Hindu-Muslim Relations in British India- A Study of Controversy, Conflict and Communal Movements in Northern India, 1923-1928

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The young Jawaharlal Nehru freely applied irony to nearly every subject, including himself. It distinguished his approach to the subject of religion from that of most of his contemporary countrymen. His ironic tone gave him the appearance of being a comfortable skeptic, but his basic attitude was one of ambivalence. He was attracted to religion at the rarefied level of personal visions but was put off by it at the crude level of corporate forms. In his autobiography Toward Freedom, he described "a spiritual experience" which happened to him in the autumn of 1923 and which influenced him deeply for more than two years afterward. Its immediate effect was to confer upon him a sense of being at peace and of seeing clearly the shape of events as a whole. Over the next years it enabled him to continue his work in the freedom movement while remaining unaffected by the "emotional atmosphere" which characterized Indian public life in the middle 1920s, due largely to "the progressive deterioration of Hindu- Moslem relations, in North India especially." Spiritual experience and skill in irony made Nehru prepared twice over to live through a period of intense Hindu-Muslim difficulties. Study of those difficulties and reading about them, as contrasted with immediate experience of them, occur at some remove from their "emotional atmosphere" and so perhaps require no special preparation to deal with that aspect of the subject. However, in writing this book an effort was made to use a mixture of disinterested scholarship and human empathy, with a touch of irony, in the hope that together they would aid the writer and the reader to find an attitude which combines appreciation for the human significance of the phenomena under study with un- impaired capacity for the exercise of critical judgment.

In this book the emphasis is on the Hindu side of Hindu-Muslim relations, and more particularly on the role of the Arya Samaj movement. The movement was founded near Bombay at Rajkot in 1875, and it achieved a wide influence in northern India. It was organized into a network of local voluntary associations which were coordinated by committees and boards at the provincial and all-India level. Its general object was to revitalize Indian life by making it conform to a "Vedic" pattern in religion and society, and it pursued that object by a variety of means which included the establishment of educational and cultural institutions.