Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India

This book is a "must read" for students of Partition. It explodes many myths, including the one, floated in 1985 by Ayesha Jalal, which claimed that Jinnah's demand for Pakistan was, in reality, a bargaining chip for a better deal for the Muslims in a united India. This claim has been comprehensively demolished by Dhulipala, who provides a more authentic narrative for the partition of India; he cites many reasons to suggest that Partition was inevitable. Dhulipala's book should be read along with the book "The Untold Story of Partition" by Narendra Singh Sarila, to get a balanced view of Partition. His book spares no one, including many stalwarts of the independence movement, and sheds new light on the role of Dr B.R.Ambedkar, who was more prescient than Gandhi and Nehru about the Partition. Ambedkar, too, thought that Partition was inevitable, and was in the best interests of the Hindus and Muslims. He elaborated on this idea in his book "Thoughts on Pakistan," published a few months after the 1940 Lahore Resolution of the Muslim League, which demanded a separate state for the Muslims of undivided India. If only Gandhi and Nehru had listened to him, perhaps a great deal of bloodshed could have been avoided. This is an outstanding book by any standards. It should win many awards.

Arguably the most comprehensive book with mind boggling details on partition of India. The general perception created and perpetuated by mainstream Indian academia was that it was only Muslim League's demand to partition India and masses of Indian Muslims had nothing to do with it. Even though masses of India know that it was a false narrative the academia was keeping this perception in order to make Partition look very normal thing. In reality tye mainstream Indian Ulamas (Muslim clergy) were as much responsible for partition as Muslim league. Muslim league was head of the evil while Ulamas who provided manpower to execute the partition by street power was the body.

In this meticulously written book on the 1947 partition of India, historian Dhulipala demolishes the widely held consensus in partition historiography that Pakistan was an ill-defined and vague idea that somehow swayed the Muslim masses; Jinnah never propagated partition as a final destination, but only as a leverage to bargain for a better future for Indian Muslims. Dhulipala, with copious details, convincingly argues that Pakistan was an idea that was fiercely debated by its opponents and proponents in public sphere. It was envisaged by the Muslim League with active support of a faction of influential Deobandi Ulama not just as a sanctuary for the subcontinental Muslims, but as an “Islamic utopia that would be the harbinger for renewal and rise of Islam in the modern world, act as the powerful new leader and protector of the entire Islamic world and, thus, emerge as a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate as the foremost Islamic power in the twentieth century.”

Venkat Dhulipala worked on the manuscript of this book for more than a decade. His labor shows as the book emphasizes on the population figures of 1940s and exchange of population models for Ottoman and European models. He concentrates on Uttar Pradesh of the forties.One opinion on partition says that Hindus and Muslims constituted two distinct and often opposing ways of life, hence they can’t coexist in one nation. Most interpretations of two-nation theory, are based on whether nationalities could have coexisted in one territory or not. Every opinion is radically different.The author has been able to break the established myths. He describes how religion is not the determining factor in defining the nationality of Indian Muslims. This was undertaken by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who termed it as the awakening of Muslims for the creation of Pakistan.For Jinnah, Muslims in the ‘majority provinces’ were a nation with concomitant rights to self-determination and statehood since they constituted a numerical majority in a contiguous piece of territory. This works even today, where pockets of Muslim population are becoming a no-go zone not just in India, but everywhere that they exist.Pakistan, according to the author was imagined by Deobandi Ulema and students of Aligarh Muslim University. Soon after Pakistan’s creation, Jinna’s death left radial elements formed as a nation but with no idea of what being a nation meant. A chapter has been dedicated to Ambedkar’s opinion on the Pakistan question.The role of Aligarh Muslim University students and Deobandi Ulema in the formation of Pakistan is also discussed. Author has not only analyzed the viability of a separate country for Muslims of India but also dismissed sentimental objections Hindus and the Congress had regarding Partition.This book will surely go a long way in establishing Venkat as the historian of evidence writing.

Gives you a lucid understanding of the undercurrents pre independence!!

1) Choses facts over emotion and political correctness.2) Balanced , in depth and persuasive arguments.3) Its foolish to imagine creation of Pakistan in isolation with Islam and as stated this book brings Islam back into the discourse about Pakistan.

It's a top notch PhD scholarship by an Indian ...