Pluralism Matters: Re-visiting the Qasbas in Colonial Awadh

It has been almost two decades that the book From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh got published and yet we see that the core argument stands not only relevant but also demands further investigation. Its writer, Mushirul Hasan, makes it clear that we must study pluralism in any society at any point in history so that we can understand what goes into the making of pluralism. The whole book has six major chapters: the first describes sociopolitical context of the qasbas; the second chapter describes Kidwai families in the Masauli qasba; the third one is on a taluqdar of Rudauli named Chaudhury Mohammad Ali; the fourth is a biographical sketch of three famous nationalist Muslims, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari and Rafi Ahmad Kidwai; the fifth one describes the Awadh region when pluralism started giving way to separatism and the last chapter is on the affect of Partition on the qasbati lives. In all six chapters, we see that the subtext is to understand the importance of studying pluralism as a value in itself.