The story of Muslims in India is one of profound cultural interaction between Muslims and Hindus, and between Persian and Sanskrit cultures. The fruit of that interaction was the creation of a magnificent Indian Muslim civilisation, whose cultural contributions to the world included breathtaking Islamic scholarship, mystical and romantic literature, new musical genres, beautiful artwork and some of the most majestic architecture in the world.
Today the civilisation is a shadow of its former self; this website is dedicated to its memory. We aim to present, in a readable and accessible format, factual information about this element of India’s history, focusing in particular on relations between Hindus and Muslims. We also direct readers to further reading, to the work of the historians we draw from in our writing.
Nothing in this website is intended to necessarily endorse any particular historical ruler or political and religious practices. We wish to present the history in a factual way, to rescue it from those who would wish to distort it and propagate a fictional narrative about the past.
Indian Muslim civilisation was a world of deep complexity, often of conflict and violence but also of beauty, peace and remarkable prosperity. Its legacy is extraordinary. A Muslim-ruled civilisation, it demanded no religious uniformity from its people.
Hindus, themselves diverse and followers of many different religious traditions, were of the utmost importance to the civilisation’s culture - after all, they made up most of its population. Shameful exceptions aside, most Hindus enjoyed religious liberty and autonomy under Indian Muslim rule.
Hindu rulers, meanwhile, embraced elements of the culture introduced by foreign Muslims who integrated and became Indian. New ideas of justice and kingship, based on old Persian principles, were brought to India. Thus Hindu rulers often adopted the title ‘sultan’; Marappa, one the founders of Vijayanagara in South India, called himself “sultan among Indian kings”. Poets and the chroniclers in the fourteenth century described the Tughluq sultan as sarvabhauma, Sanskrit for ‘universal ruler’.
The civilisation crumbled, famously. Eventually it was surpassed by British colonial power, which allowed the later Mughals, stripped of their authority, to remain in Delhi as a surreal memory of a lost era. During the reign of the final Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, Delhi experienced a glorious cultural flowering, a last display of the grandeur of Indian Muslim civilisation.
It was largely destroyed after the failed Uprising against British authority in 1857. The Mughal Emperor was charged with treason and found guilty. In Delhi the British massacred tens of thousands of people. Muslims were banned from the city until 1860; by then many of their houses were gone. Colonial forces looted the prestigious libraries and Islamic schools of the city. They levelled mosques, Muslim shrines and palaces to the ground. Most of the dazzling Red Fort was demolished, its gilded domes sold. Its devastating beauty, once awe-inspiring, now seems tragic.
This website recalls stories from a long-lost era.
