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Ayesha Jalal Wikipedia

Dr Ayesha Jalal is a Pakistani historian. She is a professor of history at Tufts University and a Macarthur Fellow. The bulk of her work deals with the creation of Muslim identities in modern South Asia.

She obtained her BA,majoring in History and Political Science, from Wellesley College, USA,and her doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge. Dr Jalal has been Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1980-84), Leverhulme Fellow at the Center of South Asian Studies, Cambridge (1984-87), Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC (1985-86)and Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies(1988-90). She has taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Tufts University, Columbia University and Harvard University.

She is the author of 'The Sole Spokesman' and many other books on the partition of the British India in 1947.

Prof Jalal is probably the only person in American academia who writes on the history of Pakistan. Her innovative scholarship has led to frequent criticisms by both Pakistani and Indian establishment scholars. Her most prominent works are on the role of Jinnah and the partition of India. She argues that the 1947 partition of India -- the event that opened the door for the creation of Pakistan -- was an accident, a colossal miscalculation. What's more, she says that Jinnah never wanted a separate Muslim state; he was only using the threat of independence as a political bargaining chip to strengthen the voice of the Muslim minority in the soon-to-be sovereign India

Conversely, she lays a greater share of the blame for partition on the Indian National Congress and leaders like Nehru and Sardar Patel, who saw partition as a way of elminating its main competition and leaving it dominant player in centralised state. Indeed, successive Congress governemnts ruled India till 1977.

In this book Dr. Ayesha Jalal examines what happened in the years between the 1937 elections and the partition, identifying the factors which led to the creation of Pakistan and providing new insights into the nature of the British transfer of power in India.

In particular, Dr. Ayesha Jalal focuses on the role of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All-India Muslim League, and the main proponent of the two nation' theory on which the demand for 'Pakistan' was based. Jinnah claimed to be the sole spokesman of all Indian Muslims, not only in provinces where they were in a majority but also in the provinces where they were in a minority. Yet given the political geography of the subcontinent it was clear that there would always be as many Muslims outside a specifically Muslim state as inside it.

This book investigates how Jinnah proposed to resolve the contradiction between a demand for a separate Muslim state and the need for a strategy which could safeguard the interests of all Indian Muslims. It does so by identifying Jinnah's real political aims, the reasons why he was reluctant to bring them into the open, and his success or failure in achieving them.