Penderel Moon arrived in Bahawalpur as revenue minister in April 1947 under Prime Minister Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani, later governor of West Pa...
Penderel Moon arrived in Bahawalpur as revenue minister in April 1947 under Prime Minister Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani, later governor of West Pakistan and remembered by Salahuddin Abbasi as a “lovely little roly-poly man”. He took over from Sir Richard Crofton who had been in the post since 1942, the first of the two British prime ministers of Bahawalpur.
Moon commented on a “vague hostility” to the arrival of another British official, which he put down in part to the desire to see at last the end of the British and secondly to a tradition of “anti-western, obscurantist and reactionary Islam” in Bahawalpur. In the former complaint, the population must have been disappointed to get a second British prime minister after Independence. In the latter, such opinions may have been part of the earlier clash of the British with tradition embodied in Maulvi Ghulam Hussain. They were not overtly shared by the anglophile nawab.
However, in the years since Bahawalpur was absorbed into the Punjab, marginalised, forgotten and impoverished in the enrichment of the upper Punjab, reactionary Islam had gained ground in Bahawalpur once more. The huge support, moral and financial, given by the nawab of Bahawalpur to the Quaid-i-Azam and the new...
