The idea of separate nations

Muslims generally kept away from the Civil Disobedience Movement, and around the same time a new idea began to take shape.

In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, a philosopher and Urdu poet, presided over the All-India Muslim League session at Allahabad.

He proposed a separate territory for Muslims in northwestern India, which would let Muslims preserve their culture and religious identity.

But read the key condition the chapter adds: that territory would sit "within a larger Indian federation".

So Iqbal's 1930 proposal is not yet Pakistan. The word 'Pakistan' was coined only a few years later. What he proposed was self-rule inside one country, not a separate country.

Still, it sharpened the debate about separateness, and the chapter is careful about who stood where.

Nearly all Congress leaders opposed the Two-Nation idea, including Muslim leaders such as Maulana Azad and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who insisted Hindus and Muslims could live together and sort out their differences. Jinnah supported the idea of Pakistan.

And a few Hindu organisations, such as the Hindu Mahasabha under V.D. Savarkar, saw Hindus and Muslims as two distinct nations living side by side, though without openly asking for a partition.