not only essential for swaraj but a normative ideal in itself, Lajpat Rai's thought came remarkably close to Gandhi's (Devji Reference Devji2012, 83–88). Having frequently argued, in previous years, that the path to building the Indian nation lay in first strengthening the separate unity of the Hindu and Muslim nations, Rai now for the first time firmly made Hindu-Muslim unity an essential prerequisite of forging the Indian nation.
Precisely because Hindu-Muslim unity was central to the autonomy and identity of the Indian nation, Lajpat Rai urged Hindus to support their “Mohammedan brethren” on the “Khilafat question” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003l, 29). Hindu support was crucial to convince their Muslim brothers of their sincere desire for friendship and to further “cement the Hindu-Muslim entente” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 131). The term “entente,” seemingly borrowed from the Triple Entente powers (Britain, France, and Russia), symbolized an agreement to end mutual conflict to fight a common opponent. Although immediately upon his arrival in India he had argued against grounding politics in religion, Lajpat Rai now unflinchingly accepted the Khilafat cause as an entirely legitimate religious and political issue for Muslims (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 128–30; [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003p, 202). While he nowhere clarified this ostensible intellectual tension, Rai clearly assented to a politics for the Khilafat because it no longer represented the standard religious community-based politics, which was isolationist, stayed aloof from Hindus, and rejected the idea of a common Indian nation. Instead, for him, it aimed to preserve the very foundation of Islam, was bringing Muslims closer to Hindus, and was strengthening the Indian nation. And so, as president of the September 1920 Calcutta Congress, Rai proclaimed that “the vast majority of Sunni Muslims” took the Turkish sultan to be their caliph, the successor of the Prophet, and that Islam required him to be “the head of a large, powerful and independent state” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 129–30). He agreed with the contention of pan-Islamic Muslim leaders that the Treaty of Sevres, signed a month earlier by a defeated Turkey, palpably “violated the fundamentals of Islam” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 129). The treaty rolled back the frontiers of the once-great Ottoman Empire, leaving the Turkish sultan-caliph in charge of a small territory, placing erstwhile Ottoman lands under British and French mandates, and removing the holy places of Islam, most notably Mecca and Medina, from the caliph's custody (Minault Reference Minault1982, 90; Robinson Reference Robinson2007, 311). According to Lajpat Rai, by drastically reducing the territorial power of the caliph, it prevented Muslims from fulfilling their religious obligations.
In believing that Islamic religious obligations required the existence of the caliphate, Rai echoed pan-Islamic Indian Muslim leaders. Azad, the movement's “chief theoretician” (Shaikh Reference Shaikh2012, 180n80), declared that the caliphate was instituted by God to secure obedience to Him, a religious obligation for all Muslims (Hardy Reference Hardy1972, 191). Mohamed Ali likewise announced in 1919 that Islam demanded “allegiance” to the caliph (Hasan Reference Hasan1983, 224; Reference Hasan and Hasan1992, 86). Lajpat Rai's view that Muslim religious obligations required the caliph to exercise temporal power over a sovereign state similarly echoed this Muslim leadership (Ashraf Reference Ashraf and Hasan1992, 110–11; Hasan Reference Hasan1983, 226–7, 237; Muhammad Reference Muhammad1980a, 129). The Khilafat deputation to the viceroy in January 1920 stated that “temporal power is the very essence of the institution of the Khilafat, and the Mussulmans can never agree to any change in its character or the dismemberment of its Empire” (Muhammad Reference Muhammad1980a, 132). As stated earlier, apart from religious-theological reasons, Indian Muslim sympathies for the Ottoman caliphate-empire were animated by its symbolic importance at a time when Islam's power had dramatically declined worldwide and in India (Devji Reference Devji2022; Minault Reference Minault1982, 5–8; Shaikh Reference Shaikh2012, 176–79), and equally by anti-imperialist dreams of a postwar world order in which the Muslim world and India possessed a status equal to the West. Yet, what is important is Lajpat Rai's acceptance of Indian Muslim iterations that their Islamic obligations required the existence of the Ottoman caliphate-empire. He, like Gandhi (Devji Reference Devji2012, 75–82) (and, it seems, several other Hindu leadersFootnote 2), was at ease with such Muslim religious beliefs. The Treaty of Sevres gave enormous fillip to the Khilafat movement, which now aimed to restore the much-reduced Ottoman caliphate-empire to its former status, and insisted that this was possible only with Indian self-government (Minault Reference Minault1982, 91). Lajpat Rai, as Congress president in 1920, justified this reenergized pan-Islamic, anti-imperial movement in support of a Muslim caliphate-empire.
Rai urged Hindus to support the Khilafat question as “trustees of the honour of Islam” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003t, 25). For him, Hindus must support the Khilafat issue even if they saw it as a cause confined to Muslims. Hindu-Muslim unity was not just about acting unitedly for shared causes, but also supporting each other's causes not immediately identified as one's own. Like Gandhi (Devji Reference Devji2012, 52), then, Lajpat Rai conceived Hindu-Muslim unity as going beyond having a single, unified mind to entail mutual empathy, obligation, and reciprocity. In articulating this idea of “trusteeship,” Lajpat Rai seemed to draw on imperial language recently institutionalised in postwar international society by the newly founded League of Nations system of mandates. Mandates were conceived as an alternative to empire, whereby conquered territories were not “annexed” but divided among the Allied powers, who would act as “trustees” of the native population (Bain Reference Bain2003, 17–21). This imperial concept of trusteeship possessed connotations of superior peoples obligated to rule over backward peoples for their welfare (Pedersen Reference Pedersen2015, 24). Gandhi occasionally used the concept for the imperial relationship between Britain and India, and to highlight unjust treatment by the British who claimed to be “trustees” of Indians (Gandhi [1919] Reference Gandhi1965b; [1920] Reference Gandhi1965c; [1920] Reference Gandhi1965d). Lajpat Rai stripped this concept of its paternalistic, inegalitarian connotations and used it to encourage reciprocal obligation between Hindus and Muslims as equal members of the Indian nation. Hindus were trustees of Islam as Muslims were of Hindu institutions. As its trustees, Hindus were obligated to assume responsibility for Islam, and support Muslim co-nationals in their religious cause.
Arguing against certain unnamed Hindus who had questioned the need to partake in what they considered a religious question of Muslims, Lajpat Rai stated, “The Khilafat with which the destiny of seven crore Muslims is linked becomes a national question for us. If we have to work side by side with them for the progress of our country and nation, it becomes our duty to respect their religious sentiments” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003p, 203). This being the case, the “unjust and immoral” attempt to encroach on the religion of “our Muslim countrymen” was to “trample upon Indian religious susceptibilities” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 131). Here, mutuality was translated as single-mindedness, such that offense to Muslims could be immediately identified by Hindus as offense to themselves. This argument echoed Gandhi, who asked Hindus to support the Khilafat movement because any question affecting Indian Muslims affected the whole nation of which they were a part, and because as members of one Indian nation, they had to share in the sufferings of their countrymen (Gandhi [1919] Reference Gandhi1965a, 318–20; [1919] Reference Gandhi1965h, 104).
Occasionally, Lajpat Rai asked Hindus to unite with Muslims in support of the Khilafat cause because, for him, it simply was an Indian cause. Before and during the war, the British had promised “his Majesty's most loyal Moslem subjects” that the “Holy Places will be immune from attack and molestation” and the caliphate honored (Aydin Reference Aydin2017, 116–17). But on its path to victory, Britain broke its pledge (121–22). While Gandhi saw these as un-Christian violations of promises to “Moslem India,” in blatant disregard of its religious sentiments (Gandhi [1920] Reference Gandhi1965e; [1920] Reference Gandhi1965f; [1920] Reference Gandhi1965g), Lajpat Rai interpreted them as breaking a promise made to India by which Britain had obtained Indian help in the war against Turkey (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 131). Gandhi asked Hindus to support their Muslim fellow Indians on the religious question of the Khilafat, and even do so as part of their dharma (religious/moral duty). For Rai, the broken pledge represented a humiliating violation of a promise made to Hindu and Muslim members of the Indian nation. A collective protest to demand the fulfilment of the British promise regarding the caliphate and the Ottoman Empire represented a united assertion of the dignity of the Indian nation.
For Lajpat Rai, support for the Khilafat would aid the cause of the Indian nation from another direction. This is evident from his response to arguments advanced by some Hindus that they should keep away from the Khilafat cause as the pan-Islamic sympathies of Indian Muslims made them conceited, inflated their sense of “political importance” in negotiations with the government, and made them aloof from India and hostile to Hindus (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003p, 204–5). Unlike Gandhi, who remained silent on these Hindu anxieties, Rai addressed them, perhaps because he was himself previously offended by the distance Muslim leaders had maintained from the Congress and Hindus. He emphatically maintained that instead of making them aloof, the “religious zeal” Muslims felt toward the Khilafat caused them to renounce the policy of aloofness charted by Syed Ahmed Khan and his Aligarh College in the 1880s and assume their “rightful place” in Indian national politics. Of course, the realignment of Indian Muslim politics resulted not solely from their pan-Islamic religious fervor, but from a combination of factors: the rise of a new generation of Muslim leaders, some of whom already conceived of nationhood in nonreligious territorial terms; British policies within India, which caused resentment; and the mutual compromise over political representation between the Congress and new leaders of the Muslim League in the 1916 Lucknow Pact. Nevertheless, what is noteworthy is Lajpat Rai's view of Muslim religious fervor—and for a cause extending beyond the borders of British India—as contributing to rather than detracting from Indian nationalism. Considering this development as “beneficial to the Hindus,” he urged Hindus to encourage the process by which Indian Muslims increasingly saw themselves as constituting the Indian nation together with Hindus.
In another interesting argument why pan-Islamism was beneficial for the Indian nation, Lajpat Rai seized on what he considered the irrational British fear of pan-Islamism as a force that would drive Indian Muslims to conspire with Muslim powers abroad to facilitate their invasion of India. As Cemil Aydin (Reference Aydin2017) has argued, from the late nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire weakened more than ever before in the new Europe-dominated imperial world order, and two-thirds of the world's Muslims came under European rule, Muslim intellectuals across the globe responded to European racist-imperialist discourses about Muslim and Islamic inferiority by articulating pan-Islamic ideas. These discourses expressed concern about the fate of the “Muslim world”; ideas about the history, civilization, and achievements of the Muslim peoples; the essential civility and unity of Muslims; and the Ottoman caliph as the spiritual leader of all Muslims. Pan-Islamist (and Christian evangelical) articulations of a continuous Muslim world—united by Islam and the Islamic civilization—spread between China and Europe increasingly made European colonial officers nervous, even paranoid, about Muslim revolts against Western hegemony (Aydin Reference Aydin2017, 66–79, 98). British anxieties heightened as the content of pan-Islamists abroad (like the itinerant Persian propagandist-activist Jamal-ud-din al-Afghani), and now even in India, with the world's biggest Muslim population, turned increasingly anti-British (Aydin Reference Aydin2017, 62). As Rai saw it, British fears regarding the pan-Islamism of Indian Muslims checked their “oppressive tendencies,” compelling them to treat Indians justly (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003p, 204). The common benefits that pan-Islamism delivered to Hindu and Muslim members of the Indian nation required Hindus to support it. Rather than stoking Hindu fears of pan-Islamism, Lajpat Rai persuaded Hindus to unite with Muslims to support it wholeheartedly. Like Gandhi, he viewed Muslim countries abroad not as a threat but as an advantage for the Indian nation.
Pan-Islamism, the World Order, and India
In supporting a movement aimed at preserving the Ottoman Empire, Lajpat Rai appeared to compromise his anti-imperialism. He attempted to wriggle out of this by arguing, “I do desire the destruction of imperialism but I do not desire the destruction of some empires for the benefit of others” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 133). Speaking at the Calcutta Congress after the Treaty of Sevres was signed, he argued that the dissolution of the Turkish Empire, now “hardly in a better position than the Nizam of Hyderabad,” had led not to the freedom of Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia (Iraq) but their absorption by the French and British Empires. “Arabia and Kurdistan and Armenia” were reduced to “vassal states.” “Muslim independence” was “entirely gone,” swallowed by European imperialism. It was hardly “in the interest of humanity” that some empires be dissolved for the “enlargement and glorification of others” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 133). Therefore, he supported the restoration of the dismembered Ottoman Empire as a counterweight to European imperialism.
Lajpat Rai further qualified his support for the Ottoman Empire. After urging Hindus to not uncritically accept what he called the exaggerated, hypocritical anti-Turkish propaganda of European nations motivated by their own imperialist designs, he reiterated his principled opposition to the rapacity of big states. Rai's support for the Ottoman Empire was tempered by its conceptualization as a sort of loosely decentralized, federal caliphate composed of self-governing countries. Expressing support for the self-government of “Arabia, Iraq, Anatolia and such other countries,” he argued that their independence could be safeguarded from “enemy powers” only if they were under the paramount control of one caliph (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003p, 203). The caliphate's paramountcy was crucial to protect these countries from European imperial expansion. Underplaying the imperial logic of the Ottoman Empire itself, Rai saw his support for the Khilafat as animated by anti-imperial solidarity: “Being slaves ourselves, is it not our duty to sympathise with those who are putting up a grim fight to see that their freedom does not slip out of their hands?” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003p, 203–4). Lajpat Rai proclaimed that “any further extension of the British Empire in Asia is . . . fatal to the liberties of the human race” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 130). By maintaining a balance of power in the international order and protecting Muslim countries, the federal Ottoman caliphate would safeguard the rest of humanity from European imperialism.
For Lajpat Rai, the war radically denaturalized ideas of a culturally and morally superior Europe possessing a right to rule over the rest of the world. This enabled him to more assertively attack the entire Eurocentric imperial world order as illegitimate and unjust. A new consciousness of shared suffering of colonial subjugation with other Asian (and African) countries, signaled by the increased prominence in his vocabulary of the categories of “the East” and “Asia,” had also led him to conceive the fight against British imperialism in international terms. During the war, he envisioned India joining a Japan-led pan-Asianist struggle against the Eurocentric imperial world order to inaugurate an egalitarian world order consisting of self-governing nations. But after the war, as it became clear that the victorious powers sought to maintain a world order of imperial hierarchies, Rai turned to the pan-Islamism espoused by many Indian Muslims to continue his struggle for an egalitarian world order. As indicated by his increased use of phrases and terms like “the Muslim countries of Western Asia,” “Muslim Asia,” and “Central Asia,” he viewed these Muslim countries as sharing with India, China, and Japan an “Asian” identity defined against Christian Europe (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 130; Reference Lajpat Rai2003q, 295–96). To preserve the Ottoman Empire (reimagined as a federation of self-governing Muslim Asian countries) was to bolster a fortress protecting Asian independence from European imperialism. Hindu support for the caliphate was critical for India to play its role in this Asian anti-imperialist movement for an egalitarian, just world order. Clearly, Lajpat Rai's reasons why Hindus should support the Khilafat movement went beyond strengthening Indian national identity and unity to include a greater anti-imperialist internationalist agenda.
Of course, this internationalist argument for pan-Islamism was also a nationalist argument for India's autonomy. A restored Ottoman Empire would check British imperialist expansion in Asia, which Lajpat Rai believed was “detrimental to the interests of India” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 130). He noted with foreboding what followed the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire: the establishment of “British suzerainty in Arabia,” the “British occupation of Mesopotamia,” involving the “practical absorption of Persia (Iran) and Central Asia . . . into the British empire” (130). He also feared the future annexation of Afghanistan. The destruction of the Ottoman Empire facilitated British expansion into Muslim West Asia, not only harming the interests of the “Muslim world” (133) but further enabling India's subjugation:
If the British imperialist has no scruples using Indian troops in Egypt, Persia, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Central Asia, why will he have any in using troops he raises in these countries against us? . . . If the Muslim population in these countries continues to resist British attempts at occupation which they are likely to do for years, the Indian army will be in constant requisition to fight their battles in these regions, which means a constant and never-ending drain on our resources, both human and economic . . . The best interests of India therefore require that the Muslim countries of Western Asia should remain free and independent. Their amalgamation into the British Empire even under the pretence of mandatory jurisdiction is likely to be extremely harmful to us. (130–31)
In the loss of freedom of Muslim Asia, Lajpat Rai saw the loss of India's freedom (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003p, 204). The Muslim world was a citadel protecting the Indian nation, and pan-Islamism was beneficial for it. In conceiving Muslim countries as a defensive barrier for India, he again shared ground with Gandhi, who claimed that Indian support for Khilafat and the “great friendship” it had generated “between India and the Mussulman states” had “removed for all time the fear of Mussulman aggression from outside” and “erected around India a solid wall of defence . . . against all greed from Europe, Russia or elsewhere” (Devji Reference Devji2012, 80). Interestingly, Rai's erstwhile “extremist” associate Bipin Chandra Pal, known for having linked Hinduism with nationalism, also saw the Ottoman Empire as a check against European military and cultural imperialism (The Leader [hereafter TL], April 11, 1920).
Like Rai's, Gandhi's and Pal's support for the Khilafat was guided by the aim of protecting India. Gandhi and Pal also saw the Khilafat issue in religious and internationalist terms. Gandhi conceived Hindu support for the Khilafat in terms of Hinduism fighting to defend Islam and “emancipate Christianity” from its lust for power (Devji Reference Devji2012, 82). By saving both Islam and Christianity, Hindus would help establish the unity and truth of all religions, and thus help create a better world. Pal similarly supported the Khilafat as he held that “the destruction of a single religious faith was a challenge to his own religious faith and humanity at large” (TL, April 11, 1920). At least on one occasion, Lajpat Rai, too, portrayed this anticolonial international struggle in religious terms:
So long as Christianity in its crusading zeal keeps spreading its tentacles from one country to another, I do not believe that restraining other religions from doing so will do any good to the world. Christianity's present-day pursuits, methods and attitudes are against the teachings of Christ. If people religiously followed Christ's teachings, peace would be restored to the world. But today's Christianity is brimming with the idea of imperialism and world domination. Under these circumstances, it is wrong to think that Muslim religious frenzy is fraught with danger to the world. (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003p, 206)
A world in which Islam, whose power was embodied in the Ottoman Empire, served as a counterweight to imperialist Christianity was better than one with unmitigated domination by Christianity. Yet, unlike Gandhi and Pal, Lajpat Rai only temporarily couched in religious terms his largely secular anti-imperial internationalist and nationalist agenda. His support for the Khilafat was never animated by the aim of emancipating any religion or uniting the world's religions.
Indian Nationalism in Service of Islam
While to Hindus, Lajpat Rai emphasized the pan-Islamic Khilafat cause as a means to serve the Indian nation, in addressing Muslims, he argued that serving the cause of Indian freedom equalled serving Islam. He proclaimed that Muslim loyalism to the British government had “dishonoured their spiritual head and desecrated their holy places” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003n, 243). This loyalist “apostacy from Islam” had caused “the wreck of the Khilafat.” In their loyalism, some Muslims had failed to realize that the British used India to extend their empire and deprive Muslim countries of their political power. Therefore, “the political freedom and power” of Islam outside India was in danger so long as India was unfree (Lajpat Rai [1921] Reference Lajpat Rai2003u, 273–74). Lajpat Rai insisted that Indian Muslims would have rendered a “better service to Islam beyond India” had they joined the more assertive, anti-British Congress “from the very beginning in full force and greater numbers.” Indian nationalism was conceived as beneficial to “Islam,” by which Rai meant both the religion and an imagined geopolitical space comprising the world's Muslim countries—what he called at least once, elsewhere, the “Muslim world” (see the section “Pan-Islamism, the World Order, and India”). As the Punjab-based Tribune reported, Rai exhorted Muslim students of the newly founded Jamia Millia Islamia to join the cause of Indian freedom:
Lajpat Rai . . . referred to the [loyalist] policy of old Aligarh and termed it the negation of the very basis of Indian freedom. He expressed his great joy and approval at the assault made by the students of the Muslim National University on the policy of the old college, which he called the citadel of reaction and fashionable superstition . . . He urged them to prepare themselves for emancipating India. He emphasised the necessity of closer Hindu-Muslim unity and said that the cause of Muslim Asia was the cause of India as well, for the interest of Islam and India are interdependent. (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003q, 297–98)
Lajpat Rai's attribution of the European imperialist decision to partition the Ottoman Empire to Indian Muslim loyalism was not factually grounded. Rai may have overlooked that Aligarh loyalism had reflected partly aristocratic disdain for the conception of popular self-rule implicit in the modern concept of the nation, and partly, fears of Muslim minoritization that might result from accepting “Indian national self-government.” He may have ignored that loyalism had also accompanied the positions of several “moderate” Congressmen, Arya Samajists, and, most recently, the All-India Hindu Sabha (Bhatt Reference Bhatt2001, 60; Nair Reference Nair2011, 13–46). Even so, Lajpat Rai's repeated portrayal of Indian nationalism as being in the interest of Islam, and vice versa, is remarkable. Rai claimed that Britain had captured all routes to India earlier under Muslim possession and subjugated “Islam” to keep India in its clutches. The freedom of Muslim countries was therefore in India's interest. But conversely, Islam's freedom required Indian self-government:
The political freedom of Islamic countries like Afghanistan, Persia, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Turkey, Egypt etc., depends on a joint democratic rule in India of the Hindu, Muhammadan and other communities . . . The present condition of Asia is such that it is necessary for India to gain liberty for the sake of the freedom of Central and Western Asia. (Lajpat Rai [1921] Reference Lajpat Rai2003u, 274–75)
Arguing that “joint democratic rule” of Hindu and Muslim Indians was necessary to end British imperialist subjugation of “Muslim” Asia, Lajpat Rai portrayed free India as its guardian. Not only was the Muslim world a defensive barrier for India but, in a post-Ottoman world, only a self-governing Indian nation could protect the Muslim world. Muslims were therefore entreated to unite with Hindus against British imperialism for the cause of self-government.
In addressing Muslims during the Khilafat movement, Lajpat Rai's language was akin to that of Muslim leaders like Mohamed Ali and Azad. For Ali, the only way to “save Islam from danger” was to “side with Hindus and first secure the freedom of your own country” (Hasan Reference Hasan and Hasan1992, 84–85). Similarly, Azad viewed the British as part of a European Christendom waging a crusade against Islam in parts of Afro-Asia, and British colonial injustices in India as violating the ethical principles of Islam. He exhorted Muslims to join Hindus in the anticolonial struggle against unjust British rule in India, conceiving it as an ethically grounded jihad in defense of Islam (Jalal Reference Jalal2007; Rodrigues Reference Rodrigues, Roy and Becker2020, 124–25).Footnote 3 Discouraging the term “jihad” itself (TL, May 20, 1920), Rai's view of Indian nationalism as a service to Islam aligned with that of prominent Khilafat leaders. In using differentiated languages while addressing Muslims and Hindus, using a primarily (though not exclusively) religious language for the former and a primarily nationalist one for the latter, Rai was broadly similar to Azad who once asked Muslims to “remember that the struggle for freedom is a patriotic duty for the Hindus. For us Muslims, it is a duty enjoined by our religion” (Ashraf Reference Ashraf and Hasan1992, 118). Like Rai, Azad disapproved of his coreligionists’ loyalism towards the British and aloofness from the Congress, and asked them to perform their religious duty by joining Hindus in the national struggle for self-government (Douglas Reference Douglas1972, 471–73; Jalal Reference Jalal2007, 106).
The Muslim World as Unthreatening
Cemil Aydin (Reference Aydin2017, chaps. 1, 3, 4) argues that the idea of a “Muslim world” is a modern nineteenth-century notion, articulated by colonized Muslims to counter European imperial discourses about their racial and civilizational inferiority. For him, this new idea, developed to elevate the esteem of colonized Muslims, emulated colonialist essentialism and articulated an illusory geopolitical unity defined by a common religion and civilization, in a manner that often cleaved Muslims from non-Muslims. While the term “Muslim world” appears only once in Lajpat Rai's thought during these years, he frequently enough referred to the Muslim countries as a geopolitical conglomeration loosely united by Islam. Still, his reference to political divisions among Muslim countries as “unfortunate” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003p, 201) lamented the absence of a unified Muslim world rather than uncritically assumed a false global Muslim geopolitical unity. Rai participated in the modern discourse around a “Muslim world” but without expressing the notion in its strong sense, wherein this world was imagined as strongly united by Islam, possessing no divisions, and dividing Muslims from non-Muslims. Rai saw Indian Muslims as identifying with the Muslim world outside India. However, as mentioned, during his years in the United States, he had fashioned a culturally pluralist and historically more inclusive “Indian” national identity which Hindus and Muslims could share. Neither then, nor during the postwar Khilafat movement, did Rai view Indian Muslim affiliation to a wider Muslim world as precluding their belonging to the Indian nation.
Lajpat Rai's vision of India and the Muslim world as each other's guardians endowed him with equanimity about the existence of Islam and a Muslim world beyond India, completely devoid of the paranoia it was currently arousing in some Hindus. This paranoia is best exemplified by Savarkar's Hindutva, published later but already conceptualized by this period (Savarkar [1923] Reference Savarkar1969, v–vi). It saw Indian Muslim devotion to holy sites abroad and their pan-Islamic sympathies with the Muslim world as overriding their loyalty towards India and a threat to Hindus:
Mecca to them is a sterner reality than Delhi or Agra. Some of them do not make a secret of being bound to sacrifice all India if that be to the glory of Islam or could save the city of their prophet . . . O Hindus, consolidate and strengthen Hindu nationality; not to give wanton offence to any of our non-Hindu compatriots in fact to anyone in the world but in just and urgent defence of our race and land; to render it impossible for others to betray her or to subject her to unprovoked attack by any of those ‘Pan-isms’ that are struggling forth from continent to continent. (Savarkar [1923] Reference Savarkar1969, 135, 140)
Lajpat Rai's composure about Indian Muslim pan-Islamism is also evident in his response to the Afghan invasion controversy. In April 1921, eager to emphasize his devotion to India's freedom, Mohamed Ali announced that if any power invaded India to subjugate it, Muslims had a duty to lead the resistance. But, he said, if the same power—for instance, Afghanistan—invaded India to help overthrow the British, Muslims must assist it (Minault Reference Minault1982, 131). Even Hindu Ghadar revolutionaries had previously sought Afghan (alongside Ottoman and German) help to liberate India (Ramnath Reference Ramnath2011, 166–93; Zaman Reference Zaman2016, 631). The likelihood of the much weaker Afghanistan, itself a semicolony until 1919, seriously threatening the prized colony of the world's most militarily powerful empire was slim. But Ali's statement provoked tremendous anxiety among some Hindus about Indian Muslims aiding an Afghan invasion to reimpose “Muslim rule” in India. One lead article in the Allahabad-based Leader charged “Muslim non-cooperators” with “virtually soliciting” an Afghan invasion, warning of its consequences for India and its Hindu population (TL, April 19, 1921). Several articles censured the Ali brothers for their “zealous” friendship with Afghanistan and dealing with “foreign states” to redress grievances instead of confining themselves to India, and questioned the sincerity of their ‘nationalism’ (TL, May 12 and 16, 1921). One pronounced that Saifuddin Kitchlew, another Khilafat leader, could not give allegiance to any government in India that was not entirely Muslim and that to him, swaraj meant an India controlled by the caliph (TL, May 18, 1921). Ali's statement also caused deep consternation among prominent Hindu leaders. Malaviya clarified that he would oppose any invasion by assisting the British (TL, May 16, 1921). Shraddhanand published a story about an alleged Afghan emissary meeting the Ali brothers and securing their assurance of Hindu and Muslim support for India's invasion, clarifying that he would oppose such a jihad (TL, May 8, 9, and 11, 1921; for Ali's denial, see TL, May 9, 1921). Shraddhanand concluded that “Muslims only want to make India and Hindus a mere means of strengthening their own cause. For them, Islam comes first and Mother India second.” He contemplated whether Hindus should not work for “their own sangathan [consolidation]” (Jordens Reference Jordens1981, 126). B. C. Pal now feared that an Afghan invasion could incite “our Muslim population” to revolt and establish “Moslem Raj at Delhi.” Indeed, the controversy changed Pal's stance toward pan-Islamism, which he now saw as a “great menace to Indian nationalism” (TL, May 23, 1921).
Intervening in this controversy in mid-May, Lajpat Rai first clarified that Hindus could not trust any foreign power “whether Islamic or otherwise,” nor did he want any foreign nation “even if it be a Muslim one” to rule India (Lajpat Rai [1921] Reference Lajpat Rai2003u, 275). Yet, he dismissed allegations that the Ali brothers had “invited” Afghanistan's amir to invade India, insisting that Mohamed Ali had merely announced that “if the Amir declared jehad [on British India] he will not help the Government of India,” a position Rai considered “natural” for an emotional “Muslim nationalist” committed to noncooperation. Interestingly, he even expressed admiration for those “Muslim nationalists” who declared it their duty to help “the Muslim crusaders.” But, clearly attuned to the disproportionate power imbalance between Britain and Afghanistan, he declared this outside the scope of “practical politics.” As much as pragmatism, however, Rai's nonchalance is explained by his statement that he “did not in the least suspect Mohammadan nationalists who declare that they do not desire that the Amir of Kabul establish his rule in India” (275). A year earlier, he had similarly dismissed Hindu fears about the alleged Muslim desire for “Muslim sovereignty in India”: “How long are we going to be afraid of shadows and be deceived by imaginary fears set before us as a justification of despotic rule?” (Lajpat Rai [1920] Reference Lajpat Rai2003m, 132). For Lajpat Rai, the “imaginary matter” of the Afghan invasion was repeatedly raised by the British to weaken the strong, growing unity between Hindus and Muslims and divert attention from noncooperation. He advised Hindus to establish “complete friendship” with Indian Muslims and repose “complete confidence” in them; removing “such doubts, misgivings and prejudice as had taken possession of their minds” was essential to overthrow British rule. Hindus were to declare that they were “in every way and under all circumstances prepared to cooperate with the Muhammadans till the Muhammadans liberate the Caliphate from the control of non-Muhammadans” (Lajpat Rai [1921] Reference Lajpat Rai2003u, 275–76). Thus, even as other Hindu leaders began to feel threatened by pan-Islamism, Lajpat Rai refused to see a fifth columnist conspiracy to establish Muslim domination in India, and he urged Hindus to follow him in his faith in the pan-Islamism and nationalism of Indian Muslims. For him, the freedom of India and the Muslim world required “complete and permanent” trust between Hindus and Muslims, which
cannot be complete and permanent so long as the Hindus do not assure the Muhammadans that the freedom of India is not synonymous with Hindu rule and so long as the Muhammadans do not assure the Hindus by their conduct that their attempt to secure liberty for India does not mean that an Islamic power, external or internal, should establish its rule in India. (Lajpat Rai [1921] Reference Lajpat Rai2003u, 274)
Rather than exclusively focussing on Hindu fears, Lajpat Rai also attempted to allay Muslim fears regarding the possible equation of freedom with “Hindu rule,” a response perhaps to anxieties reignited among some Muslim leaders, whether or not illegitimately, by Gandhi's use, in a recent speech, of the word dharmaraj to denote self-government (Minault Reference Minault1982, 132). Instead of fearing pan-Islamism and the establishment of Muslim rule in India, Rai seemed more concerned about fears of Muslim domination among Hindus, on one hand, and Hindu domination among Muslims, on the other. Both would erode the trust so crucial for Hindu-Muslim unity and consequently Indian freedom.
Conclusion
Pigeonholing Lajpat Rai's complex and fluid thought as “Hindu nationalism” and Hindutva has obscured that by the time of the Khilafat movement, Rai was articulating a secular Indian nationalism. During the movement, Rai supported a Muslim politics geared toward safeguarding Islam, as long as this united rather than divided Indians and served swaraj rather than empire. Rai's secular Indian nationalism emphasized a relationship of trust, mutuality, and reciprocal obligations between Hindus and Muslims. To strengthen the secular Indian nation, Hindus were implored to respect Muslim religious sentiments and support their endeavor to safeguard Islam, including in its extraterritorial embodiments. Rai's nationalism was comfortable with Muslim sympathies with extraterritorial Islamic symbols, institutions, and holy places, as well as the wider “Muslim world.” The latter was conceptualized as an internally differentiated, even fragmented geopolitical conglomerate, loosely rather than strongly united by Islam, and as India's ally against European domination rather than a threat. Indian Muslim religio-political sympathies with the Muslim world were easily seen as coexisting with their commitment to Indian nationalism. Hindus were encouraged to realize their “imaginary” fears regarding pan-Islamism and view it as beneficial for India's fight against the really more threatening Europe.
Despite Rai's retraction of crucial elements of his Khilafat-era position by 1924, its specific textures possess integrity and significance. Part of a broader, lasting shift away from his pre-1915 isolationist Hindu nationalism, they constituted a substantial continuity from the Indian nationalism Rai articulated between 1915–20 and left a permanent mark on his thought in his Mahasabha years. Even as Mahasabha leader, he articulated a secular Indian nationalism and grappled with the question of how to simultaneously be a Hindu, an Indian nationalist, and secular. But as important are the implications of Rai's Khilafat-era narrative for the broader intellectual history of nationalisms in India. Rai's shift to this position enjoins us to keep an eye out for significant fluidity and complexity within Hindu thinking on nationhood, and for other Hindus who may have articulated similar ideas about Islam, pan-Islamism, and Indian nationhood. It reminds us that while some partisan appropriations may be neat and legitimate, for many figures—like Lajpat Rai—they are impossible without violating the integrity of their complex, dynamic thought. Rai's Khilafat-era stance reveals a particular kind of argumentation and reasoning, once advanced with integrity, by a prominent Hindu political figure who is today considered an icon of Hindu nationalism. While a new violent and polarized context saw him retract crucial elements of his Khilafat-era narrative, his ideas, despite his personal trajectory, still contributed to the broader emergent discourse around a trust-based secular Indian nationalism. Moreover, we may disagree with Rai's retrospective judgment about his Khilafat-era stance, choose to see its value, and build upon it. In the contemporary moment of the steep rise in Hindu nationalist discourses that view public and political expressions of Islam or Muslim-ness and the mere existence of Muslim countries as necessarily diminishing the nationalism of India's Muslims, Rai's Khilafat-era nationalism reminds us of the alternative possibility of firmly holding a Hindu identity and articulating a trust-based Indian nationalism at ease with Islam and the Muslim world.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply thankful to Faisal Devji for encouraging these ideas during my doctoral research, Margrit Pernau for comments on an earlier draft of this article that helped sharpen it, and Sudipta Kaviraj for encouraging my interpretation of Lajpat Rai's fluid and dynamic thought and always deepening my understanding of my own scholarship. I am also grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers at The Journal of Asian Studies for showing how the peer-review process can be constructive and appreciative of different approaches to history.
Author Bio
Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an affiliated Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany.
