pressure for daily library work, class, writing and meeting deadlines with my supervisor, I had little time for my family. Maliha, my wife carried the brunt of raising a child, shopping, cooking and feeding the family for which I cannot make enough acknowledgments to her. And whatever credit, I earned for this work in the past and whatever appreciation, I might deserve for its new version, I would share it with my wife, no matter if I pay her formal tributes here or elsewhere.
Sometime after my return from England, possibly in 1965, I met poet Benazir Ahmad, an elderly gentleman, in fact my wife’s relative; he was a member of the Pakistan National Assembly at that time. When I told him about my thesis on the British Indian Central Legislature and that I just started working on Pakistan’s National Assembly, he was very happy. When I was complaining about consecutively working on two restricted legislatures, in Colonial India as well as in Pakistan, the gentleman, a former anti-British rebel in his youth and an accomplished writer, counseled me that even a handicapped legislature was, at times, better than no legislature at all! He ← xxi | xxii → encouraged me to study the Pakistan National Assembly even though at that nick of time, it was dwarfed by an undeniable executive dominance. He was glad to receive a copy of my published thesis. What’s more, he told me that he made a proposal to the then Pakistan National Assembly to establish a good research library for reference purposes.
Two important feedbacks on this work are worth mentioning in this Preface for the book’s new edition: When I returned to Dhaka in 1964, I was invited by the local Asiatic Society to make a presentation on my Ph.D. dissertation and I accepted the invitation. In course of my speech, I used the term Muhammadan when talking about the Muslim members of the legislature and the Muslim constituencies were too officially listed as the Muhammadan electorate. Most Muslims were then elected from the separate communally designated seats. One senior Professor of Islamic Studies at the Dhaka University made a serious objection to the use of the term Muhammadan: it was wrong to categorize the Muslims under that banner since they pray to Allah only and not to Prophet Muhammad, he reminded. He admonished me for using the Muhammadan badge for the Muslims; it was routinely done by the Western Orientalist scholars out of ignorance and disregard, the faculty insisted. Personally, I had little problem in respecting this critique, but, as a matter of documents, the term Muhammadan continued in the Central Legislature’s debates and other records in British India. As a result, I was unable to change it in my text.
Another opportunity to draw on this book and the research behind it came in 1975 when I was invited to Pakistan’s Islamabad University’s Commemorative Conference on M. A. Jinnah, the acclaimed founder of Pakistan. I was asked to speak on Jinnah’s role in the Central Legislative Assembly, which I did in person. One of the anecdotes I shared in my seminar was a recollection of my 1963 interview with Lord M. Hailey, once upon a time an outstanding member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council in India. One of the episodes he remembered about Jinnah was his sharp skill in the legislative debates. Jinnah was precise in his speech and, consistently, he picked up such points on which the official members of the Central Assembly, time and again, found themselves on the defensive. Few of his colleagues would miss Jinnah’s speech and they would always take notes of what he delivered, Lord Hailey reminisced. In sharing that one-time interview with the audience in the seminar, I was throwing light on the bizarre relationship between the non-official Indian legislators and the executive members in the Central Legislature of the bye gone days who were not accountable to the legislative body. ← xxii | xxiii →
When I returned to the Dhaka University, then East Pakistan in 1964, the “publish or perish” pressure obliged me to bring out my Ph.D. thesis in Dhaka with a local publisher. But I did it in a rush, with a slice of disappointment, without much of revision, polishing and serious editing even though a few generous people helped me towards the publication. They were acknowledged in its first edition and I have later reprinted it here as a matter of a chronological testimony of this book. The limited printing of the book was, however, stuck in poor marketing: I thought about a revised second edition, a wish that is fulfilled now after 54 years in hibernation! Meanwhile, in 1965, my thesis earned the Lord Campion Award of the British Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, for its contribution towards the “understanding of a representative institution”.
I am indeed delighted with this edition of the book and what I have been able to append to the earlier publication are summed up below:
• I have added a fresh comment or two to most of the chapters except my old Preface and a Foreword from my doctoral supervisor late Professor W. H. Morris-Jones for whose profound intellectual wisdom, I have maintained a life-long respect and gratitude.
• I have nearly rewritten the Conclusion Chapter (XI) with a new voice on quite a few points.
• At several chapters, I have changed or consolidated numerous sentences and restored the slips caused during the transcribing process from the original volume.
• The earlier graduate research done in England is intact in its detailed description laid across the chapters dealing with the Central Legislature’s structural-functional working—the original focus of this study. But I have added flashes of new perceptions drawn from my diverse research on Pakistan, Bangladesh, British India and Colonial Bengal over the last few decades. Rewritten comments and a few additions are more embedded in the Chapters VI, VII, IX and XI.
• I have added fresh points at different spots, but I did not radically change the original contents and quality of the chapters; Chapter I establishes the key stages of legislative history from 1861 to 1921, and there was not much of recent findings to add there. Chapter II puts the Central Legislature in the backdrop of Indian politics from 1921 to 1947—it falls in line with Chapters VI and IX, which too, in different ways, examine the Indian Legislature’s political relevance to the emerging ← xxiii | xxiv → nationalist campaigns, conflicting political trends, ventilation of grievances and the obdurate Hindu-Muslim discords. Chapter III lays out the legislative body’s electoral setting and Chapters V to VIII and X examine the composition, leadership, professional credentials and the social background of the legislators, law-making process, the institutional features and the relations between its two chambers. In addition, Chapter XI (Conclusion) sums up the achievements as well as the limitations of the Central Legislature, the Colonial India’s summit parliamentary institution.
• Partly based on my post-doctoral and more contemporary works, I have added that the political groupings in the Central Legislature, especially from the 1930s, reflected the growing Hindu-Muslim conflicts that ultimately catapulted to the 1947 division of India. Both the Hindu and Muslim religiosity and their respective communal colors found their expressions in the legislative chambers from 1926 as detailed in Chapters II, IX and XI (Conclusion).
• In course of a three-generational narrative in a village in Colonial Bengal, I found that my family elders’ remembrances about the Hindu-Muslim identity conflicts in the early decades of the 20th Century resonated in the larger provincial and central political forums: strikingly, some of those echoes were heard in New Delhi’s legislative floor long before the communal disputes transitioned themselves into a demand for Pakistan. I have touched on a few of such supplementary versions across this book’s couple of chapters; those are among the new elements added to this revised volume.
• Chapter VII’s title has been modified and there is a stroke of new analysis of the old data on the non-official members’ law-making achievements.
• The former statistical tables did not undergo any changes, but I tried my best to minimize the typographical errors, which were further checked during the polishing stage. As of this writing, I don’t have the resources to go back to the previous legislative research that I did in England in the 1960s.
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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (1965)
This
