By Anjum Altaf
Being a Tribute to Dr. G.M. Mekhri
The 2006 Sachar Committee report on the status of the Muslim community in India found that Muslims were amongst the poorest of the poor in the country.
How do we square that with the fact that up until 1857 Muslims had ruled parts of India for over 800 years? I mention this fact because, in the minds of some people, Muslims had expropriated all the wealth of India during this period and oppressed all the non-Muslims.
India has been independent for a little more than 60 years, so this transformation from being the owners of the land to being the poorest of the poor could not conceivably have occurred during this short period.
So, did the decline of the Muslims occur during the less than hundred years of British rule between 1857 and 1947? If so, how?
I don’t know. I am writing this post partly to find out and partly to discharge a long-owed debt to Dr. G.M. Mekhri, a remarkable man in my opinion, who I met just once in the mid-1980s and have never forgotten because he had a very unique perspective on this issue.
Dr. Mekhri had a hypothesis that intrigued me. I don’t really know if it would survive a rigorous test but that seems beside the point. What fascinated me was the audacity and innovativeness of his thinking and his ability to communicate the excitement of such thinking to a younger generation. He was the kind of teacher one would have loved to have as a thesis advisor.
Here is the gist of his hypothesis as best as I remember after all these years:
Islam was born as a religion of the desert where land was of little value. The principal forms of property in the early years of Islam were animals (camels, horses, sheep) that are reproducible assets.
When a man died, his property was divided according to the Islamic law of inheritance to all his heirs in certain proportions. With reproducible assets, even if an heir inherited a pair of sheep, he/she could build up a stock again with a reasonable amount of diligence and common sense.
You should already be getting the drift of the story.
When Muslims came to India, they applied the same law of inheritance in a country where the principal form of property was land, which is a non-reproducible asset. You divide up land amongst the heirs and pretty soon (say over two or three generations) the size of a holding becomes uneconomic to farm. The owners have no option but to sell the land and join the category of the landless.
Dr. Mekhri had some extensions to this story:
First, the Hindu inheritance law and joint family institution were adapted to land being the principal form of property. This must have had many other implications but one that was relevant was that the process of inter-generational dilution of property was not the same. In general, Muslims whose land holdings became too small to farm did not sell out to other Muslims but to non-Muslims.
Second, that there were three Muslim trading communities (Bohris, Khojas and Memons, if I remember right) who converted to Islam from Hinduism but retained their old institution of joint property holding. These were the only three communities that remained prosperous amongst the Muslims.
Once again, I don’t know if these hypotheses would be sustained by detailed research but at the level of theory they do highlight the fact that the laws of inheritance have a great bearing on economic outcomes over generations. And this relationship has attracted very little attention.
There are a number of fascinating extensions that came to mind as I pursued the line of thought opened up by Dr. Mekhri. I will write about them in a later post.
To conclude this tribute, I want to return to the reason I raised the possibility that the British period might have a bearing on the phenomenon of Muslim impoverishment. At least under the Mughals, all land was the property of the emperor and was subject to tax-farming under the mansabdari system. I doubt that the mansabdars cared whether those from whom the extracted taxes were fellow-religionists or not, just as modern factory owners don’t discriminate amongst their employees on the basis of shared identities. That should take care of the speculation that ordinary Muslims had benefited inordinately from Muslim rule in India.
But more importantly, if there were no ownership of land Dr. Mekhri’s theory would not have applied during that period. It was only under the British that the Permanent Settlements were introduced (beginning with Bengal in 1793) and private ownership of land became a reality with the mansabdars being transformed into lawful owners of their domains. Only after this change could the process of dilution of land holdings of this Mughal elite could have started.
I wonder if someone would be able to obtain a copy of Dr. Mekhri’s dissertation and delve into this topic in more depth. The details are as follows: Mekhri, G.M. Social background of Hindu-Muslim relationships, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Bombay. Bombay: Bombay University, 1947, English. National Social Science Documentation Centre (NASSDOC), 35 Feroz Shah Road, New Delhi: 110001, India
Tags: India, Inheritance, Land, Mekhri, Mughal, Muslims, Permanent Settlement, Poverty, Sachar
May 23, 2009 at 7:24 pm |
In response to the post on the poverty of Indian Muslims, a reader sent the following comment that anticipates the direction in which I wish to develop the argument. I am adding it to the blog to make it available for other readers who might wish to develop some of the ideas further.
“Not long after 9/11, there was a short but insightful article in the NYT about the material conditions of Muslim communities in the wider world vis-a-vis the West. Some economic historians were cited as offering two reasons for the lesser wealth of the non-West: the existence of certain traditions of inheritance and, equally importantly, the lack of economic innovations – principally the joint stock company around the 17th century.
I don’t now recall exactly how this innovation made it possible for the West to accumulate and spread wealth as opposed to existing practices but it may be worth adding this kind of analysis as a follow-up to your post. I believe the Jews played a major role in these developments, especially in relation to banking.
Neither the earlier Hindu traditions nor the later Muslim traditions led to any significant innovations with material import whereas the last five hundred years of the West were so crowded with innovations that we have even given this a name – the Industrial Revolution.
Focusing on innovations in the economy of one kind or another (e.g. technology) may also be a worthwhile general addition to the blog. Analysis and understanding are of course very good but adding positive and innovative action to this mix might be a good thing.”
May 24, 2009 at 9:58 am |
I have a basic problem in respect of the very formulation of the issue. In today’s globalised world, are we justified in forming social categories on the basis of a single determinant, religion? I agree that religion is a major influence for many of us – but that does not eliminate diverse understanding of it nor it prompts the adherents of one religion to adopt the same stance on different major issues.
Not only today, even in nineteenth century, we have had Mirza Ghalib, a ‘Muslim’, whose poetry was appreciated, and friendship enjoyed, by people of different religious persuasions (as also atheists) and nationalities .
A simple, or one may say even simplistic, argument against religion as a single social determinant, is the fact that one seldom expresses solidarity (in action/ deed) on the basis of religion, and completely identifies with ones coreligionists.
Important, perhaps, is to try to understand that how poverty can be removed, and the life of the people made as good as can be (with the given level of resources) irrespective of ‘who’ (in terms of religious identification) is poor?
The simple point I am trying to make is that an individual’s ideology and actions are not determined by the single factor of religion.
May 24, 2009 at 1:04 pm |
Hasan, This is not an argument for or against religion or to show that one religion is better than another or to argue that some religion can produce no great personality (like Ghalib). Nor is it saying that we should not address the issue of poverty quite independent of religion. And finally, there is no attempt to argue that an individual’s ideology is determined by religion. In this regard there was some earlier discussion that showed that people of any one religion can hold all positions across the ideological spectrum.
This is a scientific hypothesis which in this case involves religion but it need not. The point is that different groups adopt different practices or policies and it is of interest to try and understand how the impact of that difference shows up in some outcome variables.
For example, England and France might choose different means of financing basic education. We can study the impact of that without necessarily making any value judgments about the characters of the English or the French. To take another example, there is a lot of interest in the health field in studying the implications of variations in dietary practices (e.g., vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets).
Similarly, where groups have different laws of inheritance it is possible that the economic outcomes could be different because of that. Now clearly Islam and Hinduism have different laws of inheritance so this is a legitimate area of scientific study. These could have been any other religions and I will discuss others in a later post.
These days every Western university has a department of Religion which means that religion is studied like any other subject because it has important implications for society. In the academic world there is no emotionalism attached to the study of religion any more.