4 INTRODUCTIONgallantly fighting on to shake off the despoilers."^3 For the Hindu Right,
the "foreign" origins of Muslims in India demonstrated their "indig-
enous" struggle against conquest and domination: each new arrival
of the Muslims was another war of attrition. After Partition, the bonse-
quences of this understanding of the past became evident in 1992. A
sixteenth-century mosque, the Bahri Masjid in Ayodhya, was taken apart
brick by brick by thousands who believed it to be birthplace of the God
Ram. In this destruction, the conflation of historical and mythic time
was not an accident or a divergence-it represented the culmination of a
decades-long utilization of this origins myth for the Hindu Right.
These two threads of understanding pasts-Jinnah's insistence
on separatism and the Hindu Right's insistence on avenging past
wrongs-are distinct and produce vastly different trajectories for the
future. Yet they each begin with the idea of Muslims as outsiders, they
each narrate events across a thousand years of history that insist on
that difference, and they each rely on the other's contrary reading.^4
This origins narrative has prompted contemporary violence, absolved
it, and argued for a recognition of an always-there difference. The hero
of one and the foe of an.other are at battle-"the civilizAtion of conquest
is also the civilization of defeat"-the two modes are in syncopation.^5
The ledgers of victories and defeats are kept separately, but tfie regime
of tabulation is same. For each, the "foreign" produces that which can
save or that from which one needs to be saved. For each, the difference
of'the p'resent stems from a difference in origins. In effect, how, dif-
ferent groups of Muslims at a given point in time came to political
dominance in India is viewed solely through the lens of conquest by
outsiders-what I am here labeling as the origins narrative.
The critique of Indic pasts understood as a long teleology of violence
between communities has been the work of many historians. Several
generations of historians, of the ancient or medieval or modern period&,
h·ave taken on the question of difference in Indic pasts. Romila Thapar,
Gyanendra Pandey, Uma Chakravarti, Richard Eaton, Cynthia Talbot,
and Shahid Amin are some of the key·figures in this historiography
whose efforts were to trace the emergence of categories of being Hindu
or Muslim-beyond the invention of such modes during colonial rule.^6
One answer for contemporary turbulences, they offer, is to understand
the multiplicity of being Indian that history provides. While this