The Wounded Civilization — Part 1: The Soil and the Encounter

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Seven centuries of Islamic rule, and how a civilization remembered them.

Islamic Rule India

The Question This Series Asks

In June 2014, in his first speech to the newly elected Lok Sabha, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of a “slave mentality of 1,200 years” that was still troubling India. The number deserves a second look. British rule lasted, at most, two centuries. Twelve hundred years reaches much further back, past the Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate, to the first Arab and Turkic armies that crossed into the subcontinent. It was not a slip of the tongue. It was a thesis: that India’s humiliation began long before the East India Company arrived by sea, and that the political movement now in power represents the end of a very long subjugation.

This series takes that thesis seriously, which is not the same as accepting it.

Something happened to India over the last fifteen years that mainstream commentary has struggled to explain. A society that carried the Nehruvian promise of secular democracy into the twenty-first century turned, with speed and evident conviction, toward a politics of Hindu civilizational assertion. The comfortable explanations do not hold. Leaders do not manufacture mass movements from nothing; they crystallize forces that were already building. Prejudice has always existed, but it does not become a dominant political force without conditions that make it suddenly and urgently credible to tens of millions of people at once. And the liberal explanation, that the Indian voter was simply deceived, is both lazy and quietly condescending. When a narrative captures a society at this scale, it is because it speaks to something real in the lives of the people who embrace it.

When I first wrote about the psychology of India’s right turn, several readers made a fair complaint. I had written about anti-Muslim sentiment as a political force — the scapegoat, the “love jihad” panic, the unfinished grief of Partition — without examining where that sentiment comes from. I had treated the historical memory of Islamic rule as a given, when it is precisely the thing that needs explaining. They were right. You cannot understand why the names of Babur and Aurangzeb still move crowds in 2026 without understanding the seven centuries those names belong to.

But this is the most fought-over territory in Indian intellectual life, and it is mined from both sides. One camp tells the story of an unbroken catastrophe: a golden Hindu civilization shattered by fanatical invaders, its temples razed by the tens of thousands, its people converted at the point of the sword. Another camp, anxious to protect India’s Muslim citizens from the uses to which that story is put, has sometimes softened or explained away real violence until it seemed to be apologizing for it. Both are politically motivated, and both have done damage. The first built a grievance industry. The second abandoned the ground, and the first moved in.

So the question that frames this series is the one most often asked badly: is India’s anti-Muslim sentiment real, or manufactured? The honest answer is that the question offers a false choice. Every collective grievance has three layers. There is what happened: events that can be documented, counted and dated. There is what was remembered: the selection of those events that families, castes, regions and communities carried forward, shaped by what mattered to them. And there is what was told: the story that chroniclers, historians, reformers and politicians assembled out of those memories, for purposes of their own. The first layer is real. The third is made. The political power of the whole lies in the fact that people experience all three as one thing.

This series moves through those layers in historical order. This first part examines the soil and the encounter: the psychology that centuries of agrarian and mercantile life produced, and what actually happened when Islamic armies, rulers and saints arrived in that world, from the conquest of Sindh in 712 to the eve of British rule. The second part examines the narrators: how British historians, census-takers, reformers and nationalists on both sides turned scattered memories into a single story, and how Partition turned that story into lived experience. The third examines the inheritance: what the Indian republic did with the wound, and how it became the politics of today.

In 1977, V.S. Naipaul published a book called India: A Wounded Civilization. In 1993, a few months after the Babri Masjid was torn down, he told The Times of India that what was happening in the country was “a new, historical awakening” and “a mighty creative process.” Naipaul saw the wound more clearly than many of his critics allowed. Whether he saw as clearly what was being done with it is one of the questions this series will try to answer.

It begins, as almost everything in India eventually does, with the land.

Table of Contents

The Soil That Made the Soul

India was, for nearly all of its history, a civilization grown from the earth. The overwhelming majority of its people lived by what the land gave and suffered by what it withheld. The rhythm of life was the rhythm of the monsoon: the ploughing, the planting, the anxious reading of the sky, and the harvest that decided whether the coming year would be endured or enjoyed.

And land, to be productive across generations, demanded the collective. There was no state to catch you when you fell. No hospital when illness struck, no pension when age made labor impossible, no orphanage when parents died young, which they often did. No court that a poor man could meaningfully approach, no bank that would lend to the landless. The invisible net that modern life stretches beneath the tightrope simply did not exist.

In its place stood one institution: the family. It was extended, multi-generational and collectively organized, not as a sentimental choice but as a survival architecture. The family was your hospital, your pension fund, your orphanage, your court, your bank and your militia, all at once. It absorbed the failed harvest, the dead husband, the sick elder, the orphaned child and the widowed daughter-in-law. It absorbed everything, because there was nothing else. Around the family stood the jati, the birth community that fixed whom you could marry, whom you could eat with, what work you could do, and who would come to your aid. Family and jati together formed a complete social world, and that world had one overriding rule: the unit must not break.

This produced a social logic that was, in its own terms, ruthlessly rational. Individual ambition was dangerous. The son who left fractured the unit. The daughter-in-law who asserted her preferences disrupted the household’s order of labor. The young man who questioned the patriarch introduced the possibility of fission at exactly the moment when unity was the only thing standing between the family and ruin.

Over centuries, this logic was not merely practiced. It was sanctified. The suppression of individual desire in service of collective survival stopped being a pragmatic adaptation and became a moral virtue. Sacrifice was elevated. Duty, dharma, was made sacred. Personal ambition was coded as selfishness, impiety and social danger. Generation by generation, people learned to experience their own subordination not as an imposition but as a calling.

There is a second consequence of this architecture that matters enormously for what follows, and it is almost never noticed. Because family and jati carried everything, they also carried religion. Faith in the Indian countryside did not depend chiefly on a church, a capital or a king. It lived in household rituals and village gods, in the rites of birth, marriage and death performed by a family’s hereditary priest, in the customs of the jati, and in pilgrimages that families made together. The same structure that held the individual so tightly also made the faith extraordinarily hard to dislodge. When conquerors arrived who could topple kings and pull down royal temples, they would discover that they could not reach the place where the religion actually lived. We will return to this. It may be the single most important fact in the story.

This is the soil in which the Indian psyche grew. And soil, as any farmer knows, does not change overnight.

The Merchant and the Field

But India was never only a civilization of farmers. For thousands of years it was also one of the world’s great trading civilizations, and this side of its life is curiously underweighted in accounts of the Indian mind.

Long before Europeans arrived, India sat at the center of a vast web of exchange. Ships from the Malabar and Gujarat coasts crossed the Arabian Sea to Persia, Arabia and East Africa. Caravans carried Indian cotton, indigo, pepper and iron over the mountains to Central Asia and China. Tamil merchant guilds operated across the Bay of Bengal, and Indian traders, priests and ideas travelled to what are now Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia, where Sanskrit inscriptions and Hindu and Buddhist temples still stand. Indian merchants were not marginal players in the pre-modern world economy. At various points they were among its central architects.

Trade produced its own survival logic, parallel to the farmer’s, and it arrived at a strikingly similar destination. A trader’s most valuable asset could not be built quickly by one ambitious individual. It was cultural capital: knowledge of routes, languages, markets, prices and reliable partners, accumulated over generations and held within the family and the community. A Marwari family’s ability to extend credit across distant markets, a Chettiar firm’s network in Southeast Asia, a Gujarati merchant house’s agents in the ports of the Red Sea: none of this could be improvised. It was an inheritance, available only to those who stayed inside the fold. Credit was not just a financial instrument. It was the community’s reputation, maintained across generations through careful, non-confrontational conduct.

Trade also demanded, as a matter of business, what farming demanded as a matter of survival: the suppression of aggressive individualism. Where the farming family needed submission to the patriarch to keep the household from splitting, the trading community needed something subtler: soft negotiation, patience, the cultivation of long-term trust, and an aversion to open confrontation. A merchant who chased short-term personal gain at the expense of the community’s name was not simply making a bad deal. He was damaging the social infrastructure on which every future transaction depended.

So two entirely different economic systems, the field and the marketplace, converged on the same psychological formation. Both subordinated individual desire to collective continuity. Both treated confrontational self-assertion as dangerous. Both made the preservation of the group not a strategic preference but a moral duty. Two independent routes arriving at one destination make a far stronger foundation for an argument than one route ever could.

One more fact about trade belongs in this story, because it complicates everything that comes later. Islam first reached India not with an army but on a merchant ship. Arab traders had been sailing to the Malabar coast for centuries before the Prophet’s time, and in the generations after him, Muslim merchants settled in the port towns of Kerala and Gujarat, married local women, built mosques, and lived for centuries under Hindu kings who valued their trade. The first Muslims that most coastal Indians ever met were neighbors and business partners, not conquerors. That difference in first encounters will matter a great deal when we ask, later in this series, why the memory of Islam is so different in different parts of India.

The Woman in the Architecture

Here is the part of the story that is almost never told plainly.

The agrarian and mercantile family’s greatest structural vulnerability was not the monsoon or the trade winds. It was female autonomy.

Marriage was the diplomatic infrastructure of this world. It was how families sealed alliances, shared risk, pooled land and capital, and built the networks of obligation that substituted for formal insurance and law. In trading communities a marriage was also a commercial merger, binding together families whose combined credit might stretch across an ocean. A woman who chose her own partner, or refused the one chosen for her, did not simply make a personal decision. She could unravel a treaty.

Women were the most dangerous variable in this system for a structural reason. At marriage, a woman moved from one family to another. She stood at the exact point where two families’ interests touched; she bore the next generation and guaranteed its legitimacy. Her loyalty, her choices and above all her body therefore carried the weight of the whole arrangement. A young man’s restlessness could be managed with the promise of land, status and, one day, authority of his own. A woman was offered no comparable stake in the structure she held together, which is exactly why the structure could not afford to let her choose.

The response was not subtle. Across the agrarian heartland, most intensely on the Indo-Gangetic plain and less so in coastal and trading communities where women historically had somewhat more freedom of movement, female autonomy was not merely restricted. It was dismantled by design. The prohibition of widow remarriage, marriage before puberty, the seclusion of women from public life, and the theological elevation of wifely devotion into spiritual merit were not random cruelties. Together they formed a system: a thorough mechanism for neutralizing the most destabilizing variable in the collective equation.

That system had a consequence that would echo for a thousand years. When a family’s honor is located in the bodies of its women, those bodies become the place where the whole community can be wounded. A woman’s chastity was not her own affair. It was the family’s standing, the jati’s purity and the lineage’s legitimacy. Violate the woman and you violated all of them. Keep that thought in mind, because it is the key to understanding why, when conquest came, its violence against women would strike the load-bearing beam of the entire structure, and why the memory of that violence would carry a charge that no other memory could match.

The standard telling misses something else, too: subjugating women required the simultaneous subjugation of junior men. The young man in the joint family did not only watch his wife, mother and sisters submit. He submitted too: to his father, his elder brother, his caste council, his landlord and his priest. His ambitions and dissatisfactions were equally suppressed, equally coded as moral failure, equally disciplined through shame. The joint family produced a whole population, male and female alike, for whom submission to authority was not an external imposition but an internally experienced virtue. For whom challenging authority felt like transgression. For whom endurance was wisdom.

At the center of this world sat a relationship that the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar would later place at the heart of the Indian male psyche: the bond between a young mother, powerless almost everywhere else in the household, and the son through whom she gained her only real standing. Part 3 of this series will return to that bond, because it is where the oldest layer of this story meets the newest.

This was the psychological world the Islamic encounter entered: collective, hierarchical and enduring, with its honor stored in the bodies of its women and its faith stored in its families. What happened next can only be understood against it.

A Civilization Without a Single Name

There is a trap in the way this history is usually told, and it is set in the very first sentence: “When the Muslims invaded Hindu India…” Both halves of that phrase project the present onto the past.

The people of the subcontinent in the eighth or eleventh century did not, for the most part, call themselves Hindus. The word came from outside. It is the Persian form of Sindhu, the Indus river, and for centuries it meant simply the people who lived beyond it. The identities that mattered to people were nearer to hand: their jati, their village and region, their lineage, and their sect. A devotee of Shiva and a devotee of Vishnu might worship at different temples, follow different teachers and argue bitterly over whose god was supreme. Buddhist monasteries and Jain communities flourished alongside Brahminical temples and competed with them for royal patronage. This was not one religion in the sense that Christianity or Islam were religions. It was a vast, overlapping ecosystem of traditions.

That does not mean there was nothing in common. The authority of the Vedas, the Sanskrit language, the great epics, and a shared sacred geography of rivers, mountains and pilgrimage sites stretching from the Himalayas to the southern seas gave the subcontinent a recognizable cultural unity, and Sanskrit texts had long imagined a land called Bharatavarsha. What did not yet exist was a single political identity built on that culture: the sense that all these traditions formed one community, with one set of interests, one history and one set of enemies.

The second trap concerns violence. It is often assumed that the destruction of temples began with the arrival of Islam. It did not. Long before the first Turkic raid, Indian kings fought each other ferociously, and their wars had a sacred dimension. A royal temple was not merely a place of worship. It housed the image of the deity that protected the king and his dynasty, and it was the public stage on which his authority was displayed. To seize or destroy a rival’s temple image was to destroy his power symbolically, and Indian kings did exactly that.

The historian Richard Eaton has assembled the record. In 642 the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I carried off the image of Ganesha from the Chalukya capital at Vatapi. In the early tenth century the Rashtrakuta king Indra III destroyed the Kalapriya temple patronized by his rivals, the Pratiharas, and recorded the fact with evident pride. In the early eleventh century the Chola king Rajendra I adorned his capital with images seized from four defeated dynasties. In the late eleventh century, Eaton writes, the Kashmiri king Harsha “raised the plundering of temples to an institutionalised activity.” And at the very moment the Turks were establishing themselves in the north, Paramara kings were plundering Jain temples in Gujarat.

None of this cancels what came later. But it establishes the baseline. The subcontinent the conquerors entered was not a peaceful, unified Hindu world. It was a plural, fractured and intensely competitive one, already familiar with the political destruction of sacred things. To see clearly what was genuinely new about the Islamic encounter, we first need to know what was not.

Raid, Conquest, Settlement

What was genuinely new arrived in stages, over five centuries.

The first was the Arab conquest of Sindh in 712, led by a young general, Muhammad bin Qasim. It was a frontier event, absorbed into the expanding caliphate, and it went no further. According to the Chachnama, a Persian chronicle written five centuries later, Qasim treated the Hindus and Buddhists of Sindh as protected subjects, allowed to keep their temples on payment of tax, much as Christians and Jews were elsewhere in the caliphate. Whether or not every detail is reliable, the pattern it describes would recur: conquest, followed by accommodation, because there was no other way to govern.

The second stage was far more violent. Between 1000 and 1027, Mahmud of Ghazni, a Turkic ruler based in what is now Afghanistan, led some seventeen raids into northern India. He was not trying to rule India. He was looting it, and his targets were the richest places in the land: the great temple cities of Thanesar, Mathura and Kannauj and, in January 1026, Somnath on the coast of Gujarat. His court chroniclers and poets celebrated these raids as holy war, describing idols smashed, temples burned and treasure carried home. They boasted that 50,000 people died at Somnath, a figure the historian Romila Thapar regards as formulaic, a stock number used to magnify the victor. But the boasting itself matters. The religious framing of this violence was not invented by modern historians. It is in the medieval sources, written by the victors, in their own words.

The most valuable witness to these years is not a Hindu at all. Al-Biruni was a Persian-speaking scholar, one of the great minds of the medieval world, who was brought to Ghazni after Mahmud conquered his homeland in Central Asia and who travelled into India in the wake of Mahmud’s campaigns. Around 1030 he wrote a remarkable study of Indian religion, science and society, and he recorded plainly what the raids had done. Mahmud, he wrote, “utterly ruined the prosperity of the country,” so that the Hindus “became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions.” “Their scattered remains,” he went on, “cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims.” Hindu learning, he added, had “retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us” to places “which our hand cannot yet reach.”

That passage settles one argument permanently. Hindu hostility toward Muslim conquerors was not manufactured in the nineteenth century. A Muslim scholar recorded it as a fact of his own time, a thousand years ago, and he understood exactly why it existed. Al-Biruni noticed something else, too, which is easy to miss. He found the Hindus of his day intensely insular, believing “that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs,” yet he observed that “their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is.” A society under attack had begun to close in on itself.

The third stage was conquest and settlement. In 1192, at the second battle of Tarain, Muhammad of Ghor defeated the Chauhan king Prithviraj, and within a few years his generals held Delhi and much of the Gangetic plain. The Delhi Sultanate, founded in 1206, would rule much of northern India under a succession of Turkic and Afghan dynasties for more than three centuries. Its armies pushed east into Bihar and Bengal, where, around 1200, the forces of Bakhtiyar Khalji destroyed the great Buddhist monasteries. Popular memory speaks of Nalanda’s library burning for months, a story that grew in the telling. The record is grim enough without it. When the Tibetan pilgrim Dharmasvamin reached Nalanda around 1235, he found only two of its eighty monasteries still functioning, the rest abandoned after Turkic attacks, and an aged abbot teaching some seventy students while raids continued around them. Buddhism, as an institutional force in the land of its birth, never recovered. It is a revealing detail that this loss, suffered by Buddhists, is now remembered as a Hindu wound. Memory, as we will see, gathers its victims into the shape it needs.

What the Sultanate brought was not only destruction but domination. Enslavement on a large scale accompanied the early campaigns; the chroniclers’ figures are surely inflated, but Indian captives were sold in large numbers in the slave markets of Central Asia. The fourteenth-century historian Ziauddin Barani records that Sultan Alauddin Khalji deliberately impoverished the Hindu rural chiefs who collected his revenue, so that they could no longer ride horses, carry arms or wear fine clothes, the better to prevent rebellion. And in 1398 the Central Asian conqueror Timur descended on Delhi, ordered the killing of the captives his army had taken, perhaps 100,000 of them, and then let his troops loose on the city.

Yet the Sultanate was never the whole of India, and for long stretches not even the whole of the north. Rajput kingdoms survived in the deserts and hills. In 1336 the kingdom of Vijayanagara rose in the south and held the Deccan sultanates at bay for more than two centuries. The Mughals, who arrived in 1526, built the most powerful state the subcontinent had yet seen, but they ruled it, as we will see, in partnership with Hindu nobles and through Hindu revenue officials. Islamic rule in India was real, long and often brutal. It was also, at every point, partial: a minority ruling class sitting atop a vast population it never fully absorbed. That partiality is the key to almost everything that follows.

The Temple Question

No question in this history is more charged than how many temples were destroyed, and no question has been answered more carelessly.

At one end sits a figure that circulates endlessly on social media: tens of thousands of temples, sometimes forty thousand, sometimes sixty. No traceable source supports these numbers. At the other end sits the work of Richard Eaton, who in 2000 went through the Persian chronicles, inscriptions and other evidence and identified eighty instances of temple desecration between 1192 and 1729 “whose historicity appears reasonably certain.” Eaton’s number is often quoted as though it were a total. It is not, and he says so himself: his list “by no means give[s] the complete picture,” and “we shall never know the precise number of temples desecrated in Indian history.” Between these poles stand writers who have argued for much higher counts. In 1990 Sita Ram Goel compiled a list of nearly two thousand mosques he believed stood on temple sites, and in 2019 the historian Meenakshi Jain documented the long history of sacred images hidden, carried away and reinstalled by communities fleeing destruction. Their methods and conclusions are contested, but they engage with evidence, and they deserve to be engaged with in return.

The honest position is a range, not a number: a documented floor of dozens of major desecrations of royal and politically significant temples, a larger and much less certain total of local destructions, and no evidence at all for the tens of thousands.

Eaton’s more important contribution was not his count but his explanation. Temple destruction under Muslim rulers, he showed, largely followed the same political logic as temple destruction under Hindu kings. The temples targeted were overwhelmingly those tied to royal power: the temples of enemy kings, of rebels, of chiefs who had defied the state. Temples of loyal subjects were usually left alone, and Muslim rulers sometimes funded and protected them. Destruction was a political act, the annihilation of a rival’s sacred authority, performed by conquerors who happened to be Muslim, in a land where everyone understood what such an act meant.

All of this is correct, and none of it settles the matter, because there are two differences that historians sometimes pass over too quickly. The first is language. When a Chola king carried off a rival’s image, he did not describe the act as the triumph of one religion over another. The Persian chroniclers frequently did. They framed destruction as the victory of Islam over idolatry, and in doing so they gave the act a religious meaning that outlived its political motive. The second is architecture. A Hindu king who seized an image took it home and installed it in his own temple. A Muslim conqueror sometimes built a mosque on the site, or out of the temple’s own stones. The Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi, built in the 1190s, announces in its own inscription that it was constructed from the materials of twenty-seven temples. In 1669 Aurangzeb ordered the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi demolished; the Gyanvapi mosque rose on its site, and the old temple’s wall still forms part of the mosque’s rear facade. In 1670 the great Keshava Deva temple at Mathura met the same fate.

This is where the history of events and the history of memory part ways. For a historian, the question is motive: was this political or religious? For memory, the question is meaning: what does it say to the people who see it? A temple torn down and a mosque raised on its plinth sends a message that lasts as long as the building stands. It does not fade with the generation that witnessed it. It is renewed every time someone walks past. A wound with a wall does not heal like a wound without one. It is no accident that the three sites at the center of today’s disputes, Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, are all places where a mosque stood, or stands, on ground that Hindus regard as sacred, and that all three lie in the Gangetic heartland, the region where Muslim political power was strongest and lasted longest.

Yet the same history holds its quieter counter-evidence. At Somnath itself, the temple Mahmud raided appears to have been repaired within a dozen years and was rebuilt in stone by the Chaulukya king Kumarapala in 1169; it would be attacked again in 1299, in 1395 and later. But in 1264, between those attacks, a bilingual Sanskrit and Arabic inscription records a Muslim shipowner building a mosque in the temple town under a Hindu king, with the support of local Hindu notables. Somnath was a place of destruction. It was also, for long stretches, a place where Hindus and Muslims traded, built and lived side by side. Memory kept the raid. It let the inscription go.

Why the Subcontinent Did Not Convert

Here is a question that sounds simple and turns out to be one of the most revealing in this entire history. The lands conquered in Islam’s first great wave, from Syria and Iraq to Egypt, Persia and North Africa, eventually became overwhelmingly Muslim. India, after some six centuries of Muslim rule across much of the north, did not. At the first comprehensive census, in 1881, Muslims made up roughly a fifth of the population of British India. Why?

The question needs two corrections before it can be answered properly. First, India is not the only exception, and conversion was slow even where it happened. The historian Richard Bulliet, tracking the spread of Muslim names, estimated that Persia took roughly two centuries to become majority Muslim. Christian communities in Egypt, Syria and Iraq survived as substantial minorities into the twentieth century. The closest parallel to India is the Ottoman Balkans, where five centuries of Muslim rule left Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria mostly Christian, while Bosnia and Albania converted heavily. Ottoman Hungary barely converted at all. Meanwhile Indonesia and Malaysia became almost entirely Muslim without ever being conquered. Conquest and conversion, it turns out, are only loosely linked.

Second, Islam did not simply fail in India. Today about a third of the subcontinent’s people, roughly 590 million across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, are Muslim: the largest Muslim population of any region on earth. So the sharper question is this: why did Islam convert the edges of the subcontinent but not its heartland, and why so slowly?

Part of the answer lies in who conquered, and when. The Arab armies of the seventh century overthrew empires whose religions were bound up with the state. When the Sasanian empire of Persia fell, Zoroastrianism lost the patrons of its priesthood and its institutional backbone. The conquerors of India came five centuries later and were a different kind of ruler: Turkic and Afghan military elites, small in number, governing an immense settled population. Their project was holding territory and collecting revenue, not remaking society.

Part of the answer lies in the law. The Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, which the Turks followed, allowed non-Muslims beyond the “People of the Book” to keep their faith as protected subjects on payment of the jizya tax. A stricter view, that idolaters must choose between Islam and death, existed and had its advocates. Barani preserves a telling exchange from the reign of Sultan Iltutmish in the thirteenth century. The ulema, the religious scholars, urged the sultan to give the Hindus exactly that choice. His vizier, Nizam-ul-Mulk Junaidi, agreed that the demand was in keeping with religious law but advised against it: the Muslims were a small minority and the Hindus the overwhelming majority, and such a policy would provoke a revolt the state could not survive. In that exchange lies the whole story in miniature. Theology pushed. Statecraft refused.

Part of the answer is money. The state lived on taxing a non-Muslim majority, and every convert could, in principle, pay less. In the Middle East, early Umayyad governors had openly discouraged conversion for exactly this reason. Indian rulers did sometimes use incentives to encourage it. Sultan Firuz Shah Tughlaq, in the fourteenth century, boasted of exempting converts from the jizya, while extending that same tax to Brahmins, who had previously been spared it. Coercion happened too. Sultan Sikandar of Kashmir, around 1400, earned the name Butshikan, “idol-breaker,” for his persecution of Hindus, before his son Zain-ul-Abidin reversed course and invited the Pandits back. But these were the policies of particular rulers at particular times, not a sustained imperial project. There was never a centrally directed campaign to convert India.

Part of the answer lies in the structure we met at the beginning of this essay. Hinduism had no church, no pope and no single capital to capture. It lived in households and jatis, village shrines and family priests, monasteries and pilgrimage routes. A conqueror could pull down a royal temple, but he could not reach the rituals performed in millions of homes. Destroying a king’s temple broke a king. It did not break a religion that had never depended on kings.

Part of the answer is that Hindu power never disappeared. Rajput kingdoms, Vijayanagara, the Ahoms of Assam, and later the Marathas and the Sikhs held or regained independence for long stretches. Inside the empire, Hindu landholders collected the revenue, Hindu scribes and accountants ran the administration, and Rajput nobles commanded imperial armies. The Hindu elite never lost its social and economic base, and the state depended on it.

Part of the answer may lie in competition. The devotional bhakti movements that swept India from the twelfth century onward offered lower castes much of what Sufi Islam offered: direct access to God, worship in their own language rather than Sanskrit, and a scathing critique of priestly hierarchy, but inside the Hindu fold. It is hard to prove that bhakti slowed conversion. It is plausible that it did.

And part of the answer lies in how conversion actually happened when it did. It was rarely a sudden switch. In Bengal, Eaton shows, Muslim saints and figures were first added alongside local gods, then gradually identified with them, and only much later, often in the reform movements of the nineteenth century, did a single, exclusive Islamic identity replace the mixture. In Bengal’s villages, Hindus and Muslims alike honored Satya Pir, a Sufi saint to one community and a form of Vishnu to the other. The Meos of Mewat, south of Delhi, were Muslims who celebrated Diwali and sang their own versions of the Hindu epics. Many such communities were still somewhere in between when the British census, in the late nineteenth century, required every Indian to declare a single religion.

The decisive evidence, though, is the map. When Eaton plotted where Muslims actually lived, he found that the highest proportions were in East Bengal and West Punjab, far from Delhi, while the Gangetic heartland, where Muslim political power was strongest and lasted longest, had among the lowest. He called it “an inverse relationship between the degree of Muslim political penetration and the degree of conversion to Islam.” Conversion went furthest not where the sword was sharpest but on the agrarian frontier, among forest and pastoral peoples who were being drawn into settled farming and who were, in his words, “not fully Hindu in the first place”: the communities clearing the jungles of the Bengal delta, and pastoral groups like the Jats of western Punjab. Islam spread in India, Eaton concluded, less as a religion of the sword than as “a religion of the plough.”

Then time ran out. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, Mughal power crumbled. Marathas, Sikhs and regional rulers took its place, and within sixty years a trading company from London was collecting the revenues of Bengal. The slow, uneven process of Islamization was frozen in mid-course, and the census that froze it would soon turn its frozen categories into political weapons. That is a story for Part 2.

There is one more reason, and it deserves a section of its own.

The Double Barrier

The last reason begins with an observation that ordinary Indians have always known and that the grand narratives on both sides prefer to avoid. When Hindus converted to Islam, they did not leave caste behind. They carried it with them.

Islam preaches the equality of all believers before God. In India that ideal met a society organized from top to bottom by birth, and the society won. Indian Muslims came to divide themselves into broad tiers that mirrored the Hindu order. At the top were the ashraf, families claiming descent from Arab, Persian, Turkic or Afghan immigrants. Below them were the ajlaf, converted artisan and occupational castes: weavers, butchers, tailors, oil-pressers. Beneath them were the arzal, converts from the castes at the very bottom. Marriage stayed largely within the group. Occupation stayed hereditary. The weaver who became a Muslim remained a weaver, and his children married other weavers.

This was not merely habit. It was endorsed from the top. Barani, writing advice for sultans in the fourteenth century, insisted that the low-born should not be taught to read or given office, and that teaching them was like thrusting “precious stones down the throats of dogs.” Islamic law also had a doctrine ready to accommodate hierarchy: kafa’a, the principle of suitability in marriage, which Hanafi jurists interpreted to include lineage and occupation. Indian jurists used it to give religious sanction to caste-like marriage rules among Muslims.

It is tempting to conclude from this that Islam’s preachers met an insoluble dilemma in India: that converting people caste by caste would turn Islam into a replica of the Hindu hierarchy, and that they therefore gave up the effort. The intuition behind this idea is sound, but the conclusion does not hold. There is no record of a coordinated campaign of conversion in India that could have been abandoned; conversion was mostly unplanned, gradual and local. And Islam had lived with hierarchy before without ceasing to spread. In its first century, the Arab ruling class treated non-Arab converts as second-class Muslims, a grievance that helped bring down the Umayyad dynasty in 750, yet Persia went on converting regardless. The ulema did not experience caste among converts as an existential crisis. They had a framework that absorbed it.

The stronger version of the argument is different, and it explains far more. Caste formed a barrier to conversion on both sides of the line.

On the Hindu side, caste made individual conversion socially fatal. A man who converted alone lost his marriage network, his inheritance, his occupation, his place at his community’s meals and the services of its priests. He did not simply change his faith; he ceased to belong anywhere. Conversion was realistically possible only as a group, when a whole jati or a whole village moved together, and group conversion is slow.

On the Muslim side, the ashraf hierarchy meant that conversion brought neither equality nor entry into the ruling class. The convert did not become a Turk or a Persian. In the eyes of the elite he remained what he had been born. The promise that might have made conversion attractive to the oppressed, escape from the stigma of low birth, was not on offer.

Islam in India, in other words, offered neither escape nor ascent. Where neither exists, the strongest motive for mass conversion is missing. This double barrier also explains Eaton’s map. Conversion went furthest exactly where the first barrier was weakest: among communities only lightly touched by Brahminical caste, on the agrarian frontier of Bengal and the pastoral plains of Punjab, where leaving carried little risk of social death.

Caste cut both ways, and that is the subtle part. It blocked individuals, but it enabled groups. Whole artisan communities could convert while keeping their community, their trade and their marriage networks intact, and much of Indian Islam spread in exactly this way. That is why Indian Islam came to look so much like the society around it. It grew by absorbing whole communities with their hierarchies already in place.

Which brings us to an irony that neither side of India’s history wars has noticed. Hindu nationalists, from V.D. Savarkar in the 1920s onward, as Part 2 will show, have long blamed caste for Hindu defeat. A society divided into thousands of mutually suspicious groups could not field a united army, and so it lost its kingdoms one by one. On the battlefield, they were right. But the conversion record tells a second story. The same structure that made Hindus impossible to unite also made them almost impossible to absorb. A man could not leave his jati without losing everything, so he did not leave alone; and when whole communities did convert, they carried their rank with them into a faith that preached equality before God but did not deliver it on earth.

Caste lost Hindu India its kingdoms. It also kept its gods.

Hold on to that paradox. The modern Hindu nationalist project lives inside it. It needs the unity that caste prevented, without dismantling the social structure that preserved the faith. How it resolved that dilemma, not by abolishing caste but by building a Hindu political identity on top of it, is one of the central stories of Part 3.

Women, Captivity and the Making of a Gendered Memory

If any single thread runs from the medieval encounter to the anxieties of the present, it is this one.

The violence of conquest fell on women in particular ways. The chronicles of the early campaigns record the capture of women and children alongside the plunder, and enslavement, as we have seen, was a feature of the age. In a society that had located the honor of family, jati and lineage in the bodies of its women, this violence did not register only as harm to individuals. It registered as the annihilation of the collective. The structure described earlier in this essay meant that a conqueror who seized a woman had, in the only terms that society knew, seized everything.

The most searing response was jauhar: the collective self-immolation of the women of a besieged fortress, who chose death by fire over capture while their men rode out to die in battle. Chittor in Rajasthan, the great Rajput fortress, became its symbol. The fort was besieged by Alauddin Khalji in 1303, by Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1535, and by the emperor Akbar in 1567 and 1568. On the night before Chittor fell to Akbar in February 1568, Rajput women burned themselves in the fort. After its fall, Akbar ordered a general massacre in which some 30,000 people, most of them non-combatants, were killed. His victory proclamation, issued about two weeks later, declared that “we, as far as it is within our power, remain busy in jihad,” and that “with the help of our bloodthirsty sword we have erased the signs of infidelity from their minds.” This was Akbar: the same emperor who had abolished the jizya four years earlier, and who would go on to host debates among Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Zoroastrians and Christians at his court. Both records belong to one man.

The most famous jauhar of all is a different matter. The legend of Rani Padmini, the queen whose beauty drew Alauddin Khalji to Chittor in 1303 and who led its women into the fire rather than let him take her, is known to every Indian child. It provoked national controversy as recently as 2018, when a film about her set off violent protests. The siege of 1303 is real; it was described by the poet Amir Khusrau, who accompanied Alauddin. But Khusrau says nothing of Padmini. She first appears more than two centuries later, in Padmavat, an allegorical poem written in 1540 by Malik Muhammad Jayasi, a Sufi poet and a Muslim. From there the story passed into Rajput bardic tradition, into the romantic histories of the British era, and into the nationalist imagination. A Muslim poet’s allegory became the founding myth of Hindu female honor. Few facts in this history show more clearly how memory is made.

There is a quieter layer to this memory that deserves equal attention. It is widely believed in India that purdah, sati and child marriage arose as Hindu responses to Muslim invasion: that families veiled their women, married their daughters before puberty and burned their widows to protect them from the invader. The evidence does not support this. Greek historians recorded the self-immolation of an Indian soldier’s widow in 316 BCE. An inscription at Eran in central India commemorates a sati in 510 CE, five centuries before Mahmud. Hindu law books prescribed marriage before puberty for girls long before any Turk crossed the Indus. The seclusion of high-status women existed too, though the Persianate court culture of the Sultanate and the Mughals made it a mark of rank, and north Indian upper castes adopted it in imitation.

Why, then, the belief? Because it is more bearable. To blame the cruelties of one’s own social order on the invader is to absolve that order of them. Memory reorganized older practices around the figure of the outsider, and in doing so it protected the very structure, the honor system built on the control of women, with which this essay began. The invader became responsible not only for what he did, but for what the society had already been doing to its own daughters.

Put these elements together: an honor system that located the whole community’s dignity in women’s bodies, real episodes of capture and enslavement, the burning fortresses of jauhar, and legends that grew more powerful with each retelling. The result is the most emotionally charged layer of the entire memory. It is the layer that Partition would reactivate in 1947, when tens of thousands of women were abducted on both sides of the new border. And it is the layer that, in the twenty-first century, would make the phrase “love jihad” land with a force that no statistic could explain. Part 3 will return to it. It begins here.

The Other Record

If the story ended there, the Hindu nationalist account of this history would be essentially right. It does not end there.

Alongside the record of conquest runs a second record, equally documented, of alliance, synthesis and shared life. It is not the fairy tale of “everyone got along” that some secular textbooks retreat to. It is something more interesting: two traditions in continuous contact, sometimes at war and often in partnership, changing each other in ways neither could have managed alone.

Consider the battle lines, which were rarely religious lines. In 1562 Akbar married a Rajput princess of Amer, and her family became pillars of the empire. In 1576, at the battle of Haldighati, the Mughal army that faced Maharana Pratap of Mewar, the great hero of Rajput resistance, was commanded by a Rajput, Man Singh of Amer, while among Pratap’s own commanders was an Afghan, Hakim Khan Sur. Akbar’s finance minister, Raja Todar Mal, designed the revenue system the empire ran on. The kings of Vijayanagara in the south employed Muslim cavalry and built mosques for them. Shivaji, the founder of Maratha power, employed Muslim officers in his army and navy, and even the hostile Mughal historian Khafi Khan conceded that Shivaji forbade his men to harm mosques, copies of the Quran or women.

Consider religion. The bhakti poets and the Sufi saints shared a language of love, longing and direct encounter with the divine, and a common impatience with the formalism of priests and clerics. Kabir, the fifteenth-century weaver-poet of Varanasi, mocked the pandit and the mullah with equal glee and was claimed by Hindus and Muslims alike; legend says that at his death both communities quarrelled over his body. The shrines of Sufi saints such as Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi drew Hindu pilgrims then and draw them still. In 1657, Akbar’s great-grandson Dara Shikoh, the heir to the Mughal throne, translated fifty Upanishads into Persian, arguing that the Hindu and Sufi mystical traditions described the same ultimate reality. A French scholar later translated Dara’s Persian into Latin, and it was through that Latin version that the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer encountered the Upanishads, which he called the consolation of his life. One of the roads by which Hindu philosophy reached modern Europe ran through a Mughal prince.

Consider culture. Hindustani classical music, the Hindi and Urdu languages, and the cuisine, dress and architecture of northern India were all shaped by centuries of exchange. Akbar’s court musician Tansen, the most celebrated singer in Indian history, is revered in both traditions. Akbar himself pursued a policy he called sulh-i-kul, “peace with all,” and abolished both the jizya and the tax on Hindu pilgrims.

This second record does not erase the first. The same Akbar who preached peace with all ordered the massacre at Chittor. The same Mughal state that employed Rajput generals destroyed temples when it was politically useful. Political power in this world was Muslim-coded: the court language was Persian, the law was Islamic, and the ruling class prized foreign descent. Hindus could be partners in that power, and spiritually enriched by the encounter, while remaining subordinate within it.

Both records are true. That is the hardest thing for either camp in India’s history wars to accept. And it raises the question that will run through the rest of this series: if both records are true, why does memory so often keep only one?

Aurangzeb: The Turning Point Memory Chose

Every story of wounding needs a villain, and Indian memory chose Aurangzeb.

He ruled for forty-nine years, from 1658 to 1707, over the largest empire the subcontinent had yet seen. He came to the throne by defeating and executing his elder brother Dara Shikoh, the translator of the Upanishads, an event that in hindsight seems to divide two possible Indias. The record of his religious policy is real. In 1669 he ordered the destruction of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi, and in 1670 the Keshava Deva temple in Mathura. In 1679 he reimposed the jizya that Akbar had abolished more than a century earlier. In 1675 the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi on his orders, and in 1689 the Maratha king Sambhaji, Shivaji’s son, was captured, tortured and put to death.

For the great historian Jadunath Sarkar, whose five-volume History of Aurangzib appeared between 1912 and 1924, this was the story of a bigot whose religious zeal destroyed the empire his ancestors had built through tolerance. For the historian Audrey Truschke, whose 2017 book has made her one of the most attacked scholars in India, the same facts look different in context. Aurangzeb’s temple destructions were concentrated on sites linked to rebellion and political opposition, and he also issued grants to temples and Brahmins elsewhere. The share of Hindus among his nobles rose during his reign, to roughly 31 percent compared with about 22 percent under Akbar, as he drew Rajputs and Marathas into imperial service. And the jizya was as much a fiscal and political measure, in an empire straining under endless war, as a theological one.

Both portraits draw on real evidence, and neither fully contains the man. What matters for this series is not which historian is right, but why memory needed one figure to carry the weight of seven centuries, and why it chose this one. The answer is partly timing. Aurangzeb was the last great Mughal, and his long reign coincided with the rise of the Hindu and Sikh powers, the Marathas, the Sikh Khalsa and the rebellious Rajputs, whose resistance would become the heroic half of the memory. Every hero needs an adversary, and Aurangzeb was the adversary of almost all of them. He was the villain of their founding stories before he became the villain of anyone else’s.

It is also that memory prefers clarity to complexity. A calculating ruler, balancing factions and squeezing revenue from an exhausted empire, cannot fuel a movement. A pure embodiment of religious hatred can.

The power of that choice is not historical. It is current. In February 2025 a Hindi film, Chhaava, dramatized the torture and execution of Sambhaji. Within weeks, protests demanding the removal of Aurangzeb’s modest tomb, near the city now renamed Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, led to communal violence in Nagpur. An emperor dead for more than three centuries had become, for a few days, a reason for neighbors to attack each other. Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon, and we will meet it shortly.

Resistance and the Birth of a Hindu Political Self

Memory is not only a record of wounds. It is also a record of resistance, and the resistance half of this story matters as much as the defeat.

Islamic rule never covered the whole subcontinent, and wherever it came, it was contested. The Rajput clans fought, lost, allied and fought again for five centuries. In 1336 the kingdom of Vijayanagara was founded in the south and became one of the great states of its age, its capital at Hampi among the largest cities in the world, until a coalition of Deccan sultanates destroyed it in 1565. In Assam, the Ahom kingdom defeated a Mughal army at the battle of Saraighat in 1671 and was never conquered. In the west, Shivaji carved a Maratha kingdom out of the Deccan and was crowned in 1674 as an independent Hindu king. In Punjab, the Sikh Gurus turned a devotional community into a martial one; the executions of Guru Arjan in 1606 and Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675, and the deaths of Guru Gobind Singh’s four young sons in 1704 and 1705, gave the Sikh tradition a memory of martyrdom that remains central to it today. By 1758 Maratha armies had reached Attock on the Indus. In the half-century after Aurangzeb, Islamic political power across most of India was in retreat.

Something else was happening in these centuries, more quietly, and it matters for the debate over whether “Hindu identity” is a modern invention. Some influential historians, notably Romila Thapar, have argued that the idea of Hinduism as a single, unified religion was largely constructed in the colonial era, assembled by British administrators and Indian reformers out of an enormous diversity of traditions. There is much truth in this, as Part 2 will show. But the evidence also shows that a Hindu self-identity was forming long before the British, and that it formed in contact with Islam. From 1344, inscriptions show the kings of Vijayanagara styling themselves Hindu-raya-suratrana, “Sultan among Hindu kings,” a title that borrowed the word for the rival kings to the north even as it declared a distinctly Hindu kingship. In the fifteenth century, Kabir’s verses speak of “Hindu” and “Turk” as two communities with two sets of practices. The historian David Lorenzen, surveying this evidence, concluded that a recognizably Hindu religious identity had taken shape between roughly 1200 and 1500, defined in part against the Muslim other.

That is the honest middle position. The British did not invent Hindu identity; they found one already forming, and they hardened it, counted it and narrated it. Nor was there an ancient, fully formed Hindu nation waiting to be liberated. There was a sense of difference, sharpened by centuries of encounter, expressed differently in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Punjab, Assam and the Tamil country.

The resistance memory supplies the heroic half of the modern story: the Rajput who would not bow, the Maratha who won back self-rule, the Guru who gave his head rather than his faith. Without it, the memory of Islamic rule would be a memory only of defeat, and defeat alone does not build movements. Defeat answered by heroism does.

What Seven Centuries Did to the Mind

So what, carefully and honestly, can we say about the psychological residue of this long encounter?

First, that the wound was real, and early. Al-Biruni’s sentence about the Hindus’ “inveterate aversion towards all Muslims” was written a thousand years ago, by a Muslim who understood its causes. Anyone who claims that Hindu hostility to Muslim rule was invented by British historians or modern politicians has not read the medieval sources. The conquerors’ own chroniclers documented the violence and celebrated it in religious terms. Their victims remembered.

Second, that the wound was not one wound. Memory in pre-modern India was local, caste-specific and regional. The Rajput remembered jauhar and the honor of the clan. The Sikh remembered martyred Gurus. The Maratha remembered self-rule won back from the Mughals. The Kashmiri Pandit remembered Sikandar the idol-breaker, and also, if he was honest, the Zain-ul-Abidin who called his ancestors home. The Bengali peasant whose village had become Muslim over generations of forest-clearing remembered very little conquest at all. The Malayali, whose first Muslims were merchants on the coast, remembered something else again. Large parts of the south and the northeast lived histories in which the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals were distant powers, briefly present or never present at all. There was no single “Hindu memory” of Islamic rule. There were dozens.

Third, that memory has a geography, and it follows the way Islam arrived. Islam came to the Gangetic heartland primarily as a ruler: as the Sultanate and the Mughal court, as the temple torn down and the mosque raised in its place. It came to the frontiers of Bengal and Punjab primarily as a settler, through Sufi shrines and the clearing of forests for the plough. And it came to the coasts of Kerala and Gujarat, first of all, as a trader. Where Islam arrived as power, the memory is of power. Where it arrived as a neighbor, the memory is of neighbors. Partition, as we will see, would remove most of the regions where Islam had become the faith of the peasant majority and leave India with the heartland, where Islam had been the faith of the rulers. The consequences of that geography are visible on India’s electoral map today, and Part 3 will examine them.

Fourth, that the condition this history produced was not the clean trauma of defeat but something more corrosive: the chronic anxiety of incomplete subjugation. The civilization was never destroyed, and never fully sovereign. Its temples could be pulled down, but its households could not be reached. It was continuous but not triumphant, preserved but diminished. Clean defeat has a narrative shape, before, catastrophe, after, that a people can mourn and move beyond. Chronic, unresolved subordination has no such shape. It produces vigilance rather than mourning, and vigilance does not end when the threat recedes.

The psychiatrist Vamik Volkan, who spent decades studying ethnic conflict, gave this kind of memory a name: a chosen trauma. A chosen trauma is a group’s shared mental image of a calamity suffered by its ancestors, passed down the generations and woven into the group’s sense of who it is. No group chooses to be wounded, but it does, unconsciously, choose to keep a particular wound at the center of its identity. Volkan also described what happens when leaders reactivate such a memory. He called it “time collapse”: feelings about an event centuries old are experienced as if it had happened yesterday, and present-day neighbors are treated as if they were the ancient enemy. The violence in Nagpur in 2025, over the tomb of an emperor dead for 318 years, is as clear an example as anyone could wish for.

But a chosen trauma needs something that India, on the eve of British rule, did not yet possess. It needs a single story: one people, one wound, one villain, and one golden age before the fall. It needs a narrator. In 1757 the memories were real and many, the grievances were real and local, and the identity called “Hindu” was real and still forming. What did not yet exist was the story that would gather all of it into one.

The Story Not Yet Told

On 23 June 1757, in a mango grove at Plassey in Bengal, a small army belonging to a London trading company defeated the forces of the Nawab of Bengal. It was hardly a battle; several of the Nawab’s commanders had already been bought. Within a century the company and the crown that succeeded it would rule the whole of the subcontinent, and among the many things they brought was a new kind of history.

So, at the end of Part 1, where do we stand on the question this series began with? Is India’s anti-Muslim sentiment real, or manufactured?

For the seven centuries examined here, the answer is clear enough. The events were real: the raids, the temple destructions, the enslavements, the massacres, the burning fortresses, the executions. So were the alliances, the shared shrines, the Rajput generals, the Sufi and bhakti poets, and the Mughal prince who carried the Upanishads toward Europe. The memories were real too, and plural, and local, and shaped, as all memories are, by what each community needed to remember. Some of them, such as Padmini, the months-long burning of Nalanda, and the tens of thousands of temples, had already begun to grow beyond the evidence. But the great work of manufacture, the assembling of all these local memories into one continuous national wound, had barely begun.

Its first architects would not be Hindu nationalists. They would be British: administrators who needed a history that justified their rule, translators who chose which medieval chronicles the English-reading world would see, and census officers who asked every Indian, for the first time, to declare a single religion in a single box. After them would come Indian reformers, Hindu and Muslim, who took that history and turned it into politics. And at the end of that road lay the summer of 1947, when the memory of conquest became, for millions of people, a living experience.

That is the story of Part 2: The Narrators.

Sources and Further Reading

Author’s Note: This article was conceptualized, researched, and outlined by the author, with generative AI tools utilized to assist in drafting and refining the prose.

Articles in this series:

  1. The Wounded Civilization — Part 1: The Soil and the Encounter
  2. The Wounded Civilization — Part 2: The Narrators
  3. The Wounded Civilization — Part 3: The Inheritance
  4. The Wounded Civilization — Part 4: The Crystallization

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