The Founding of the Muslim League

In December 1906, at the close of the annual All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference held that year at Dhaka in eastern Bengal, a group of Muslim notables and landowners founded the All-India Muslim League, the first durable political organisation to speak specifically for the Muslims of British India. The initiative came above all from Nawab Khwaja Salimullah of Dhaka, who hosted the gathering, with leaders drawn from across the subcontinent. The League was born of the conviction, sharpened by the controversy over the 1905 partition of Bengal and by the rise of the Indian National Congress, that the Muslims of India, a large minority of perhaps a quarter of the population, needed their own organised voice to protect their interests in the new representative and electoral politics the British were slowly introducing, lest they be permanently outvoted. Its early aims were loyal and limited: to promote Muslim political rights, to secure separate representation, and to foster good relations with the colonial government. Over the following four decades the League was transformed, especially under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, from a notables' pressure group into a mass movement, and it became the vehicle of the demand for a separate Muslim state that culminated in the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Its founding at Dhaka in 1906 is thus a seed of one of the great political transformations of twentieth-century Islam, the emergence of the Indian Muslims as a self-conscious modern political nation. This scene depicts the founding gathering, the delegates at their long table in a riverside Dhaka mansion above the Buriganga.