Number of words: 425

Because most Indo-Persian chroniclers of medieval India identified Islam with the fortunes of their royal patrons, therefore, with sycophantic inaccuracy they reduced accounts of those reigns into such hagiographical nonsense as ‘India’s history’ begins only from when Muslims began to rule areas around Delhi/Agra/Malwa. This attitude can be traced to the beginnings of the Turkish rule, an ironic oddity being that even as the Delhi Sultanates were consolidating their hold here, 8 the land of the birth of Islam was itself then being subjected to devastating Mongol invasions. That titanic Mongol energy and the ferocity of their invasions uprooted many Persianised Turks from their homelands in Iran and Central Asia, driving several of them towards Hindustan where they sought refuge, found sanctuary, often service in those still new Sultanates of Delhi. By ad 1258 the Abbasid capital of Baghdad had been razed and the office of the Khalifa of Islam taken over by the Turks. This effectively questioned not just the principal symbol of Islamic authority but also its institutions, ecclesiastical and temporal. In consequence a markedly preservative mentality got embedded in this large refugee community that had sought shelter in Delhi. Many of the traumatised escapees carried with them vivid memories of the inhuman ferocity of the Turkic-Mongol destructions. Which is why having found in this adopted homeland, Hindustan, a sanctuary the shelter itself became a focus of their remaining Islamic world. Thereafter, these elite administrators, men of arms and of letters then began to equate (habitually) the impress of Muslim presence in Hind with both sovereignty and with Islam itself. And Hind, as it has always done, gave sanctuary, but not all of itself. For then that latent nationalism, call it Indian or Bharatiya or Hindu or whatever you will, began to assert itself. That was also, roughly the time that Al Beruni came to this land—to Hind, as part student, part refugee, complaining that ‘the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs. They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste among their own people, still much more, of course, from any foreigner.’ Little wonder that thereafter this separation of the invader from the invaded, Muslim from the Hindu, began to permeate our social consciousness and fabric.

Excerpted from Page 15-16 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh