The Mahatma and the Maulana: Understanding Minority Politics in British India

Abstract

This article provides a fresh initiative and insight into issues that are rather well trodden. Gandhi, Mohamed Ali, Muslim politics, and the Khilafat Movement — each topic has been studied exhaustively. What this essay does is to pose them all together in an interactional framework to understand minority politics in colonial India. Here, minority politics is defined as issue-based politics around Muslims as minorities. This paper uses the terms “Mahatma” and “Maulana” as literary devices to understand Gandhi-Mohamed Ali relationship around the Khilafat Movement arguing how minority politics in British India became a terrain laden with individual motivations. The argument is unraveled through the analyses of Mahatma-Maulana interrelationship as understood from a range of sources in English as well as Urdu.