Ayesha Jalal is a Pakistani-American historian of Muhajir background.

She is the Mary

Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow. The bulk of
her work deals with the creation of Muslim identities in modern South Asia.
Ayesha Jalal was born in Lahore in Pakistan to Hamid Jalal, a senior Pakistani civil servant, and
is the grandniece of the renowned Urdu fiction writer Saadat Hasan Manto. She came to New
York at the age of 14 when her father was posted at the Pakistan Mission to the United Nations.
She obtained her BA, majoring in History and Political Science, from Wellesley College, USA,
and her doctorate in history from Trinity College at University of Cambridge, where she wrote
her Ph.D. dissertation: 'Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan'.
She is married to Sugata Bose, a Bengali scholar from India and the grandnephew of Netaji
Subhas Chandra Bose and grandson of nationalist leader Sarat Chandra Bose. He is also her
research partner. Together, they have written a book called Modern South Asia which is the first
South Asian history book that has been written in joint collaboration between a Pakistani and an
Indian.


Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal provide an excellent study of South Asian history in Modern South Asia:
History, Culture, and Political Economy. The book, now in its third edition, is a concise overview of
modern South Asian history, focusing on changes in society, economics, and politics from 1700 to the
present in India, Pakistan, and Bagladesh. For Bose and Jalal, the goal of the work is to implement the
newest research on and historiographical (the ways the history has been or is written- the history of
historical writings) interpretations of the formation of religious, regional, and national histories in South
Asia. The themes of regional and religious identities coupled with the intricate relationship between
religion and politics are discussed throughout the book, and reveal how the shifting parameters of South
Asian historiography coincided with the changes of decolonization. The major focus of the work
addresses colonialism and the post-colonial period, positing colonialism as an agent of historical change
placed in a social context and studied in its interaction with culture and the politics of resistance.

The book is organized chronologically into twenty chapters, ranging from a brief discussion of the pre-
modern period to events of the twenty-first century. Beginning with an introduction to South Asian
history, the authors immediately explain one of the key theoretical frameworks of the book. Bose and
Jalal rely heavily upon the ideas of Edward Saids Orientalist theory, showing how much of the
historiography surrounding South Asia is muddled by less than accurate information. For the authors, the
inability of the West to understand the East is a key element in the derivation of contradictory images of
the Indian subcontinent, many of which this book attempts to dispel. The dual dialectics of centralism-
regionalism and of nationalism-communitarianism are very important here as well. Shifting definitions
and relations between the center, region, nation, and community are integral to the diversity of South
Asia, and the relationship of constituent parts to the whole in the subcontinent is the subject of an ongoing
historical discourse (6-7).

Following the introduction, the book explores the socio-cultural foundations of ancient India as rooted in
religious practices and major political changes. While it is emphasized that historians, orientalists, and
traditionalists alike have attempted to provide many versions of Indias past, there is much new research
available to suggest that the country was highly diverse and was willing to accommodate a plethora of
cultures. According to the authors, Indian society, economy and politics from ancient times until the
twelfth century had dynamism, which is not in accordance with the stereotypical image of Indias
changeless tradition. (16) Politically, phases of imperial consolidation were followed by decentralization,
while economically and socially there was mobility, commercial exchange, and the caste system. Indias
ability to adapt to change and absorb a plethora of internal and external groups made it one of the most
unique countries in the world.

Role of I slam(misconception of west)
The authors attempt to summarize hundreds of years of pre-modern history from the seventh century to
the sixteenth century succeeds less as a cohesive narrative and more as a poignant argument regarding the
overall complex role of Islam in India during this period. Despite the ignorant Western view of Islam as
an intolerant and militant religion, Muslim rule often allowed for tolerance and assimilation, as evidenced
in South Asia (18). Regional specificities of economy and culture as well as the variety in Muslims
debunk the myth of a monolithic (Gigantic) Islamic community in India and question any singular model
of Muslim conversions (19). For example, the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate from 12061526 led
to four dynasties: the Mamluks, Khaljis, Tughlaqs, and Lodis. The Delhi sultans upheld the supremacy of
sharia in their state structure, but did not impose it on non-Muslim subjects (23).

(Mughal were not despot, peasantry was accommodated, which proglonged their rule)
The Mughal Empire receives a number of reinterpretations by the authors. Bose and Jalal argue that the
two recurring themes in premodern history are the infusion of new people and ideas and temporary cycles
of imperial consolidation and decentralization. Invasion, such as the establishment of the Mughal dynasty,
was not a sharp disjuncture (difference) but rather a fresh process of accommodation, assimilation, and
cultural fusion (28). The authors suggest that the Western interpretation of the Mughal Empire as a
despotic authoritarian state is false; instead, the Mughals ruled in a complex and loose form of hegemony
over a diverse, differentiated, and dynamic economy and society. In addition to debunking these views,
the authors also cite new research to show that the Mughals were not oppressive towards the peasantry.
Rather, the Mughals entered into accommodations with their subjects. Furthermore, even during the age
of European expansion, Mughal sovereignty was not undermined until the British tried the last of the
emperors, Bahadur Shah Zafar, after the 1857 rebellion.

(british view as anarchist, not explaining the reason for colonialism)
Westerners viewed the eighteenth century decline of the Mughals as a period of anarchy until the period
of British hegemony. India was rife with revolts based on regional aspects during the eighteenth century,
and this, coupled with tribal incursions and outside threats, led to the erosion of the Mughal state.
Following the British victory at Plassey in 1757 and the 1764 victory at Buxar, the British began imperial
control over parts of India. The British conquest began in the 1750s, and the final conquest occurred by
the 1850s. Bose and Jalal note that the interpretation of the transition to colonialism in India must address
the impetus for European expansion, the reasons for colonial conquest, the basis for EIC-Indian
collaboration, and the reasons for British success.

The EIC (East India Company) profited from Indian textiles, the right to collect taxes from Indian
territories, and the opening up of new markets. Therefore, the British resorted to conquistador
imperialism (sailors( include soldiers, explorer and adventurers) sailing in search of trade routes), which
contributed to economic stagnation during the nineteenth century. (53) The period 1757 to 1810 saw the
straightforward plunder of Indian revenues, in which huge revenues were garnered from Indian
manufactured products and textiles. Following the capitalist imperialist paradigm, the British began
flooding the Indian markets with cotton by the 1850s, crippling the native textile industry. China tea soon
replaced textiles as the most profitable good, and the EIC financed itself through the cultivation of indigo
and opium.

The amoral political behavior of the British combined pre-colonial state ideology with English law, and
retaining Indian puppet rulers to minimize the threat of social reaction. For the British, the maintenance of
cultural legitimacy through the symbols and meanings of the indigenous society was as important as
physical rule. Orientalist scholars helped design policies based upon pseudo socio-cultural interpretations
of the subcontinent. Yet cultural bribery had its limitations, especially since the British sought to
sedentarize and peasantize Indian society by reinforcing the caste hierarchy and the enforcement of strict
legal codes. Colonial role in the nineteenth century was social engineering at its worst, with Indian
traditions reinforced in rural areas, while in urban centers there was a push towards Westernization (67).
The promotion of western education and the English language did benefit some through upward mobility,
but for most, the problems created by colonial oppression only led towards widespread resistance
affecting all regions and social groups.

Bose and Jalal superbly detail the tumultuous (wild) events of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. Despite the
mixed historiographical views on the mutiny as being a freedom movement, restorationist struggle, feudal
reaction, or peasant rebellion, the authors of the text posit that the revolt was tied to aristocratic, religious,
agrarian, and patriotic aspects. While the breakdown of the EIC army was caused in part by the Lee
Enfield debacle, other revolts in Awadh and central India were popular movements. Many of the farmers
who took up arms were discontented by the loss of landed rights to urban traders and moneylenders, and
also were fed up with high British taxes and racial arrogance. The mutiny was ultimately a failure which
ended in mass executions, the destruction of villages, and millions of pounds in debt. Yet it showed the
British that Indian patriotism and discontent were forces to be reckoned with and resulted in the end of
company management of the colony.
The period following the Sepoy Mutiny is described in the book as the High Noon (most flourished) of
Colonialism, 18581914, during which time the British reformed their administrative methods and
continued to reap even greater economic advantages from the colony. The installment of a viceroy and
secretary of state to lead the administration of the colony allowed for greater central control, while the
Indian army was altered based on a 1:2 ratio. British Indian forces were utilized to help protect the
Empires interests globally, yet the sacrifices of 60,000 brave Indian troops in the First World War were
in vain, because the colonial forces did not benefit from Britains European conflict. (82). Instead, the
authors argue that India was literally drained of its wealth during the latter nineteenth and early twentieth
century, leading to devaluation in currency, loss of resources, and ultimately the loss of life in famine and
warfare.

In light of these dismal circumstances, it is clear why the most important theme of the late nineteenth
century is nationalism. Bose and Jalal explain that new research shows that anti-colonialism was not
simply the result of isolated educated urban groups imbued with Western ideas, but rather nationalism
derived from many sources, primarily related to regional affinities and religious sensibilities (89). For
many people, the desire for upward mobility was part of the changes of this important period, and the
effects of social reform and religious revival further altered the situation. Intellectuals in India sought
alternatives to the oppressiveness of the colonial situation, and Muslims in the north, led by figures such
as Sayyid Ahmed Khan, attempted reform movements to push for both modernity and anti-colonialism.
Anti-colonial resistance took on many forms, including civilian insurrection, rural revolts, tenant protests,
and riots, revealing that subaltern anti-colonialism predates the attempts by urban elites to launch mass
mobilization against the British. While the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 represents
the first attempt at establishing a leadership body for the people of India, most of the country was
quiescent until the First World War.

The book emphasizes the effects of the First World War as the catalyst of political and social change in
India. Important here is the theme of the impact of war on the structure of the colonial state and economic
relations between the metropolis and colony. Bose and Jalal note that the 1920s mass movements were
directly the result of the economic and political crises of the decade. For example, the British used 1.2
million Indian men in the armed forces, causing strains on the food supply, which led to famines (104). In
addition, the British enforced high income taxes and customs duties causing high inflation and poverty
among the rural population. As noted by the authors, the path towards decolonization was not paved with
good intentions, since the British merely attempted to shift attention away from the center by focusing on
mere provincial reforms in the 1920s and 1930s (107). While the 1935 Act did widen the franchise to 35
million people and give provinces more autonomy, Indians still had no say on defense issues, and the
viceroy had many powers under his direct control.

Bose and Jalal tie the rise of Gandhian nationalism and mass politics intricately to the events of the
Depression and the Second World War. The Great Depression changed the metropolis-colony relationship
yet again, including a decline in imported British goods and materials, wiping out Indias export surplus,
and the devaluation of currency. While India was still vital to the Empire, economically the situation
changed in the 1930s and 1940s, but with the rise of tensions with the Nazis the British continued to want
to retain to their foreign holdings and shelve reforms. In this context, the rise of Gandhi, who first staged
non-violent agitations as early as 191718, appears all the more plausible given the broad range of events
surrounding his rise to prominence. Gandhis appeal to nationalists in India through the medium of the
Congress and countrywide protests made him an influential player in the 1920s, but for many students
and workers the efforts of more radical organizations seemed the more effective means to overthrow
colonial rule.

The Second World War put further strains on the Indian economy and contributed directly to the fall of
British colonial power. While the British were willing to spend 3.5 billion rupees on defense and financed
the war by overworking the mints in India, they were unwilling to aid the Bengalese, who suffered from a
terrible famine in 19434, costing the lives of over three million people (132). Thus, as the British began
suffering major defeats in Southeast Asia at the hands of the Japanese, Gandhian nationalists pressed their
demands through the Quit India movement. By late 1945-1946 the final mass movements broke down the
last vestiges of British administration and resulted in the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy. Therefore, the
authors show how the War broke down the last vestiges of imperial control, and led to the 1946 British
cabinet mission to discuss the terms of Indian independence.
While British colonial rule died an ignominious death in 1947, its legacy was firmly implanted with the
partition of Indian and the creation of Pakistan. Bose and Jalal believe that the contradictions and
structural peculiarities of Indian society and politics led to the creation of Pakistan, yet a fierce historical
debate exists as to whether it was due to a religious divide, or British imperialist policies of divide and
rule. Returning to Edward Said, the authors question whether Indian social tradition and even Muslim
identity were byproducts of the British colonial imagination. While it is certain that both were influenced
by colonialism, they definitely were not entirely formed by it. Muslim identity faced fractures in the
nineteenth century and continuous regional divides, yet the power of the All India Muslim League and the
views of Punjabis and Bengalese fostered enough Muslim support to contribute to Pakistani sovereignty.
While the partition created a terrible wound far deeper than the promises of independence, the end of
British rule allowed for both states to attempt to move forward. For Pakistan, it meant creating from
scratch a nation of sixty five million Muslims, and the conditions under which the nation was formed
caused the government to be prone to military rule.????
India and Pakistan have continuously struggled with centralism and regionalism in the balance of power
to create modern states. Center-region tensions are due to the circumstances of the post-colonial period
during which both nations were forced to set up strong states, leading to a strong federal authority in India
and a strong military state infused with Islamic ideology in Pakistan. The successful rules of Jawaharlal
Nehru and Indira Gandhi as prime ministers from the 1940s to the 1970s allowed for a period of political
stability in India. Yet, as noted by the authors, the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi by Sikh separatists
damaged the stability of the country, leading to shakeups in numerous elections and the rise of Hindu
majoritarian politics. In Pakistan, the military has kept much control over the country despite challenges
by parliamentary figures, with military officers such as General Zia-ul-Haq and General Pervez
Musharraf ruling as virtual dictators.

Bose and Jalal conclude that India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh each continue to face common sets of
political, social, and economic problems. While illiteracy and life expectancy are huge issues in all these
states, the problem of high defense expenses and inter-state hostilities continues to hamper the potential
growth of these countries into major powers in the South Asian market. The authors hope that instead of
threatening nuclear war against each other, India and Pakistan may be able to bridge their political
differences through shared socio-cultural similarities. A better understanding of their common history
makes it clear that each has much to learn from the other, though the legacies of the past are also riddled
with many complex issues which are continuously debated to this day.

Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy is a superb analysis of South Asian
historiography and the history of the past several centuries. In addition to the twenty detailed chapters
covering the topic in question, the authors provide a useful glossary of terms, a chronological outline of
major historical events, and a select bibliography with notes. The bibliography and notes are a treasure
trove of materials for teachers and students alike, detailing some of the best works in the field of South
Asian studies. Bose and Jalal give the reader a brief historiographical essay prior to the bibliography,
citing the works of Ranajit Guha, C.A. Bayly, and other scholars in the field of Subaltern Studies to shape
the intellectual framework of the text. As noted previously, the work is heavily influenced by the writings
of Edward Said, whose critique of Orientalism paved the way for outstanding historical works on Asian
history such as this one.



Review 2
In the last twenty years or so there have been great transformations in the historiography of modern South
Asia. It would not be too crude an exaggeration to say that no western historian of much intellectual
ambition engaged with the subject from James Mill in the early nineteenth century until after the second
world war, while Indian historians were little known outside the subcontinent. All that has changed.
Highly innovative work that commands the attention of all historians, not merely of regional specialists, is
now done on modern South Asia. This work comes out of Indian and western universities, where scholars
from South Asia, like Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, play a very prominent role.
Works of synthesis on modern South Asia have not kept up with the flow of monographs, the installments
of Subaltern Studies or the articles that appear in profusion in The Indian Journal of Economic and Social
History or in Modern Asian Studies. The late Percy Spear and Stanley Wolpert, the two authors who have
commanded the field in Britain for so long in introducing general readers or undergraduates to South
Asian history, now look distinctly dated. A new and authoritative synthesis like this one is therefore very
welcome.

Modern South Asia introduces the reader not merely to new interpretations of topics such as the rise of
British power, nationalism and partition, but to new perspectives on the subject as a whole. The
traditional historiography of British India tended to be very much history from above. British Governor
Generals were placed in the centre of the stage and judged as good, bad or indifferent by whatever criteria
were currently deemed appropriate. In later and more liberal treatments, such as those of Spear and
Wolpert, prominent Indians who engaged with the Raj, Rammohan Roy, the early nationalists and the
great protagonists in the end of empire - Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, were also given full treatment.
Popular accounts published in this country remain obsessed with personalities, above all with
Mountbatten, Wavell and the leadership of Congress and the League. 'Ordinary' Indians were reduced to
abstract Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs or in books with any pretensions to scholarship to statistics in the
perennial debates as to whether India got richer or poorer under the British.
Bose and Jalal try to write history from below. They are of course interested in Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah
and have important things to say about them, which lay readers may well find surprising and challenging.
The British, however, are not personalised. Wavell does not appear in the index and the only reference to
Warren Hastings tells the reader that he was impeached. There is no room for cultural brokers like
William Carey. Instead, the British presence in India is depicted as a colonial state, taking forms that
varied with its underlying economic rationale. In the early nineteenth century that rationale shifted from
oceanic trade to the extraction of land revenue; in the later nineteenth century priorities changed to the
generation of an export surplus and the stimulation of rural purchasing power for British imports.
Something is of course lost in such a synoptic view. The Raj may well seem to be a much more unified,
calculating and rational institution than was actually the case, and the diversity of the British presence is
inevitably telescoped. Nevertheless Bose and Jalal could well reply that there are enough books of The
Men who Ruled India genre for those who wish to recapture that diversity and they have other purposes to
fulfil.
They wish attention to be paid not to the British, except as a source of some of the pressures that shaped
Indian society, or to the Indian elite, but to what they term 'intermediate social groups', such as merchants
and traders and those who filled minor offices, and the 'subaltern groups', peasants, the urban poor and the
'tribals', at the bottom of society. They are concerned with women as well as with men. They recognise
the crucial importance of labels such as Hindu or Muslim in the twentieth century, but insist that these are
not immutable distinctions that have endured for centuries; they have a relatively recent history. 'The
undue and ahistorical privileging of religion in the periodization of Indian history' must be discarded.
'There are no grounds for branding the ancient, medieval and modern periods of the subcontinent's long
and complex history as Hindu, Muslim and British' (p. 13). Bose and Jalal urge historians to concern
themselves with smaller entities, those that they call 'communitarian' rather than with the 'communal'
labels attached to supposedly monolithic religions. As with all the other concepts that the authors use, the
uninitiated probably require much more explanation of community' than is offered to them, but the issue
is summarised on p. 108: 'What needs emphasizing is that there were multiple and competing narratives
informed by religious and linguistic cultural identities seeking to contribute to the emerging discourse on
the Indian nation.' These voices were eventually drowned by the assertion of religion in the making of
Pakistan and by the counter-assertion, at least for a time, of secular nationalism's right to inherit the
centralised state created by the British and to call it 'India'. It has been the ultimate fate of the
communities, except in Bangladesh, to be subordinated to one or other of these leviathans.
There is a strong ideological commitment behind this interpretation of South Asia's history, as there is
behind any historical interpretation of any interest. Its assumptions are very different from those
embodied in recent western attempts at synthesis, such as those of Spear or Wolpert. Both of them seem
to have believed in an essential Indianness and to have understood its history as a series of interchanges
between that essence and outside influences, most obviously Muslim and British ones. This for Spear was
'the inner meaning of modern Indian history, culminating in Gandhi and the national movement,
independence and the reign of Nehru'. In brief sections at the end of their books he and Wolpert assessed
the state of contemporary India, noting the extent of western influence and the survival of 'traditions'. For
Wolpert, 'The more India changes, the more Indian it remains'. Significantly, neither of them wrote
anything about post-1947 Pakistan, let alone Bangladesh. For them, partition was a disaster and the
criterion for judging the success of independence was the survival of India as a unitary, secular state.
Neither intellectual trends nor recent events have been kind to such interpretations. Concepts of an
essential, timeless India have been subjected to withering analysis. They are emphatically rejected as
western constructions, designed to emphasise India's difference and therefore its inferiority. Indian
nationalism as it emerged at the end of the nineteenth century is not generally seen as any kind of
fulfilment of India's history, but rather as a colonial legacy. A narrow elite were able to use western
concepts of nation and state as the means to obtain power over the rest of the population and to perpetuate
the subordination of the 'subalterns'. Bose and Jalal are more sympathetic to nationalist aspirations than it
is currently fashionable to be, arguing that discriminating nationalists were capable of recognising the
claims of linguistic and regional diversity to be embodied in the new Indian nation. Nevertheless, the
heroes of the nationalist pantheon are left badly scarred. Congress under Gandhi 'more often than not
represented the class interests of the middle to richer peasantry and industrial capitalists in the urban
sector'. For the poor, the Mahatma offered only "the palliative remedy of trusteeship" (p. 144). Nehru is
portrayed as the exponent of a unitary nationalism that took over and operated the colonial centralised
state. His claims to have founded a democratic new India are called into question. Of the great leaders,
only Jinnah, so often reviled in conventional historiography, emerges largely unscathed. It is argued that a
separate Pakistan based on religion was not at all what he intended. He had a vision of a pluralistic India
in which a Muslim 'nation' would co-exist with other nations and be able to exercise 'an equitable share of
power' in the centre (p. 193).
What many recent historians have seen as a flawed nationalism inevitably, in their eyes, produced flawed
states after independence. Bose and Jalal do not endorse the respect, if often tempered with anxiety for the
future, accorded in most western accounts to Indian 'democracy', let alone to the workings of the states of
Pakistan or Bangladesh. They dislike the centralisation of power which, they believe, Nehru perpetuated
from the past. Expectations that a strong state might be an effective agent for driving through 'modernity"
are now often looked at with as much scepticism as is accorded to the concept of 'modernity' itself, taken
to be another western construct. On the role of the Indian state as a promoter of economic or social
development, Bose and Jalal are a little ambiguous. They recognise that the economic liberalisation of the
early 1990s removed 'the more stifling bureaucratic controls on industry', but insist that 'state and public
action' have an important role in remedying deficiencies in health and education (p. 229). The political
failures of India seem glaring to them. The narrow basis of the Nehru regime could not be sustained. As
subsequent leaders, notably Indira Gandhi, endeavoured to become more populist they were forced to
invoke Hindu 'majoritarianism' as a counter to regional challenges. The legacies of military rule in
Pakistan have been 'a parallel arms and drugs economy, administrative paralysis, and violent social
conflict' (p. 230).

In the last chapter of the book, reflections on fifty years of independence, Bose and Jalal offer their
alternative scenario for the evolution of modern South Asia. Instead of a transfer of 'colonial structures of
state and ideologies of sovereignty' to 'mainstream nationalist elites' (pp. 23940), they would have
preferred the survival of pre-colonial ideals and practices, whether under the Mughals or their eighteenth-
century successors, of 'flexible, nuanced, and overarching suzerainties', which observed both individual
and communitarian rights' and had no 'notion of absolute sovereignty' or 'singular allegiance' (p. 240).
There must be a return to 'a political and state system based on layered and shared sovereignties' (p. 243).
Assuming that the pre-colonial order had some of the characteristics attributed to it by Bose and Jalal,
how did the shift come about some hundred and fifty years later to two and subsequently to three
sovereign successor states, one overtly based on religion and the others to a considerable degree
dominated by parties organised according to religious allegiance? The attempt to answer this question is
the book's major theme.
Bose and Jalal attribute much to the nature of colonial rule. They rightly point out that the British had a
strong concept of a sovereign state from the eighteenth century onwards and that nationalists were more
inclined to try to capture this powerful state for themselves than to dismantle it. Bose and Jalal are,
however, also critical of what might seem to be opposite trends in colonial rule, a willingness to devolve
authority to regions within a nominally federal structure and to assure separate rights to what the British
identified as minorities. The situation created by the 1935 Government of India Act with its carefully
rigged provisions that no Indian group should be able to exercise absolute power at the centre and with its
provinces based on historical evolution rather than on religion does not look all that different from Bose's
and Jalal's ideal, except of course for the survival of a sovereign imperial presence.

The British are also held responsible, in part at least, for the consolidation of more or less unified Hindu
or Muslim religious entities. British views that India was so divided go back to the early days of their rule
and the British had something to do with the process of defining the orthodoxies to which Hindus and
Muslims increasingly adhered. In the south, the East India Company 'sponsored a somewhat spurious
neo-Brahmanical ruling ideology' based on a rigid definition of caste, while British scholars 'gave far
greater importance to doctrinal Islam or the sharia as propagated by the ulema' than to the 'eclectic
religion shot through with local customary practices which was followed by the vast majority of Indian
Muslims' (p. 74). The late nineteenth-century censuses embodied British notions of clear-cut religious
divisions and electoral constituencies were eventually demarcated on religious lines. Yet Bose and Jalal
stop well short of divide and rule as a full explanation for the hardening of the Hindu/Muslim divide, let
alone for partition in 1947. They see the emergence of a variety of Muslim identities, 'linked to the fact of
British colonial rule without being wholly shaped by it' (p.167). The creation of a Pakistan consisting of
no more than parts of the Muslim majority provinces of the old British India was the outcome of a whole
series of contingent events, carefully analysed in this book. The partition of the areas where Muslims
lived between Pakistan and India, far from being the fulfilment of the idea an Islamic nation, was 'its most
decisive political abortion' (p. 188).
This review has tried to indicate something of the richness of this book and of the intellectual excitement
that it generates. Will it succeed in displacing other introductory accounts to provide 'the multi-
dimensional, high definition overview of modern South Asian history' (p. 5) which the authors, with
justification, find lacking elsewhere? There can be not the slightest doubt that it addresses the issues
which currently dominate a highly creative body of historical writing, that this writing has been
comprehensively mastered and that persuasive interpretations of it are offered. The book is a manifesto as
well as an historical account, but readers will have no difficulty in identifying the authors' ideological
agenda and in making up their own minds about it. Total success seems, however, to require a little more
than these admirable attributes. It requires a high quality of exposition if an audience without prior
knowledge is to be caught and held. That quality is lacking.
Whatever their level of intellectual aspiration, Spear's books were, as the authors generously
acknowledge, 'elegantly written'. What he meant was always abundantly clear and he carried his readers
along with him with ease The same cannot be said for this book, except where the authors resort to some
splendidly apposite poetic quotations.
The introductory chapter embodies what the uninitiated will surely find to be a major defect in the book.
The later pages of that chapter become hopelessly over-allusive. The authors clearly wish to establish
their position in relation to their peers, but that is surely not the purpose of a book such as this. Instead,
they are likely to baffle, and one fears to irritate and put off, the serious inquirer who might like to know
what 'subalternity' is or what is the difference between 'dissonance or polyvalence' and might well
welcome 'a much-needed decentred balance in our current, disoriented scholarly predicament' (p. 11) if
she knew what any of that meant or if the authors would condescend to tell her. The issues raised in the
introduction are serious ones but it is self-indulgent to write in that way in a book like this.
The other main problem that the lay reader is likely to face is the denseness of the exposition in many
places. The authors set out to cover a great deal in a relatively short space and this inevitably means
cutting corners rather than offering full explanations. For instance, in a section on the emergence of
successor states to the Mughal empire the reader is told about 'a transition from prebendal to patrimonial
land holdings' (pp. 52-3), but the following sentences do not seem to explain or to illustrate what that
might mean. In short, one feels that what this book desperately needed was an aggressive copy editor
prepared to say over and over again: 'Stop, I do not know what that means; please explain it to me.'
Modern South Asia would have benefited greatly from that salutary discipline. As it is, it is certainly a
work that professionals and the initiated will greatly admire but it is one whose wider impact may be
more limited than it deserves to be.