(1) Colonial institutions and colonial knowledge played a massive role in shaping our modern

understanding of our regional religions, languages and cultures. Discuss in your own words,

the history of some of these institutions and forms of knowledge in the formation of our

modern identities.

South East Asia is undoubtedly a third world region and, believed by countless historians, this is

because of its colonial past. Even though colonist countries like Britain do not actually deny it,

they certainly do not say that that is what happened. The rhetoric is so one-sided that most literary

work on this issue is done within South East Asia. From social constructs that define our everyday

lives to civil and military institutions, everything is fundamentally flawed as it was designed by

the British to serve them and we are constantly trying to make them work for us.

One such example is that of our own country’s police that is crumbling because of corruption and

injustice. It was designed by the British to instill fear into the Indian population and that is what it

is doing right now. The public is afraid of them even though the police is supposed to serve them.

On the other hand, is the relatively recently made Motorway Police which has the best relationship

with the public. Every rank has similar uniforms and many basic flawed principles have been

abolished to fulfil this relationship.

Pakistan became independent on the 14th of August in 1947 and it has been more than seventy

years since then. The problems created by the British to divide the Indians are still present and are

still a major hindrance in the progress and the prosperity of the region. Pakistan got its

independence in the name of religion and this is a fact that we, as Pakistanis, are extremely proud
of. This is a completely new phenomenon that still baffles historians. The question they raise is

that how did we survive before the arrival of the British if that was such a huge problem. The

answer is simple. It was not an issue. During the late 19th century, the British, to better

“understand” the Indians, decided to do a census. In the census, for the first time ever, everyone

was asked to state their religion. This was the first time, in the history of India, that someone put

a number against a religion and analyze the Indian population with respect to religion. This divide

matured for more than 70 years and led to the formation of two countries that still hate each other

to their core.

British had a very simple rule to subdue its colonies and that was to divide and rule. Just like they

used opium to do that in China, they used religious hatred in India. Instilling this distaste by

demographically dividing communities, they would often allot budgets based on religion. At first

Muslims and Hindus were united against the British rule but by the start of the 20th century, these

tactics started working and Hindus and Muslims started having clashes both at civil and political

levels. This hatred still exists and affects us in a lot of ways. The money that can be used to pull

both countries out of poverty but we are too busy on the problems created more than a hundred

and fifty years back.

As with any other case, British saw the Indians as the unsophisticated “animals” that needed to be

disciplined. As they were just getting started with ruling them, they realized that to do a “better”

job, they needed to understand the people. A college known as Fort William College where they,

along with some “learned natives” studied the languages spoken by the locals. Upon seeing, quite

literally, a mess of hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects or accents or variations in the
same language, they compared it to their “civilized” homeland where they only had one language

and took it upon themselves to clean up this mess. They studied some languages and decided to

rename the language known to many as Hindi, Hindvi, Rekhta, etc. Coming from a country called

“England” that had one language called “English”, calling the language of Hindustan as

“Hindustanee” made sense to them but it utterly failed. Just like with the religious divide in the

census mentioned earlier, a new kind of hatred developed. This distrust between essentially same

language gave birth to a new phenomenon – a language got attributed to a religion. Upon further

misinformation fed to the public by the gora “scholars” at Fort William College, people started

thinking that the Mughals brought Urdu to the sub-continent with them. Despite being false, this

discourse stuck around and is still a source of hatred between India and Pakistan to this day.

In the modern rhetoric surrounding the Independence of Pakistan, at least in Pakistan, the most

common term used it the “two-nation theory” which implicates that Hindus and Muslims are

essentially two very different people and cannot live together because of their inherent differences

of cultures, languages and religion. Notice the last three words. These are the three things goras

actively used to “divide and rule” the Indian sub-continent. This is the reason that the validity of

this theory is still debated. The Indian state is still largely, at least on paper, secular with millions

of Muslims and other minority religions. While Pakistan is a Muslim nation-state, both countries

suffer from the problems created by the goras in the colonial India. Religious minorities are

persecuted on a regular basis. Lower Class jobs are unofficially and in some cases officially

reserved for the minority religions. People are often forced to convert which leads to them hiding

their identities from the people around them. People have to change their eating habits to match

those of the majority of their respective countries. Despite these and countless other measures
taken by the minorities, they still suffer. Especially in Pakistan, the number of minorities have

decreased significantly. They are practically non-existent in all of the provinces with the exception

of Sindh. Even there, the numbers have decreased and it is all thanks to the problems created by

the goras.

The religious hatred created a lot of other problems too. The most important being religious

extremism. The most recent example of that would be the Hindu Nationalism that is slowly

ingesting all of India. It is fueled by anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim discourse and closely resembles

the Nazi ideology of Hitler. This is evidence that, even after seventy years, we, the Indians, are

still sitting in the rubble created by the goras – throwing stones at each other and have utterly failed

at rooting out these inherent problems.

Bibliography
Chand, T. (1944). The Problem of Hindustaani.
Faruqi, S. R. (2001). Aspects of Early Urdu Literature and History.