Book Review

Asia

"It's the economy, stupid!" This political catch phrase summarizes Naureen Talha's central argument. Talha describes how the Muslims of colonial South Asia came increasingly to see themselves as an economically backward community: a community, moreover, whose minority status seemed to them to assure their continued backwardness in a postcolonial state within which Hindus would comprise the majority of the population. The solution, Muslims came to believe, was an independent Pakistan wherein Muslims would control their economic future. Why and how this belief emerged and significantly intensified is the focus of this book, itself a revision of Talha's Ph.D. thesis.

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Talha builds her argument in six short chapters plus a brief introduction and conclusion; the complete text and chapter endnotes total a slender 162 pages, followed by 30 pages of tabular material presented in a series of appendixes. The first chapter covers the period from 1857 to 1921 and shows how Muslims began to recognize and then to respond politically to the fact that their community had become underrepresented, relative to its population size, in education and government employment in most parts of India. Chapters two and three describe the attempts of the Muslim leadership to improve the economic position of Muslims (in government service, in the independent professions, and in trade and industry) in the period 1921–1935, within a political framework that did not, for most leaders, require a divided India as the necessary step to safeguard and advance Muslim economic interests. However, because of some Muslim advances in education during this period, Talha does argue that Muslims' perception of their economic backwardness and the role Hindus played in that backwardness increased.

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