Religiously Localized Nationalism: British India, 1871-1947

Abstract

Under the British Raj, South Asia developed two opposing nationalist movements that separated its Hindu and Muslim populations. This thesis traces the rise of these rival religious nationalist movements from 1871 to 1947 by counting number and types of motivations of deadly contentious events (DCEs) including riots, revolts, and protests. It argues that local elite religious reform movements led to Hindu-Muslim riots. These events solidified identities within the mass public along religious, rather than ethno-linguistic, class, or caste lines, and created a public sphere imbued with religious symbols. During the noncooperation movement largely local, but religiously tinged, grievances exploded into further inter-religious violence, which scuttled any Hindu-Muslim nationalist cooperation. This process was most pronounced in religiously diverse and urbanized provinces, while literacy was found to have no correlation with DCEs. Furthermore, this thesis challenges the Europe-focused modernization and literacy theories of nationalism and provides a new methodology with which to understand nationalist movements.