Article54

India was divided in not in 1947 and it was divided in 712

India was not divided in 1947. That was only the cartographer’s flourish, the final ink upon a map already scarred for over a millennium. The real division began in 712, when Muhammad bin Qasim crossed into Sindh, defeated Raja Dahir, and declared the Indus Valley open to the sword of Islam. Partition was not Jinnah’s invention, nor Mountbatten’s blunder, nor even the British Empire’s divide-and-rule at its most cynical. Partition was inscribed in history when the first mosque rose on the ruins of a temple in Sindh. Everything that followed—the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Muslim League, the hurried negotiations of 1947—was commentary on that original rupture.

India had always known invasions. Alexander’s soldiers marched to the Beas before turning back. Central Asian nomads stormed into Punjab, plundering and settling. Huns and Scythians left their traces in bloodlines, coins, and villages. But those invasions, however brutal, carried no theology that demanded erasure. They did not deny the gods of India their existence. The Greeks could admire Indian sages. The Kushans could commission statues of the Buddha. Even the most violent incursions ended in assimilation, with conquerors eventually absorbed into the kaleidoscope of Indian culture.

What came with Muhammad bin Qasim was different. The armies that marched into Sindh did not come merely for land or loot; they carried an ideology that declared India’s temples to be houses of falsehood, its gods to be idols, its people to be dhimmis—second-class subjects tolerated but never respected. The sword was not only a weapon of conquest; it was an instrument of theology. A mosque was not just a new building; it was a declaration that another god had replaced the old. That was the beginning of Partition: not a line on a map, but a line across the soul of a civilization.

From that moment onward, Indian history could never again be described as a seamless unfolding of one culture. Every dynasty after 712 had to grapple with the fact that a portion of the land had been claimed in the name of a god who recognized no equals. The line widened with the Delhi Sultanate, established in the thirteenth century. The Sultans were not just rulers; they were custodians of a faith that bound them to law books and jurists far away in Arabia. Indian kings had fought wars before, but their disputes were personal or dynastic. The Sultanate’s wars were often framed as jihad, a struggle for the supremacy of Islam. When the great temples of Mathura or Somnath were razed, it was not simply plunder; it was theology hammering away at stone.

The Mughals, who followed the Sultans, complicated this story but did not erase it. Akbar dreamed of synthesis, experimenting with Din-i-Ilahi, marrying Rajput princesses, inviting Hindu thinkers to his court. But Akbar was the exception, not the rule. Aurangzeb, the empire’s most orthodox monarch, reversed the experiment. Temples were demolished, the jizya tax reinstated, and the line that Qasim had drawn in Sindh was etched deeper into the soil of India. The Mughal empire, despite its artistic grandeur, was another rehearsal of Partition: an empire forever negotiating the terms of coexistence between a Hindu majority and a Muslim ruling elite.

To claim that Jinnah divided India is like blaming the last tremor for an earthquake whose fault line had been shifting for centuries. By the twentieth century, that fault line had hardened into identity. When the British arrived, they exploited what was already present. Their censuses classified populations by religion. Their legal reforms created separate electorates, ensuring that Hindus and Muslims voted as distinct communities rather than as citizens of a single polity. The colonial state did not invent the division—it codified it, quantified it, and institutionalized it. By the time Jinnah delivered his Lahore speech in 1940 demanding Pakistan, he was drawing on centuries of precedent. He was not writing a new story; he was delivering the conclusion of one that had begun in Sindh.

Critics resist this compression of history. They prefer to see Partition as a modern problem: a British conspiracy, a nationalist failure, a communal tragedy avoidable with better leadership. They point to centuries of coexistence—shared languages, shared festivals, shared neighborhoods. They argue that Hindus and Muslims ate from the same kitchens, celebrated each other’s weddings, and mourned each other’s dead. They note that Sikhism itself emerged as a bridge tradition, testifying to a history of mingling rather than division. There is truth in this picture, but it is only half the truth. Coexistence was always provisional, always shadowed by asymmetry. A Hindu might attend a Sufi shrine, but the Quran could never bless an idol. A Muslim might love Ram as a cultural figure, but he could not accept Ram as a god. The intimacy of daily life did not erase the abyss between theology and theology.

Consider the contrast with Buddhism. Buddhism, too, spread beyond India. It claimed universal truth, sent missionaries to Central Asia, Sri Lanka, China. But when Buddhism and Hinduism contested each other within India, they argued in debate halls, not on battlefields. The Buddha did not declare Vishnu or Shiva to be false gods; he taught another path. The quarrels were intellectual and sometimes political, but they remained within the family. Islam’s arrival was different. It was the intrusion of a doctrine that did not see a family at all, but strangers whose gods were to be overthrown. That is why the violence of Partition feels different in kind from the many dynastic wars of Indian history. Partition was not simply the failure of modern politics; it was the eruption of a theological incompatibility seeded in 712.

When trains of refugees arrived in Punjab in 1947 carrying corpses, when wells in Bengal ran red, when millions stumbled across borders they did not choose—those horrors seemed sudden. But they were not sudden to history. They were the culmination of a thousand-year fault line finally tearing open. The neighbors who once shared meals became enemies because their gods had never shared legitimacy. A line that began with Qasim’s horsemen on the Indus ended with Radcliffe’s pen on a map.

Does this mean Partition was inevitable? That is the harsh conclusion, and yet history offers little evidence to the contrary. Every attempt at synthesis—Akbar’s ecumenism, Gandhi’s prayers that included verses from the Gita and the Quran, Nehru’s secular dream—collapsed under the weight of the original asymmetry. Tolerance without reciprocity is not peace but postponement. The India of 1947 discovered what the India of 712 had already been shown: when one side believes its truth is absolute, the other side’s tolerance is weakness, not strength.

This longer view does not absolve Jinnah of his role. He could have chosen differently. He could have sought a federation, a compromise, a looser union. But Jinnah was the executor, not the originator, of Partition. He reaped what had been sown long before him. Nor does this view absolve the British. They hastened the division, hardened identities, and then fled the mess they had made. But blaming the British alone is like blaming the matchstick for a fire that had been smoldering for centuries. The tinder was laid in 712.

The tragedy is not only historical. The Partition of 1947 has frozen the subcontinent into suspicion. India and Pakistan glare at each other across borders fortified by armies and nuclear weapons. The ghosts of 1947 haunt every riot, every flare of communal violence. But beneath those ghosts lie older ones: the fall of Dahir, the first razed temple, the first mosque built upon a conquered site. To understand Partition as only a twentieth-century tragedy is to miss the depth of the wound.

And so, when we tell the story of India’s division, we should begin not in Lahore in 1940 or in Delhi in 1947, but in Sindh in 712. Partition was not an accident of modern politics but the fulfillment of a logic introduced when the first conqueror declared India’s gods to be false. From that moment onward, every dynasty, every empire, every negotiation was either an attempt to manage the fracture or a refusal to acknowledge it. Jinnah may have raised the banner of Pakistan, but Muhammad bin Qasim planted it. The rest is commentary.