Hindus and Muslims in Medieval North India: Stages of Reciprocal Perception

Twelfth–Thirteenth Century: Acquaintance and Rejection

The situation changed drastically when Tajiks, Turks and other people from Central Asia, Near and Middle East, came to India as invaders and migrants and entered into direct contacts with the indigenous population. Those who had been hitherto imagined became clearly visible now. One of the early texts reconstructing the first impressions of such contact was ‘The Victory of Prithviraj’ (Pṛthvīrājavijaya), a heroic poem by a Kashmiri Brahman, Jayanaka. Patronised by Prithviraj Chauhan, the ruler of Ajmer (1149–92), he glorified the heroic feats of that prince prior to the latter’s valiant death in (or shortly after) the battle of Tarain (1192) against Muhammad of Ghor (1149–06). Before the war with Prithviraj, Muhammad Ghori had sent an ambassador to Prithviraj’s court in Ajmer. Jayanaka, who might have personally witnessed the reception of the ‘Turk’ envoy, left a description of perhaps the first ‘Turk’ he and his lord saw in flesh and blood.

This ‘Turk’ was described by Jayanaka as an exceptionally ugly person, whose clean-shaven head and wide forehead looked like a copper plate for writing (patta). His beard was reddish like grapes from his homeland; his skin was as white as bleached cloth or the body of a person affected by ‘condemnable illness’ (avadyaroga). His speech was as annoying as the shrieks of forest birds; and absence of retroflex sounds (luptamūrdhavarṇām) in his language made him tongue-twisted (bhāṣādoṣavaśād). Jayanaka denounced the ambassador and his ruler as sinners, eaters of ‘bad food’ and slaughterers of cows. The poet even made Muhammad’s loconym (from the name of his domain, Ghor/Ghur, in Jayanaka’s rendering ‘Gauri’) a combination of two Sanskrit words, go (cow) and ari (enemy). ⁷

In his illuminating book on the material aspects of Hindu–Muslim cultural contacts in medieval India, Finbarr Barry Flood counterposed this episode from Jayanaka’s poem with the description of the same embassy in the thirteenth-century chronicle Tāj al-Ma’āṣir (The Crown of Glorious Deeds) by Ḥasan Niẓāmī. The chronicler spared no laudatory epithet for the envoy, one of the Sultan’s viziers, and described him as an attractive, wise and eloquent person. ⁸ As was demonstrated by Basile Leclére, who had studied thirteenth-century Sanskrit dramas, the Muslims were frequently demonised in those texts as mythological and epic rākṣasas (demons). ⁹ In Jayanaka’s poem, the Turk is not a demon, he is just ugly and disgusting: the main objects of censure are his appearance and speech. At the same time, the poet demonises the envoy’s liege, Muhammad Ghori, and compares him with Rahu, the maleficent planet and demon swallowing the Sun, presenting him as an evil king of Kaliyuga, the destroyer of the divinely sanctioned order of things and slaughterer of cows. However, neither the Sultan’s evil nature nor his ambassador’s ugliness are, in Jayanaka’s description, conditioned by religion. Even cows are slaughtered by the Sultan due to the ruler’s ‘inclination towards cold-blooded killing’ (mārakaphalāsaṁgād), not his wrong religion, which is never mentioned.

A few decades after Jayanaka wrote, Sanskrit epigraphs appeared in which the Delhi sultans were glorified in full compliance with Sanskrit royal panegyrics (praśasti). In those texts, not readily decipherable by Muslims, the Muslim rulers were still eulogised by the traditional epithets like ‘best of the kings’ (nṛpati vara), ‘Indra of the Earth’ (pṛthvīndra), ‘lord of the land’ (bhūmipati), ‘the Maharaja over the rajas’ (mahārājādhirāja) and so on. ¹⁰ This was not, necessarily, a testimony to the prevailing ‘communal harmony’. ¹¹ It seems more probable that the Hindu authors used for the Muslim kings the same standard clichés that had been prescribed by the Sanskrit literary tradition of narratives about rulers and their achievements. That the glorified monarchs were Muslims was not as important as their regal status. However, the epigraphs in question did testify to the Hindu elites’ acknowledgement of the fact that North India had come under the rule of Muslim conquerors with whom the Hindus had to coexist.

Fourteenth–Fifteenth Century: Annoyance and Adjustment

Within two centuries after Jayanaka had described his impression of the Muslim newcomers, a greater part of North, Central and partially Eastern India came under the rule of the Delhi Sultanate, which from the late thirteenth century began its rapid expansion southwards. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Sultanate disintegrated into independent principalities. One of such kingdoms was the Jaunpur Sultanate, founded in 1395. In the early fifteenth century, the celebrated Mithila poet Vidyapati Thakur wrote a poem titled ‘The Liana of Glory’ (Kīrtilatā). Two personages of the poem, the sons of a dethroned Rajput ruler, come to Jaunpur to solicit the Sultan Ibrahim Sharqi’s assistance in the restoration of their titular rights. As the two princes enter Jaunpur, described as a rich and flourishing city, they see in the crowded bazaar a multitude of ‘Turks’ (this word the poet used for Muslims of whatever ethnic denomination, along with yavana). This is how they look in Vidyapati’s description:

The Turks greet each other with ‘Salaam’.

They buy purses, shoes and stockings.

Mir, Wali, Salar and Khwaja ¹²

The Turk rides around the bazaar, collecting tax, ¹³

Looks angrily, saliva flows upon his beard.

He spends all his money on wine, devours hot kababs.

How to describe his stupid habit (avivek ka rītī)? He rides, a foot servant follows him.

How to describe their goofy (khundkārī) rule? They will declare one’s wife as alien!

Hindus and Muslims live side by side,

What is dharma for one is a mockery for another.

Here they call for namaz, there they recite the Vedas.

Here they say ‘Bismillah’, there they perform the sacrifice.

Here the Ojhas live, and there live the Khwajas.

Here they celebrate and there they keep fast (rojā)

Here they use betel, there they take sugar. ¹⁴

Here they read the namaz, there they perform puja.

In some place a Turk chases people,

Forcing them for performing begar. ¹⁵

He seizes upon a Brahman boy in a house,

Covers his head with a cow skin,

Rubs off the tilak from his forehead, tears his janeu ¹⁶ and tramples him under his horse.

He takes away the sacrificial rice and makes wine out of it.

Destroying the temples, they built scores of mosques,

Tombs and mausoleums – no place to step.

They say ‘Hindu!’ insult and chase.

Even a small Turk beats up (Hindus).

The Turks behave as if they are ready to swallow all Hindus.

But the Sultan is glorious and brave (ai seo pratāpī), may he live eternally! ¹⁷

It is worth analysing what annoys the Mithila poet in the ‘Turks’ most of all. Primarily, it is the Turk’s behaviour: rudeness, aggressive manners, eating habits, especially the consumption of meat, wine and onion that was especially disgusting for caste Hindus. The Muslims are depicted as hostile but empowered aliens; they exploit the conquered population, insult the Hindus and defile Brahman boys; their rule is tyrannical, their customs are ‘stupid’ and what they say is ‘rubbish’.

However, at the end of this long invective, Vidyapati unexpectedly praises the sultan, Ibrahim Sharqi whom the two Hindu princes pleaded for help and who finally helped them to regain their ancestral throne. We are left to guess whether this complimentary ending of the abusive description was caused by the poet’s aspiration for royal patronage or his desire to be just and, therefore, show that among Muslims there could be worthy people as well. More importantly, despite Vidyapati’s negative attitude to Muslims, he had graphically described the ‘Turks’ living side by side with Hindus. They could mock each other’s dharma, but, nevertheless, in cities like Jaunpur, and in many villages as well, the azan sounded in unison with the Vedic hymns, while ‘Khwajas and Ojhas’ coexisted in urban space, and this referred to the personages of not only Kīrtilatā, but Vidyapati’s own, ‘The Test of Man’ (Puruṣaparīkṣā), which included a story of Rajput princes faithfully serving the Delhi sultan. ¹⁸

It is noteworthy that neither Jayanaka nor Vidyapati censured Muslim faith as such. The Kashmiri Brahman would not even mention it, perhaps having no idea of it. The Mithila poet knows considerably more, mentioning mosques, mausoleums, fasting, namaz, azan, and other aspects of Muslim worship. Nevertheless, all of those aspects are referred to as something alien, annoying by their multitude and aggressive intrusion into the habitual Hindu urban space. At the same time, they are not condemned as elements of a ‘wrong’ religion. This approach is remarkably different from that of contemporary Muslim authors (to be discussed below), for whom the Hindus were bad as ‘unbelievers’. The reason seems to be not in an exceptional tolerance and peacefulness of Hinduism, as some Indian and Western scholars would make us believe, ¹⁹ but in the nature of Hinduism as a conglomerate of cults, as a religion devoid of a unified dogma complex, holy book, ruling organ or person, and practice of worship. For Jayanaka and Vidyapati, the ‘Turks’ were condemnable not because they believed and worshipped in a wrong way, but because they looked ugly, behaved rudely, insulted Hindus and intruded into their habitual way of life.

Sixteenth–Eighteenth Century: Adaptation and Individualisation

In the sixteenth century, North India and the adjacent territories saw another wave of Central Asian intrusion, the Mughal conquest, and became parts of a great empire of pre-modern history. By that time, the Muslims had come to constitute a significant part of the region’s population. After the disintegration of the Delhi Sultanate, a number of Muslim states emerged in various regions of India, where Muslims had become a part of local elites, learnt indigenous languages, adopted many elements of regional cultures and entered political alliances with Hindu elites. Bābur and his successors had, thus, to fight those Muslims who viewed themselves as ‘sons of the soil’ and opposed the Mughals as alien intruders (the same happened in the seventeenth century when the Mughal empire undertook its expansion into the southern Peninsula).

A factor facilitating the growth of Muslim population in various Indian regions was undoubtedly proselytism, since preachers from Ṣūfī, Ismā‘ilī, and other Muslim communities appear to have converted whole clans or castes (primarily those of low status) and tribes to Islam. This resulted in the numerical growth of those groups, which, though Muslim, differed but slightly from local Hindus (of the same social strata) as concerned language, way of life and culture. Almost every Hindu estate, caste or professional group acquired a Muslim counterpart—a partner or a rival—but, most importantly, a coparticipant in social life, close or similar in status, profession, values and culture. A Rajput and a Khan fought together under the Mughal banners (quite frequently, against their respective co-religionists); a Marwari and a Bohra were brought together by commerce; in a city bazaar, not only ‘Ojha and Khwaja’, but numerous Hindu and Muslim craftsmen worked side by side: labour division made them cooperate in the production of one commodity. ²⁰ It was not by chance that the ideas of Hindus and Muslims worshipping, albeit differently, the same Absolute God, and of communal strife orchestrated by fanatical and ignorant priesthood from both sides, became especially forceful in the preaching of those Bhakti and Sikh gurus who, like Kabir or Nanak, came from urban artisans and traders.

Muslims, belonging to various groups and castes, thus, tended to become a natural part of the social landscape, especially urban. There is an amazing example from Bengal, the celebrated mid-sixteenth-century poem Cāṇdīmaṅgal (Poem in Praise of Chandi) by Mukundarām Chakrabartī. One of the heroes, Kalaketu, obtains a boon from goddess Chandi and, clearing a huge jungle, founds a city. To make the city populous, the goddess caused a hurricane and flood to devastate the kingdom of Kalinga, so that the inhabitants flocked to the newly founded city. After a long list of Hindu castes who come to settle in the city, Mukundaram describes Muslims too, of every denomination and profession, from the pious Sayyids and Shaikhs to militant Pathans, along with numerous traders and craftsmen. Their culture, religion and traditions, including widow remarriage, so abominable for high caste Bengalis, are referred to by the poet in a calm and impassionate tone; some aspects, like the Muslims’ readiness to die but not break their fast, excites Mukundarām’s sincere respect. However, especially important is the fact that Kalaketu’s is an ideal city, a model, which has everything that a proper urban settlement was supposed to have; and the Muslims were portrayed by the poet as a social normality, a natural constituent part of the population having a legal and worthy place in its social life. ²¹

This was not to signify that the differences between Hindus and Muslims were not felt by either side. Shandip Saha’s study has demonstrated that even in the writings by the Vallabh Sampradāy, a Krishna Bhakti community, usually praised for religious universalism and tolerance, the Muslims were described as mlecchas and yavanas who had to be avoided by the believers unless they purified themselves by true service to Krishna, which was possible primarily in the next birth only. ²² Such an approach was common for many sectarian groups, in India. If one researches upon non-religious literature, especially historical works authored by Hindus in the sixteenth–eighteenth century, a remarkable tendency is observable. In those texts, Muslims are described not as an enormous crowd of hostile and faceless outsiders (Vidyapati’s turukkā anantā) but as individuals worthy of praise or censure according to each person’s character and behaviour. The process of adaptation to the Muslim presence was enforced by the process of their individualisation. The Muslims were now not just a natural part of social and cultural life, but human beings with individual qualities, good or bad. This is clearly visible in the Hindu authors’ attitudes towards Mughal monarchs.

Akbar (reigned, 1556–05) found his glorious place in history as an empire-builder and reformer who followed the policy of union with the Rajput princes. Initiating the tradition of marital alliances with Rajput princely families, he offered many scions of Rajput clans high ranks in imperial administration and, thus, transformed the Rajputs from enemies to ‘pillars’ of the Mughal throne. ²³ This, along with Akbar’s religious policy that acknowledged Islam and Hinduism as equally true religions, was the reason for that Mughal ruler to be honoured in Rajput literature by the panegyrics that no other Muslim king, before or after him, would receive. ²⁴ Some even divinised him, like Amrit Rai in his poem ‘The Life Story of Man Singh’ (Māncarit, 1581) ²⁵ :

Lakshmi, ever nestled near Hari’s heart,

Finds shelter in Akbar’s embrace as well. ²⁶

In this panegyric, Akbar is, thus, glorified as an ideal king and at the same time as a divine creature, a demi-god if not god. One has, of course, to bear in mind that Amrit Rai’s poem is a glorification of Raja Man Singh: obviously, a great general, statesman and ruler could have as a liege lord nobody but a deity.

The Rajput princely clans choosing alliance with the Mughals needed some kind of justification and vindication, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of other Rajputs, especially those, who, like the Sisodyas of Mewar, for quite some time declined such an alliance. ²⁷ This approach is observable in the panegyric of Akbar in another poem on Man Singh, the Māncarit-rāsau by Narottam from Amber:

Akbar, the ruler of Delhi, is acclaimed in all the four directions.

His is a Hindu rule (hendū rāj), who will call it Turk? Great is his glory.

[Akbar] worships Hari and takes ablutions in the Ganga.

He never kills living creatures and never eats them.

He came to the world (avatariyu) ²⁸ for the sake of the true path.

Thanks to him everybody lives according to the Dvapara-yuga laws. ²⁹

He reveres the Vedas and the Puranas, he has abolished the pilgrimage tax.

He immensely loves Hindus, and not Muslims. ³⁰

Narottam’s panegyric is a vivid example of self-justification addressed to the opponents of the Rajput–Mughal alliance. The poet attempts at proving that Akbar was by no means an alien; that his rule was hendū rāj; and, thus, there was nothing wrong or shameful for the Rajputs to acknowledge his suzerainty. Given poetic exaggeration, some of the deeds of the emperor, as praised by Narottam, are historically verifiable, like his later disinclination to eat meat, use of the Ganga water, abolition of the non-Muslim pilgrimage tax and reverential interest in Hindu culture. In the Bhakti hagiography, there was a popular narrative of Akbar being in his previous birth a yogi, who had by mistake swallowed a cow hair in milk and was ‘punished’ to be born a Muslim but nevertheless remembered his ‘true’ identity. ³¹

Such praise of Akbar by Hindu poets is in sharp contrast to the censure his grand-grandson, Aurangzeb (1658–07) received from Hindu authors in late Mughal times. Aurangzeb reversed the traditional Mughal religious policy by destroying temples and reimposing the poll tax on Non-Muslims (jizya). He naturally became a target of critical arrows from many authors. Thus, in his ‘Light of the Royal Parasol /Light of Chatrasal’ (Chatraprakāś), Lāl Kavī from Bundelkhand wrote:

When the Shah [Aurangzeb] ascended the throne, the Hindus’ breath was choked.

[He] introduced the heavy tax on pilgrimage, destroyed the Vedas,

Collected jizya from every household, and did whatever pleased him.

All Rajputs bowed down to him, submitted and began to go on foot. ³²

Here the author censures not only Aurangzeb but also the Rajputs who had submitted to him; in the lines that followed, he praised the Maratha hero Shivaji who was ‘proud and acted according to his own will’, who ‘vanquished eight kings and carved a kingdom for himself’. Another poem, ‘Fifty-Two Stanzas on Shiva’ (Śivā-bāvanī), alluding to Shivaji, showered invectives on Aurangzeb, starting with the latter’ s way to the throne, imprisoned his father Shahjahan and murdered his brothers, Dara Shukoh and Murad Bakhsh. ³³

Further, Bhushan denounced Aurangzeb as a hypocrite and deceiver:

From early morning, you take the beads of devotion (bandagī ko),

Repeating the Name (of God) [you] are deceit incarnate (kapaṭrūp kapaṭ). ³⁴

Further, the poet accused Aurangzeb of demolishing temples and imposing Islam, so that ‘fearing Aurangzeb, Gauri and Ganesha hide’. ³⁵ After that, he found it necessary to discuss ‘the bygone days’ and Aurangzeb’s predecessors:

Babur, Humayun, and Akbar, had never transcended the limits,

They respected Hindus and Muslims, the Vedas and the Quran.

Those rulers treated the Hindus lovingly,

Jahangir and Shah Jahan could be witnesses. ³⁶

Finally, Bhushan abused Aurangzeb as an avatar of demon Kumbhakarna ³⁷ (Kumbhkann asur autārī), and stated that the emperor was ready to destroy the temples of Varanasi and Mathura, forcing Hindus into Islam; Shivaji’s valour was the only obstacle to his evil plans. ³⁸

Nevertheless, irrespective of the means employed by the poets, the main aspect to be highlighted is the approach to the Muslim emperors taken as individuals. No less importantly, this approach was applied by non-Muslim authors not only to kings, but also in regard to nobles, officials and Muslims of any social rank. Thus, in the ‘Half a Tale’ (Ardhkathānak), the mid-seventeenth-century autobiography by the Jain merchant, Banarasi Das, the author referred to a number of his and his family’s Muslim acquaintances with the same individualised selectiveness. In this narrative, the reader comes across a gallery of Muslim officials: some were cruel oppressors who tortured merchants to extract money from them ³⁹ ; some were arrogant fools like a koṭvāl (head of the local police), who suspected Banarasi and his associates of forgery and were ready to impale them without any proofs. However, some of them were wise and reasonable like the dīvān (deputy or chief accountant) of the same koṭvāl who insisted upon a proper investigation of the case and finally saved the merchants. ⁴⁰ Even a father and a son could be different: thus, Chin Qilich Khan, the governor of Jaunpur, harassed the jewellers cruelly and made them run away from the city, ⁴¹ while his son and successor in office was described by Banarasi in Sanskrit laudatory terms as ‘generous, wise and brave’ (dātā, paṇḍit and bīr). ⁴² Importantly, the religion of those Mughal officials meant almost nothing to Banarasi, who, like his father and grandfather, knew Persian and enjoyed Sufi poems in Hindi. ⁴³ Banarasi gave a graphic description of how in Jaunpur the ‘orphaned townsfolk (prajā anāth)’ grieved at the death of Akbar, the poet himself having fainted at the horrifying news. ⁴⁴

The textual evidence presented above makes it possible to discern the evolution of the Hindu authors’ perception of Muslims, from the early stages of the conquest to late medieval times. Throughout the period, Muslims remain ‘different’, but emotional perception of this difference by Hindus had changed. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the ‘Turk’ was a mysterious, ugly and frightening envoy of a demon-like king. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ‘Turk’ was no more mysterious: he was aggressive, rude, hostile, but, nevertheless, a familiar inhabitant of the social space. Finally, in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, he was not a ‘Turk’ any more, but a resident of a certain region, not an ‘Indian Muslim’, yet in the absence of the concept of unified India, but a local, a regional Muslim. He was ‘different’ no doubt, but he spoke the local language (and composed poems in it on the stories from local lore) and shared many elements of regional culture. Most significantly, by manners, food, behaviour, etc., he was closer to the Hindus of the region than his co-religionists from other regions and countries. He was no more an outsider, but, an individual worthy of praise or censure according to his behaviour and character.

The Other Side

At the initial phases of the Ghorian conquest, the victors’ perception of the vanquished was recorded in the narratives’ disclosing, in Aziz Ahmad’s well-known definition, a ‘Muslim epic of conquest’, ⁴⁵ a righteous fight of the ‘friends of Allah’ against the idolatrous kāfirs (infidels), who, by their very nature, could have nothing good in them. Unlike the early Hindu perception of Muslims, the Muslim perception of the Hindus was based primarily upon the latter’s ‘wrong’ religion. That not all educated Muslims could be of such opinion was proven by the celebrated al-Biruni, for whom difference in faith could be no obstacle for studying Hindu culture and highlighting its positive sides, though, to be sure, he was not free from prejudices as well. ⁴⁶

That the mood of the ‘epic of conquest’ continued to be relevant long after the establishment of the Delhi sultanate can be discerned from many sources, an example of it was the ‘Benefactions of Firuz Shah’ (Futūḥāt-i Firūz shāhī), the text of inscription by Firuz Shah Tughlaq, the Delhi sultan during 1351–88. This text is well known to the students of the Delhi sultanate. Apart from being a reliable source on administrative, political and social history, it is likewise important for analysing the Muslim aristocracy’s perception of Hindus. Firuz Shah’s narrative discloses a psychology of a besieged fortress. His world is sharply divided into two parts: one is the community of ‘true believers’, that is, the Sunni Muslims, and another is the realm of hostile aliens. The latter include the Shias, the Mahdavis and other ‘heretical sects’: a considerable part of the text is a ‘report’ of sorts on how the Sultan had suppressed those ‘unbelievers’, executing their preachers and burning their books. Of course, among such aliens were also the Hindus who constituted the absolute majority of the Sultan’s subjects. The text contains a rather long report of the Sultan’s actions to suppress the ‘idol-worshippers’ (butparast), especially when they tried to build new temples. The Sultan proudly reported how ‘with God’s grace, the foundations of those godless (fāsad) structures were devastated, the preachers of unbelief (kufr) were put to death, others were warned, so this calamity (fisād) was over’. ⁴⁷

The Futūḥāt has a number of such episodes, which have recently become popular with pro-Hindutva authors and bloggers, ⁴⁸ but what they fail to notice is that even this text contains evidence of Muslim domestication in India. First was that, as the Sultan came to know that in the village (mauẓa) of Maluh or Malwah, not only Hindus came to worship the temples and the holy reservoir (kuṇḍ), but some irreligious (bedīn) Muslims as well, this made the Sultan destroy the temples, build a mosque instead, execute the preceptors and found two Muslim-populated townships in that place. ⁴⁹ Another important aspect of the text is the Sultan’s struggle against ‘un-Islamic’ practices of his Muslim subjects, like women going to the graves of the saints (mazārhā) or decoration of house walls, dresses, utensils or other objects with painted, embroidered or chiselled ‘figures’ of living creatures. ⁵⁰ This clearly demonstrates that orthodox wrath notwithstanding, Indian Muslims had even in Firuz Shah’s time come to share certain practices of lifestyle and even worship with local Hindus.

The pioneering role of the Sufis in learning Indian languages and cultures is well known, but despite the fact that they spoke and wrote in local vernaculars, as well as used Hindu cultural idiom, including even religious ones, some of them were able to assess the Hindus as people who, believing differently, could be virtuous and pious. ⁵¹ In the Fawā’id al-fu’ād, conversations of the celebrated Sufi Shaikh Nizam ud-din Awliya, recoded by the poet and military captain Amir Hasan Sijzi, the Shaikh related the story of a Brahman whose entire wealth had been confiscated by a city magistrate. The Brahman, though impoverished, remained ‘well and happy’, since his sacred thread, the symbol of his faith and status, remained with him. This was related by the Shaikh to his Muslim disciples as an example of dedication and spiritual strength, worthy of being emulated. ⁵² In his eyes, the Brahman was, thus, a selfless and pious individual, not an evil kāfir.

There was another tendency that had already existed in Firuz Shah’s time. It was represented by the rulers, thinkers and poets who, while remaining orthodox Muslims, nevertheless, associated themselves directly with India (or one of its regions). They viewed India as their homeland, emphasising their ‘Indianness’ in political alliances, language, lifestyle, aesthetic values and so on. One of the brightest representatives of this tendency was Firuz Shah’s elder contemporary, Amir Khusraw (1252–25). Like the Sultan, he was the son of a Turkic migrant. To be sure, in his romances and historical poems, he described the military campaigns of the Delhi sultans in full compliance with the tradition, praising the valour of the Muslim warriors and sneering at cowardly kāfirs. ⁵³

At the time, when Firuz Shah was writing his Futūḥāt, the educated Muslims had long become acquainted with Amir Khusraw’s work ‘Nine Celestial Spheres’ (Nuh Sipihr), completed in 1318. The third ‘sphere’ (chapter) of this poem is a panegyric to India with the poet’s unequivocal statement that ‘The country of Hind is a Heaven on Earth’ (Kishvar-i Hind ast bihisht bazamīn). ⁵⁴ After an eulogy of Indian climate, flora and fauna, the poet’s praise goes to the Hindu population, primarily the Brahmans, for their intelligence and perfection in various kinds of knowledge. This is followed by a very bold assessment of Brahmans, namely that since they believed in the omnipresent absolute, they should not be viewed as kāfirs. ⁵⁵ Therefore, the Hindus, in the poet’s understanding, were ‘a very noble race’ (hindū azān t̤āifah bisyār nekū). ⁵⁶ Further, the poet praises the Indian achievements in mathematics, literature and music and eulogises Sanskrit, but more important is his clearly stated self-identification as an Indian (‘Turk-i Hindustānī am’), it is but natural for him, as for anybody else, to speak of his ‘native land’ (maḥall-i khwesh), that is, India. ⁵⁷ Therefore, the Hindus, especially if they were no enemies of his patron sultans, were, despite differences in religion, ‘his own’, like the country of Hind, which he sincerely praised in precedence to the lands of Arabs, Persians and Turks, and ‘the whole world’.

Firuz Shah and Amir Khusraw personified two tendencies in the Indian Muslims’ self-identification. Those embodying the first one felt themselves as standing alone, with Hindus seen as aliens. Others felt a strong abomination with the things deemed non-Islamic, like the famous historian, Abd al-Qadir Badauni, who, forced by emperor Akbar’s orders to take part in the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa translation project, in his chronicle expressed his disinclination with the task. ⁵⁸ They formed a long historical tradition from medieval kings and theologians to twentieth-century ideologues and politicians who ultimately imagined and then secured a separate state for Muslims inside India.

The followers of the second tendency, remaining faithful to Islam, perceived themselves as Indians or, in the medieval period, primarily as Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Awadhi or Deccani Muslims, and assessed the Hindus as co-sharers of regional culture and as individuals to be treated according to their behaviour and character. They also formed a tradition which became exceptionally fruitful for Indian culture and society, as it embraced poets like Amir Khusraw, Malik Muhammad Jayasi and Abd-ur-Rahim Khan-i Khanan; thinkers like Abu-l Faẓl and Dārā Shukoh (the thread going down to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and many Muslim intellectuals of contemporary India); kings like Akbar and Zain ul-Abidin of Kashmir; or many later Muslim rulers who officially celebrated Holi along with Eid and appointed Hindus to highest government posts.

It is outside the scope of this article, but the struggle against colonial rule also brought the two communities together in a common cause. In 1857, religion proved a bond uniting Hindus and Muslims in one great uprising against British rule. The National Movement too offered a common banner under which India, ultimately, became free. Life is, after all, much larger than faith.