Against Partition: The Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind and the Politics of Composite Nationalism, 1940–1947.

Abstract

The Partition of India is predominantly narrated through the rise of the All-India Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan, often obscuring the diversity of Muslim political responses to the question of India’s constitutional future. This paper examines the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind (JUH) and its sustained political and ideological opposition to Partition between 1940 and 1947. It argues that the JUH articulated a coherent Muslim alternative to the Two-Nation Theory through the concept of muttahida qaumiyat (composite nationalism), which distinguished religious identity from territorial nationality and affirmed the possibility of a united Indian polity. Drawing on organisational resolutions, political speeches, contemporary accounts, documentary sources, and existing historiography, the study examines the JUH’s participation in the All India Azad Muslim Conference, its rejection of separate electorates, attempts to challenge the Muslim League’s claim to represent all Indian Muslims, engagement with the Cabinet Mission, and anti-Partition mobilisation during the Sylhet referendum. The paper demonstrates that Muslim political opinion was neither homogeneous nor inevitably separatist. It concludes that the JUH’s failure to prevent Partition reflected the growing organisational dominance of the Muslim League, communal polarisation, and the collapse of constitutional alternatives, rather than the absence of a viable Muslim intellectual and political alternative to Pakistan..