On a recent visit home to India this summer, rummaging through sheafs of leftover yellowing paper, I discovered a veritable trove of notes and documents scribbled over by three preceding generations of my family over the past one hundred years. The jottings, separated by ten-year intervals, between 1926 and 1946, reveal the untold story of The Dark Chapters of India's Freedom Struggle, studiously edited out of the History textbooks of the Sovereign Secular Socialist Democratic Republic of India, that is Bharat, of which we are celebrating the 79th Independence Day today, under scrutiny of a Gang of Hooligans that identifies itself as the Cockroach Janata Party, feasting on a never-exhausting supply of free Moradabadi Biryani while parodying the ruling dispensation that was born out of the clamour of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's Two-Nation Theory a hundred and forty one years ago. Following is a reconstruction of those deleted chapters based on the accounts of a Bengali family witnessing the Syed’s Alternate Reality transition to Reality over five generations, between my Great Grandfather and my Daughter, between 1926 and 2026. Read on...
For whoever may have heard of the place, Aonla, in Bareilly district of Uttar Pradesh, is just another mofussil town in the middle of nowhere that nobody wants to visit.
The habitat last drew national attention when one of India's first six gas-based fertiliser plants came up there in the mid-1980s feeding on the country's first interstate gas pipeline (HBJ) from the sea off Gujarat deep into the bread basket of India’s heartland in the Punjab-Haryana-UP Terai. That was then; Aonla is forgotten now.
But this was not always the case.
Once upon a time, three hundred years ago, when the Mughal Empire started crumbling, in the twilight days of Aurangzeb's reign, horse traders and goat herders from the Pashtun uplands of the Hindu Kush, on the present Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, rode into the rich and fertile Ganga-Yamuna plains of upper India to grab large chunks of land from the Mughal subahdars in the region to set up the Rohilla Afghan Confederacy in India.
Aonla, as the nerve centre of those depredations, served as the first capital of the Confederation for over 25 years before their administrative centre shifted to Bareilly.
After the British took over most of north India following the 1857 Mutiny, Aonla came back into reckoning, and was designated as a Notified Area in the 1930s (a status granted in 1908 to rapidly developing urban and semi-urban hubs), operating as an administrative tehsil under the Bareilly district authorities. But for all practical purposes, the social stratification between landlords, tenants and the landless remained intact as under Rohilla governance. That one change in nomenclature not only lifted Aonla from obscurity, but it also restored the dignity of the local zamindar, Sheikh Rasool Ahmad, son of Sheikh Karim Ahmad, ensuring his continued prosperity under the Raj, once he shifted loyalty to King Emperor George V, the new mai-baap sarkar, as potentates to minor government officials were addressed then.
Ensconced among the provincial elites, the Sheikh bought into state privileges offered by the Raj, ordinarily denied to ordinary folks in colonial India, paying Rs 400 in annual revenue to the British exchequer, a princely sum those days (almost ₹17,00,000 now or US $3,600 today). For a realistic estimate of his worth, 10 gram of 24K gold cost ₹30.81 in 1935. A ₹400 tax bill could purchase roughly 130 grams of pure gold, which equates to an asset value of ₹18.5 lakh to ₹19.5 lakh today. This, in an era where a colonial clerk or schoolteacher earned ₹15 to ₹25 per month. An annual tax bill of ₹400 was equivalent to the entire yearly salary of multiple middle-class professionals. Small wonder then, our zamindar became a small-town big man, operating within the upper-middle tier of the regional gentry.
In the 1930s United Provinces, only 2 million individuals out of a population of 50 million held registered land titles (zamindaris). Some 85% of these landowners were smallholders paying under ₹25 annually. Those paying over ₹250–₹400, as with Rasool Ahmad, belonged to the highly exclusive top 2% bracket of the landed elite (consisting of roughly 30,000 to 50,000 landowners statewide).
So, while the Sheikh inherited substantial regional influence, he also consolidated and enhanced his reckoning under the Raj, by holding pivotal roles across civic, religious, and educational sectors:
He alternately served as an elected or nominated member of the Aonla Notified Area Committee. Under British law, nominations were strictly reserved for wealthy landowners whom the District Magistrate viewed as reliable stakeholders in public order. He was also the mutawalli (trustee) of several waqfs (Islamic charitable trusts), empowering him with legal and financial stewardship over local religious properties, agricultural lands, and mosques, cementing his social and spiritual authority within the Muslim community. He also served as the Secretary of the local minority educational institutes, mainly madrasas, and various public societies. In the pre-Independence era, these societies were the primary drivers of community-funded schooling and social behaviour. The going, as they say, was good for the Sheikh. Better still, it could not have been any better for Rasool Ahmad, prospering both in this world and that, the present and the past.
Then, shit happened!
In the winter of 1935, northern India burst out in flames, engulfed by the raging fires of communal riots sparked by the nationhood demands of the Hindus and Muslims, that we now believe was rooted in "the two-nation theory".
Official data presented to the British House of Commons reveal that in the year 1935 alone, communal riots in British India resulted in 105 deaths and 516 verified injuries. In the United Provinces (UP) alone 13 died and another 77 suffered injuries, among them landless Hindu and Sikh tenant farmers, quite a few of them at Aonla. The data also suggests that the casualties were triggered by a mix of national flashpoints and hyper-local religious friction. Sheikh Rasool Ahmad emerged as the mastermind of the massacre at Aonla. We will get there in time.
The overarching political catalyst for the 1935–1936 unrest was the Government of India Act in 1935 that got passage in August. This legislation granted limited provincial autonomy and scheduled the highly competitive 1937 provincial elections. Because the British electoral system relied heavily on separate communal electorates, local politicians and landed elites (zamindars, like Rasool) began aggressively mobilising their communities. Stoking communal anxieties became a primary mechanism to secure exclusive voter bases ahead of the elections.
Across North India, the single biggest geopolitical trigger during this exact window occurred in Lahore (Punjab), when a severe dispute erupted between the Sikh and Muslim communities over the possession of the Shaheedganj Gurdwara, located in the city’s Landa Bazaar, under Sikh occupation for well over a century. But Saheedganj was not forever theirs.
One version has it that one Abdullah Khan, a former Mughal cook turned kotwal (Police Chief) of Lahore during the reign of Shah Jahan, built a mosque at that spot in 1653. Subsequent Sikh records suggest that the site, known earlier as nakhas (Persian nakhkhas), was a marketplace for the sale of captives, horses and cattle taken as war prize. During the Chhota Ghallughara campaign of 1746 thousands of Sikhs, including the celebrated Bhai Taru Singh, and about 3,000 captives were executed or tortured to death here by Mu’in ul-Mulk (Mir Mannu, in Sikh chronicles), son of Wazir Qamar ud-Din, the prime minister to the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah Rangeela. As governor of Lahore and Punjab during 1748-53, Mannu raised a domed building sitting where the muftis administered their summary judgements after giving their victims a straight choice between conversion to Islam and death. Almost invariably the victims chose the latter. Close by was the place where Sikh women and children were kept in narrow cells to meet slow death through hard labour and starvation. The nakhas, long soaked with the blood of martyrs, became a sacred spot for Sikhs.
In 1761, Afghan warlord Ahmad Shah Abdali invaded the dwindling Mughal Empire under Shah Alam. Abdali defeated the Maratha army sent to defend the Mughal at the Third Battle Panipat, before retreating to his country. Shortly thereafter, the Sikhs misls briefly took physical and adverse control of the location around 1762, establishing a gurdwara memorial alongside the mosque.
A hundred and sixty years later, at the height of Hindu-Muslim communal clashes raging across north India, the local Sikh gurdwara management committee gained formal possession of the long abandoned and dilapidated mosque in 1935 and decided to clear the old structure to expand and uplift the gurdwara. Demolition began on July 7 that year. The local Muslim community viewed the destruction as a severe blow to Islamic heritage. They launched the Shaheedganj Masjid movement. Large crowds gathered to protest, leading to violent clashes and police gunfire on July 20–21, 1935, which left several dead and resulted in a strict city-wide curfew.
Subsequent legal suits filed by Muslims to reclaim the property were dismissed by the British courts (culminating in a famous 1940 Privy Council ruling) on the grounds that the Sikhs had held continuous adverse possession of the spot for over 170 years, overriding limitation laws.
Tensions reached a boiling point on December 1, 1935. The violence and subsequent civil disobedience in Punjab sent massive shockwaves through neighbouring UP. It radicalized local vernacular press and heightened religious anxieties across North Indian trading towns. Colonial district gazettes report that riots during this winter timeframe were sparked by routine, highly localized flashpoints that quickly turned violent due to the tense political atmosphere.
Firozabad (near Agra), part of Rohilkhand, suffered an exceptionally brutal riot. The violence escalated after a prominent Hindu doctor, Jivaram, and his family were burned alive in their home. This specific event deeply polarised western and central UP, creating a retaliatory climate where any minor argument could explode into a town-wide riot.
In this intense regional power struggle, Rasool Ahmad was waiting for his moment of glory, as were the state's elite political actors, each utilising their resources to convert minor arguments into organized communal riots.
On 8 March 1936, a serious communal disturbance occurred in Aonla, targetting the local Hindu community. Several residents were killed and injured.
Colonial authorities frequently targeted high-profile elites during riots, viewing them as the structural orchestrators or financial backers of public disorders. As the prominent zamindar, mutawalli, and municipal board member, the Sheikh was implicated by the British administration for instigating the unrest at Aonla.
A "mercy petition" on behalf of the Sheikh three years later, left behind at the desk of my grandfather, NM Roy, then a young and prominent criminal lawyer at the Allahabad High Court reveals that the Sheikh, as the local zamindar, had been in litigation in disputes relating to land grabbing and usurpations of Hindu properties, in general, and against his tenants, in particular, in Aonla. So he came to be mistrusted by the townsfolk. Socially cornered, and possibly ostracised, Rasool rode the communal passion burning India to incite a mob of his Muslim minions to kill the Hindus and burn down their dwellings.
“Hinduwon ko maro, unkey gharon ko jalao,” he yelled, directing a mob from the roof of his godown. The mob went on a rampage.
It was not long before the Sheikh was tried before the Sessions Judge of Bareilly and sentenced to 7 years of rigorous imprisonment. A sentence of this magnitude for a public order offence was an exemplary punishment designed by the British judiciary to deter the landed elite from using their private retinues to disrupt state security. But that was not the end of Rasool's story. We will revisit the Sheikh in time. So will we meet my grandfather again. Neither was 1935 the first occasion when Muslims had trapped Hindus behind walls of fire.
Sporadic local flare-ups had been occurring through the 19th and early 20th centuries, following the 1857 Mutiny, driven by political changes, cow protection movements, and religious processions. Ten years before Lahore and Aonla, severe localised riots erupted in 1924-25 across northern and western towns like Kohat, Delhi, and Calcutta over forced conversions and religious music near mosques. But that too had vicious precedents, flaring up into a major conflagration at least once every decade with monstrous regularity.
When the Crown took over the Empire in 1857, the British colonial government primarily blamed the Muslim elite for trying to restore the Mughal Empire, forcing them into systematic exclusion from government jobs, legal roles, and military positions. At the same time, the Hindu community rapidly adopted English education and adjusted to the new British bureaucratic system.
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was an exception. He was educated and worked as a court record keeper in the East India Company. Following the transfer of Crown from the Mughals in Delhi to the Hanovers in London, Khan realised that British rule in India would eventually transition into a democratic, majority-wins system. And if his bet were to come true, a severely lagging Muslim minority would be permanently marginalized in the country.
The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, confirmed his identity crisis. It championed democratic reforms and competitive exams for government jobs. Sir Syed, who had by then founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (MAO) in Aligarh, deeply distrusted the Congress, and became one of its harshest critics. He argued that Western-style democracy would inherently function as a “tyranny of the majority” in a deeply divided subcontinent. Because Hindus outnumbered Muslims four-to-one, he believed a joint political nation would inevitably lead to absolute Hindu dominance over Muslim religious and economic interests. Hindus had to wait for a hundred and thirty years for his prediction to manifest, a good seventy years after the Partition of India.
Faced with the rising clamour for Freedom among early Congress stalwarts, Sir Syed advocated a new line of thinking. He insisted that the differences between the Hindus and Muslims were not merely religious, but civilisational. He concluded that to survive, Muslims needed to stop attempting political assimilation with Hindus and, instead, focus on modern English education to bargain with the British as an entirely distinct political entity. That ‘othering’ of the Hindus became a mission statement for Muslim intellectuals, redefining the attitude of the hoi-polloi among them for well over a century. That statement defines much of the Muslim intellectual narrative even today, not just in Pakistan and Bangladesh, but almost entirely across what remains of India, among academics, filmstars, lawyers, politicians and clerics who define and shape community perceptions in Independent India now.
Years after the Syed was received in Paradise, MAO transformed into the community-defining Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 1920 and immediately set out to ignite fresh conflagrations across the subcontinent, leading the demand for Partition over the dying embers of the Khilafat Movement. This had disastrous consequences for India emerging out of the Dark Ages.
Meanwhile, on the eastern front, in Bengal, seat of the Imperial British government, incidents of brief and highly localised friction had been gathering pace with fair regularity, since the days of Company Raj. Disputes usually arose over agrarian grievances leading to clashes between upper-caste Hindu zamindars, and marginalized Muslim peasantry. The most notorious recorded incident was Titu Mir's Fairazi insurrection against my forefathers’ zamindari at Barasat, northeast of Calcutta in the 1830s. The terror let loose by the Mecca-indoctrinated Mir introduced Wahabism to India. Mir was finally put to bed when the Company Bahadur deployed its sepoys from the nearby Barrackpore garrison. Yet local communal skirmishes occurred every now and then over cow slaughter and music-by-the-mosque during religious processions.
Forty years after Mir, Barasat became the setting where Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, a deputy magistrate of the Crown, working from the historic Magistrate’s House in town, composed the faith-binding Vande Mataram, while penning his civilisation-defining Anandamath in 1882, seeding nationalism in the heart of Hindus to the first strains of Hindutva.
In this civilisation shaping journey of modern India in walked George Nathaniel Curzon in 1899, as Governor General and Viceroy of India, after an educational railway trip cum private vacation to Samarkand and Bukhara where Central Asian architectural monuments inspired his fascination with Islam. For good measure, the ongoing Russian restoration of those architectural marvels motivated Curzon during his eventful stint at Calcutta to restore the long-neglected and crumbling Mughal monuments left ruined by the Company’s assaults on Delhi and Agra half-a-century ago. Meanwhile, the Governor General also plotted an insidious campaign to bolster the Crown’s grip on its biggest colonial possession, threatened by the Call for Freedom.
Curzon’s appearance at the time of budding Indian nationalism provided him a golden opportunity to show the Indians their place in history. He started by carving Bengal into two administrative regions - the Hindu majority west and the Muslim majority east - deliberately weaponising religious identities under the Imperial Britain’s "divide-and-rule" policy, triggering major, highly organised communal riots across the province.
The Partition of Bengal in 1905 provided the template for the Partition of India 40 years later and the consequences that followed the occasion. Mymensingh and Jamalpur were up in flames through 1906-07, marking the first major post-partition explosion of communal violence.
The nationalist Swadeshi Movement, primarily led by Hindus, responded by instituting a boycott of British goods. When Swadeshi volunteers forcibly tried to prevent Muslim shopkeepers from selling foreign wares at local fairs, severe communal clashes erupted, leading to the desecration of temples and extensive looting.
The Comilla riots followed in 1907, triggered by political polarisation surrounding the newly formed All-India Muslim League (1906). Anti-partition agitations and violent riots tore through Comilla, resulting in deaths and vandalised properties.
The partition skirmishes culminated with the Calcutta riots on 9-10 September 1918, stemming from the imminent Ottoman collapse in the First World War. "Offensive remarks" in AS Barrow's city newspaper, The Indian Daily, caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb, rubbed salt on wounded Muslim pride. Large-scale rioting broke out in Calcutta, leading to significant target-specific looting and violence concentrated in central Calcutta in which poorer Muslim workers and petty traders confronted predominantly Hindu Marwari commercial interests. Up to 300 citizens were murdered. Another 24 rioteers were shot dead and 30 wounded in police action.
My great grandfather, Babu Bhupendranath Banerji, a direct disciple of Swami Vivekananda, having joined the British Police Service in 1905, was brought in to tame the violence. He lived in the heart of Calcutta's elite Muslim district on Circus Road, close to the La Martiniere schools, in his family home that now, ironically, houses the Deputy High Commission of Bangladesh in the city. Babu Bhupendranath, among the first Indian officers in the Imperial Police Commission (IPC), was promoted to Assistant Commissioner of Calcutta’s South District that year, for meritorious service.
Given their complete passion for British goods and subversion of the Swadeshi Movement, Muslim loyalty to the Raj ended with a Bang! after literally starting with whimper.
The Muslim gentry shifted allegiance from the British Crown en masse with the end of War. Desperate to stall the dismantling of the Abdülmecid II's Caliphate following the Ottomam Armistice of October 1918, community stalwarts woed the Congress for support, bringing respite to the slaughter of Hindus across India, if only momentarily. Muslim intellectuals blamed Britain for attacking the Caliphate. So they cozied up to Gandhi. It made sense to oppose "a common enemy” they convinced the Mahatma.
The Khilafat Movement, conceived by Muslim intellectuals - with brothers Ali, Muhammad and Shaukat, as prime movers - was led by Abul Kalam Azad and Hakim Ajmal Khan, between 1919 and 1924, with a joint call for Freedom alongside Gandhi who launched the Non-Cooperation Movement a year later in1920. The Maulana, as Independent India’s first education minister between 1947 and 1958 went on to influence and manipulate how the History of Freedom Struggle and 800 years of Islamic rule would be eventually drafted for school and college textbooks.
But the promised bonhomie failed to materialise. In 1921, the Malabar coast on the western seaboard flared up with violence when local Moplahs took to slaughtering Hindus in Kerala. Starting off as an anti-British agrarian revolt tied to the Khilafat movement, the agitation quickly devolved into intense communal violence, featuring the forced conversions and killings of local Hindus. The Muslims particularly targetted the breasts of Hindu women for mutilation. This shattered the illusion of cross-communal unity at the national level.
Things got worse when Mahatma Gandhi abruptly suspended the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922, following the murder of policemen at Chauri Chaura in eastern UP. Shortly after, Muslim-Hindu violence panned out across India between 1923 and 1927. During this brief four-year window, more than 70 major communal riots fractured the Indo-Gangetic plains, running from Rawalpindi all the way to Dhaka, along 16th century Afghan warlord Sher Shah Suri's Grand Trunk Road. Major, multi-day riots broke out in Multan and Amritsar in 1923, followed by one of the most vicious post-Khilafat clashes in Kohat (now in Baluchistan), resulting in the massive displacement of the local Hindu minority.
The violence brought about by Muslims birthed the Hindutva movement, originally conceived by Bankim’s contemporary scholar, intellectual and columnist Chandranath Basu in 1892.
Following Gandhi’s withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation Movement, the Khilafat Movement lingered on for two more years before petering out when Turkey's leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, abolished the Caliphate in 1924. And India’s Muslims returned to slitting Hindu throats with renewed zeal and passions. Reacting to this fallout, conservative factions on both sides aggressively tried to reclaim their populations.
Responding to the Moplah bloodbath of Hindus, and the riots that followed in north India, the Arya Samaj launched the Shuddhi (reconversion) and Sangathan (organization) movements. In response, Muslim leaders launched Tabligh (propaganda) and Tanzim (organization) initiatives, turning neighborhoods into religious battlegrounds.
Secular, cross-communal coalitions collapsed.
Nationalist leaders increasingly retreated into identity-based organisations, such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the newly relevant Muslim League, to protect their specific community interests. Localised structural trigger, specifically disputes over cow slaughter and Hindu processions outside mosques, were weaponised on a national scale to incite coordinated urban rioting.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) movement was founded to challenge and confront the countrywide communal riots in the wake of the Khilafat Movement. The organisation was explicitly created in response to what its founders saw as a vulnerable, disorganised Hindu society under attack during that specific wave of sectarian violence.
Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder of RSS, was initially an active member of the Indian National Congress. However, he became deeply disillusioned by Gandhi’s decision to link the Indian independence struggle with the Islamic Khilafat Movement. When the 1921 Moplah uprising in Kerala turned into a violent massacre of local Hindus, Hedgewar felt that the Congress party downplayed the atrocities to maintain a fragile and artificial facade of Hindu-Muslim unity.
The Muslims responded to RSS with the Nagpur riots. The immediate flashpoint occurred in Hedgewar’s hometown in October 1923. A massive communal riot erupted over the right of Hindus to play religious music while processing past a local mosque. Hedgewar observed that during the chaos, the Hindu population was "totally disorganized and panicky.” The capacity for mobilisation during the riots showed Hindu leaders the raw power of a unified front, prompting Hedgewar to step away from mainstream factional politics. Convinced that political independence from the British would mean nothing if Hindus remained fragmented, Hedgewar teamed up with his mentor BS Moonje and founded the RSS on September 27, 1925.
Hedgewar heavily integrated the ideological concepts of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, whose 1923 book Essentials of Hindutva argued for a unified ‘Hindu Nation’ or Hindu Rashtra. Instead of forming another standard political party, Hedgewar designed the RSS as a cultural and paramilitary-style outfit. Inspired by Bengal’s Anushilan Samiti, of which he was an alumnus, the RSS established shakhas (local branches) to teach young Hindu boys physical fitness, military discipline, and group solidarity to prepare for future communal clashes.
Sent to Calcutta in 1910 by Moonje to study medicine, Hedgewar’s true objective was to embed himself within Bengal’s underground revolutionary networks. He drew several distinct organisational strategies from the Samiti when designing the daily shakha system. The organisation gained its first major surge in local popularity only two years later, when trained RSS cadres actively fought back during the 1927 Nagpur riots.
A year earlier, violence peaked in major urban centers, with massive, recurring riots paralysing Calcutta and Dacca. Rapid urbanisation of both these cities forced poor migrant workers, artisans, and transport workers into fierce economic competition, turning everyday financial rivalries into communal battlegrounds.
On April 2, 1926, during the Ram Navami festival, a procession organised by the Arya Samaj passed by a mosque in Calcutta’s Beliaghata neighbourhood. A dispute erupted when the procession continued to play music while passing the mosque during a time of prayer. This violated a highly contentious local custom regarding music near religious spaces. The argument quickly degenerated into physical street fights, which spiralled into an unprecedented six weeks of urban warfare across the city. Mobs engaged in brutal stabbings, looting, and arson. More than 100 people were killed, and martial law had to be declared.
My great grandfather, of the Calcutta Police, was pressed into action once more. Despite personal injury, he brought the city in order and was honoured with the title badge of Rai Saheb, George V, and eventually exalted with the title badge Rai Bahadur, George V. :Rai Bahadur Bhupendra Nath Banerji" became the second Indian DCP of the Calcutta Police South District. His citation reads:
“Rai Sahib B. N. Banarji is an Imperial Police Officer having been promoted to that rank in 1926, and having acted as Deputy Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, since 1924. For the last six years he has held charge of the South District and throughout the period of his administration has been characterised by initiative and thoroughness. He did exceptionally well in the communal troubles in Calcutta in 1926 and has handled the civil disobedience movement in his district with firmness and success. Whilst holding charge of Calcutta during the communal riots of 1926, during the first phase of which he was seriously injured in the performance of his duty, he displayed great presence of mind, courage, and perseverance. These qualities and the excellent work done by him at every stage of his career render him worthy of the distinction recommended. He has throughout his career proved himself a loyal, industrious, and successful police officer. He received his present title in 1927 and has justified his advancement to the higher title for which he is now recommended.”
But the riots did not end with the Rai Bahadur. Dacca, blew up in flames in September 1926, on Janmashtami, when local Muslims strongly protested the traditional musical processions passing near local mosques. A Muslim hartal (strike) was organised on September 8 and 9, and Muslim carriage and cart drivers were stopped from offering transportation services to Hindus during the festival. In retaliation, Hindus initiated a counter-boycott of Muslim drivers and began forcing passengers out of carriages, even burning their vehicles down. This triggered a fierce Muslim counter-offensive that paralysed Dhaka for days.
While music near mosques was the physical trigger, history points to a broader landscape of friction that allowed these events to combust so easily. The collapse of Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922 fractured the fragile alliance between Hindu and Muslim nationalists. Politics became intensely polarised along communal lines as groups competed for administrative power.
The Raj actively exploited these religious chasms under its “divide-and-rule” strategy to undermine the secular Swarajya Party’s strong influence across Bengal. The political polarisation set off by Curzon’s 1905 experiment eventually laid the foundational blueprint for the bloodier 1946 Direct Action Day and ultimately the Partition of India in 1947.
Before that, time to revisit Aonla.
Forced into seven years of back breaking imprisonment, our small-town-big-man from Aonla, Sheikh Rasool, sought to subvert the judicial system. His wealth provided him the means to hire two outstanding English lawyers at the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad, then India’s second most significant court of law after the High Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal (Calcutta High Court, for short). Over the next three years after his incarceration, two leading lawyers at the Allahabad High Court, Sir Charles Ross Alston, and B.E.O.Connor argued, one after the other, that Rasool was, at best, an observer, and sloganeer, not a participant in the arson that killed Aonla’s Hindus, craftily translating the Hindi word ‘maro’ to ‘beat’ not ‘kill’ in English. Rasool, they argued was not a part of the mob, he was only a cheerleader, joining the chorus “Hinduwon ko maro...Beat the Hindus” from his rooftop, when the actual arsonists were out on the street down below, marching down to the Hindu ghetto in his neighborhood. There were no CCTV cameras then, only the rationale of a sophisticated argument decided the course of judgment. Unfortunately for the Sheikh, both his lawyers died in succession before the appeal. Fortunately, for Rasool, the ‘translation’ held and his sentence was remitted from seven to three years of rigorous imprisonment. And, by now, those three years had almost lapsed.
Left without defence, and running short of cash, Rasool did the next best thing he could. He hired my young grandfather in June of 1938 to draft a mercy petition to His Excellency Sir Henry Haig, KCSI, CIE, ICS, Governor of United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. I discovered a carbon copy of that typewritten petition on my last visit to Allahabad.
The Sheikh pleaded that he had lost his wealth and property, his relatives had abandoned him, and his wife was rendered ill following childbirth a few years ago. Worse, his estate had been encumbered (become a legal burden because of claim, restriction, or liability attached to it), affecting his ability to freely sell, transfer, or use his land to support his family. His zamindari was ruined. The Sheikh pleaded that the Sir Haig remit his sentence and set him free. Immediately. “In the exercise of the Royal prerogative of Mercy.”
There is no way to tell if Sheikh Rasool Ahmad, Zamindar of Aonla, actually won his Freedom . The Muslims eventually did, just nine years after his petition.
The Hindus, were taken for a ride, and held hostage by Secular rhetoric and a whitewashed History of history sheeters that gave Independent India its all-time great Muslim icons: Dawood Ibrahim, Mukhtar Ansari, Atiq Ahmad, Asaduddin Owaisi and Rohilkhand’s yet another stalwart in the footsteps of the Sheikh, Azam Khan, whose vast estate, ironically, is “encumbered” today on the verge of demolition.
The fire ignited by Rasool Ahmad and his predecessors, going back two hundred years ago to Titu Mir of Barasat, still rages today, after forging India’s identity in its final ten-year lap to Independence.
August 1946 heralded the moment in history that led India to its “Tryst with Destiny” a year later. The 1946 riots marked a massive turning point of urban warfare and thousands of deaths, spreading to Bihar and Noakhali later that year.
Returning home to Allahabad for Christmas from his undergrad class at St Xavier’s College in Calcutta, my father, 15, weighing “1 maund-9 seer” or all of 45.72 kilos, and still in knickerbocker, jotted in his journal late in the night on New Year’s eve:
“Communal strife has again started in the city from day before yesterday, the 29th. Dec. ’46 in the Colvin Hospital area. This occurred as a result of Sikh Procession which was taken out of the Gurudwara of the Sikhs on occasion of the birthday celebration of the Guru Gobind Singh. The curfew order has been put into force from yesterday. That’s all for now.” Signed K.K. Roy. 31/13/46. He end his entry thus: “It is quite late now. I will get up, finish my puja and then go to eat. Again come back and read something or write. It is about to 9 pm now, it seems.”
Independence at midnight on August 15, a good 79 years ago, brought mass cross-border migration and unprecedented sectarian bloodshed across northern and eastern India, that we are familiar with today, with a genocide of up to 3 million people and displacement of up to 15 million ordinary lives that, unlike Sheikh Rasool Ahmad’s, had no means to plead for securing their home and hearth on both sides of the border, sacrificed to the hatred of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s TNT: Two Nations Theory.
But the killings did not end there.
Tensions continued sporadically, with major outbreaks after Independence, including the 1969 Gujarat riots, the 1989 Bhagalpur violence. And the 2002 Gujarat progrom, heading from The Burning Train at Godhra, in which 59 young Hindu volunteers (kar sevaks) sworn to rebuilding the Temple to Ram were roasted alive.
In my 30-year-stint as a journalist, I missed the train to Godhra, as also the 1992-1993 massacres of Mumbai in the wake of the 6th of December 1992 demolition of Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. I did get to interview chief minister Narendra Modi, however, two years after ‘Gujarat!’
But I have ground experiences of the hatred of Hindus, surviving and flourishing decades after India’s Independence and well into my formative years.
The first was in the midst of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, when, as an 8-year-old, I was packing my stuff on a December morning, before embarking for the “Chicken’s Neck” in the Siliguri Corridor, where my father was being posted to “listen-in” on the newly emerging nation we know as Bangladesh today. Barely days after Indian soldiers had crossed into East Pakistan in defence of the Bangali victims and to bolster the Mukti Bahini’s assault on the Khan Sena, distant Allahabad, half-way between East and West Pakistan, went into night curfew. That’s also when the city’s daytime traffic repeatedly came to halt, not by the traffic cop's whistle, but by calls of “Pakistan Zindabad” from banner-waving sloganmongers in the long and winding ‘juloos’ right through the city’s main thoroughfare on which we lived. That was a good 24 years after Secular India had started calling itself Free. Where was that noise coming from, I wondered then. Why? I keep wondering even now.
Still eight years later, in Calcutta, in 1979, we now lived in a posh, government-provided colonial condo, Palace Court on Kyd Street, sandwiched between the landmark Chowringhee Mansion and the power-packed MLAs Hostel in the vicinity of Park Street, bang in the heart of the city’s Muslim district. We had barely relocated in time for the last and final match of Imran Khan's Cricket Test Series tour of India, scheduled in the city from 29 January to 2 February 1980. As my sister, a first-year undergrad at my father’s alma mater, Xavier’s, dressed up to join her friends for autograph hunting at The Oberoi next door, our entire neighborhood woke up to the roar of “Pakistan Zindabad" once more. Pakistani and Islamic banners were fluttering from rooftops, including ours, where the building’s Muslim household staff had their living quarters. This, in a Left-ruled state where the Communists held fort for 34 years following Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, rubbishing Hindutva then, as now, in solidarity with the country’s entitled Muslims alternately playing perpetrator and victim.
Something’s rotten in Our Sovereign Secular Socialist Democratic Republic, I told myself then, decades before discovering my family’s fragile yellow documents this summer. Like my father, 33 years earlier, I jotted a cryptic note in my diary one night. I will share that one day.
For well over a hundred years, five generations of my family, possibly six, have heard the resonance of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s historically significant observation: “I am now convinced that Hindus and Muslims could never become one nation as their religion and way of life was quite distinct from each other.” The consequences of that statement have been disastrous for the subcontinent. The last time I heard someone repeating Sir Syed was on 16 April 2025, when a Rogue Pakistani General informed his audience: “Our forefathers believed that we were different from Hindus in every possible aspect of life... That was the foundation of the Two-Nation Theory. It was laid on the belief that we are two nations, not one.” That bravado led to the ‘defrocking’ and penes identification of 25 Indians, six days later, on vacation in Kashmir’s heavenly Baisaran Valley, that Zara, my daughter and a Gen Z; my wife Nandita a Gen Xer; and I, a Boomer, watched in utter disbelief on our handheld display devices at our haven in DC. Those men—a Gen Zer, Millennials and a Boomer—identified as “distinct” were gunned down in cold blood in front of their wives and children.
We have not heard the last of Sir Syed yet. Neither have we heard the last shriek of every Sheikh in small town India inciting mobs to "maro..."
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!
© Shubhrangshu Roy
15 August, 2026
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