Abstract
This paper attempts to understand the communitarian sense of awakening
in the city of Lahore, which surfaced in the nineteenth century. This
communal tangle further transformed into communal bigotry. By the end
of the nineteenth century, Lahore had started witnessing the burgeoning
communal antagonisms in its colonial inspired cosmopolitanism. Though
Muslims were in significant majority, they were deprived in many of the
important civic affairs. On the contrary, Hindus were far less in number
but having par excellence in many of the socio-economic realm, had
upper hand in the civic affairs. Sikhs were the least in numbers in the
three-main communities in the colonial Lahore. Every community had
grabbed the colonial opportunities according to their socio-economic
status; that status-according grabbing resulted into disequilibrium among
the communities. At the same time, all the three-main communities had
tried to draw their communitarian identity according to the colonial
challenges posed by missionaries, interacting and amplifying by the
subsequent tussles even among themselves. In that foreground, the
retrospective genesis of religious antagonism was transformed into the
communitarian and subsequent communal antagonism in the city of
Lahore with all of its own peculiarities. Assassination of Lala Lekh Ram
testifies that Lahore had entered into the communal antagonism, which
sealed the future course up to the coming of partition. Thus, it is indeed
important to study the maneuverings of all the three major communities
in the city of Lahore while making their identical schemes. It is argued in
this paper that identical maneuverings of the three-main communities led
to its culmination in the form of active communalism instead of
communitarian politics.
Adnan Tariq, Muhammad Iqbal Chawla. (2017) FROM COMMUNITARIANISM TO COMMUNALISM, COMMUNITARIAN IDENTITY IN LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY LAHORE: AN APPRAISAL, Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, Volume 54, Issue 1.
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