The Crucible of Peace

This chapter presents an example of successful religious coexistence, the case of the Punjabi princely state of Malerkotla, which between 1923 and 1940 encountered a series of disputes concerning the audibility of Hindu and Muslim rituals: the arati–katha–namaz disputes. It seems that no one died in Partition-related violence in Malerkotla, and a large majority of the local Muslim population remained there rather than migrate to Pakistan. The chapter discusses Malerkotla’s complex history of conflict, going back to the state’s foundation in the mid-fifteenth century. The agreement in 1940 between local Hindu and Muslim leaders that resolved the arati–katha–namaz conflict was not to interfere in future in the practices of the other community. In the aftermath, even while Malerkotla too experienced several cases of communal stress, a mode of disciplining dissent seems to have been in place that helped to avert major clashes between Hindus and Muslims.