Number of words: 285

In areas where the Persian Islamic traditions were dominant, that distinctive culture (Perso-Islamic) began to represent the culture of the rulers, these were/are the ashraf, the global people, whose ancestors had come from other cultures, or so they averred, and some certainly had but most only so claimed. The ashraf had a well-defined vision of themselves; indeed they still do. They asserted that as they had come from elsewhere it was to rule; that this wielding of power was their natural right. They cultivated and cherished Perso-Islamic standards conduct and manners, being prepared to accept in their world such of the Hindus—as for example the Kayastha and Kashmiri Brahmins—who helped them with the business of running a government and who willingly absorbed some external elements of Muslim culture. But they hesitated, by and large, to accept the proselytised, for they had been drawn mostly from the poor. For the ashraf these converts had little to do with their world, these were the musallahs , the hewers of wood and the fetchers of water, they were the atrap. By the eighteenth century the very basis on which Perso-Islamic culture rested in India began to weaken, and to do so very rapidly. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Muslim ‘power’ had been reduced to Awadh, Hyderabad and the North- Western border lands. Perhaps because this period also saw a flowering of Islam, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, therefore, became a period of the highest refinement of Persianate culture in India. With this blooming also came the end; does not an Arab saying wisely caution, ‘Once the House is built the decline starts’.

Excerpted from Page 20-21 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh