Indeed, the political landscape of India has undergone a major shift. The dominance of Hindu nationalist parties both at the Centre and in a major part of the states has largely changed the idiom of politics and the narrative of public discourse. With the help of upper-castes-led media, the ruling establishment has pushed the agenda of seeing “Hindu”, “Hindi” and “Hindustan” as coterminous. As the communal narratives permeate large parts of the country, even a good share of the middle classes among the minorities cannot remain unaffected, and as a result they secretly believe that India has become a “Hindu” country and that there is no chance of the resurrection of a secular and democratic India. Some of them, who have developed a great skill for survival, have long bowed to the Hindutva forces so that their privileges are not denied. While these trends are the bitter realities of India today and must not be hidden under the carpet, it is also not correct to equate these developments with the true representation of a continental-sized region called India.
My optimism lies in the fact that no society is as diverse as India. India is another name for complexity, heterogeneity, contradiction, conflict and cooperation. India is neither a “holy land” nor a “fatherland” of any particular religious community. In fact, ours is a home to numerous peoples who have been settling and resettling for thousands of years.
While the ideologues of the Hindutva forces selectively arrange facts to push through an artificial narrative of equating the “Indian nation” with “the Hindus”, such an exercise is a direct copy of the Western discourse of the nation-state. While the Hindutva forces are never tired of calling themselves “the true nationalists”, they have often avoided discussing how the Hindutva ideologues were so deeply driven by colonial discourse that they had to quote German nationalists and European thinkers to push their concept of Indian-ness (Bhartiyata) and Hindu-ness (Hindutva). Even the idea of looking at history through a religious lens is a creation of colonial discourse, and the so-called nationalist forces have been shamelessly peddling the same divisive colonial narrative almost 80 years after the end of foreign rule.
That is why the more I hear about someone holding a Hindutva flag, shouting at Muslims and other minorities and questioning their patriotism, the more I become convinced that Hindutva politics is hollow. The denial of material reality is not possible for any honest observer. Only a fool or a crooked person would deny the pluralism that acts as a bedrock of Indian society.
Not only a few pages of an article but even the whole volume of a magazine would not suffice to truly capture the diversity and plurality of the country whose physical boundaries are spread across thousands of miles. The imprint of multiculturalism is visible in every walk of life. Adivasis, Dravidians, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Hindus and diverse religious and non-religious communities have left their imprint throughout the width and breadth of the country. The contribution of Islamic civilisation and Muslims to the progress of India and to the development of its composite culture is no less than that of anyone else.
As against the communal perception that Muslims arrived in India as “invaders”, plundering villages and injuring and killing people, the larger historical facts indicate that soon after the spread of Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad [ﷺ], the radiance of Islam brightened the coastal shores of India. It was through Arab traders that the peaceful message of Islam spread in the subcontinent. The local rajas were cosmopolitan enough to welcome the Arabs and agreed to enter into marital ties with them. The coastal region of Kerala witnessed the foundation of mosques much before the arrival of Muhammad bin Qasim in the early 8th century.
That is why nothing is more farcical than classifying the religions practised in India as those belonging to “Indic” or “non-Indic” traditions. How could the Hindutva organisation, which was floated by a bunch of Brahmins and some upper castes who had no record of participating in anti-colonial struggles, claim the right to present themselves as “nationalist” forces in India and become a self-proclaimed authority to decide the criteria for “Indic” and “non-Indic” religions? Their own history is barely one hundred years old, while the historical evidence of the establishment of mosques as well as churches in India goes back thousands of years. How then can the Christian and Islamic traditions be called non-Indic or foreign elements?
As a matter of fact, neither Christians nor Muslims living in India need to buy the fraudulent argument of considering themselves outside the Indic classification. The Muslims and the Christians of India are, in fact, an inseparable part of Indian-ness. Most Muslims practising Islam and Christians practising Christianity are more influenced by the regions in which they have been living than by the land from which their religions originally emerged.
We will only be able to appreciate the beauty of composite culture and shared living when we look at society through historical, sociological and economic lenses rather than easily buying into mere religious explanations. Just as the Hindutva forces wrongly assume Hindus to be coterminous with the Indian nation, some members of the minority communities trace their lineages to outside India. While it may be possible that a few hundred or a few thousand people might have migrated from Central Asia and Arab lands to India, the majority of Muslims in this country are natives. There are multiple theories of conversion, but the weakest among them is the “sword theory”, by which it is argued that Islam spread in India through force. A more persuasive explanation of religious conversion is the promise of Islam to the lower castes and Adivasis/Dalits for equality, as they were the major sufferers of the rigid caste system.
Within a quick succession, Islam spread throughout the subcontinent. The Sultans and the Mughal rulers were able to govern the vast land of the country because the previous regimes paid almost no attention to the welfare of the people. The unequal caste system was responsible for disunity among the people and the backwardness of the economy. These were some of the reasons why the Muslim rulers succeeded in capturing political power. While the Muslim rulers practised Islam in their personal lives, they did not impose their personal beliefs on those whose faiths were different. Except for a few incidents here and there, the period under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals was largely free from mass communal politics. In fact, the onset of communal polarisation was a result of the modern era, where multiple factors such as census and enumeration, the construction of new identities, electoral competition, the writing of history and textbooks based on communal interpretations of Indian history, the colonial policy of divide and rule, and the opportunism of native leaders played significant roles.
Voluminous books have been written by historians of credibility to show the emergence of a composite culture in the medieval era. The arrival of Islam not only revolutionised the thinking process but also gave a great push to the marginalised castes and communities to achieve equal status. No one is making the argument that there was an absence of material inequality or hierarchical social status in the medieval period. But the spread of the Islamic principle that all human beings are the creation of God gave an impetus to the struggle for equality. The rise of the Bhakti and Sufi traditions and the emergence of Sikhism through the preaching of Guru Nanak and the later Gurus challenged the rigidity of the caste system and preached the message of humanism. Many religious Sufis and Gurus spoke truth to power and sympathised with peasants and labouring classes.
It was also the time when new techniques in agriculture and architecture reached India. From poetry to music, a beautiful fusion took place. The influence of Arabic and Persian languages was so great that thousands of common words, along with grammatical and syntactical forms, entered the vernacular languages. Not only that, the Mughal rulers patronised artists and poets, both Hindus and Muslims, and as a result literature rose to a new height. The Muslim rulers not only patronised the Brahmins and donated generously to the construction of temples, but several Hindu religious texts were also translated into Persian, facilitating their spread to Central Asia, Arab lands and even Europe.
As far as politics is concerned, the Sultans not only protected the boundaries of India, but the Mughal rulers, particularly under Akbar and Aurangzeb, contributed to processes of political consolidation across the subcontinent. That is why to call the Mughals foreigners, to question the patriotism of Muslims, or to deny their role in national integration and nation-building is to repeat one of the biggest historical falsehoods.
[Dr. Abhay Kumar is the author of the recently published book Muslim Personal Law: Definitions, Sources and Contestations (Manohar, 2026). Email: debatingissues@gmail.com]