INTRODUCTION 3
First, let me demonstrate the power and dominance of this origins
narrative in South Asia. This narrative positing the Muslim as always
distinctly an outsider is one of the primary ideological fulcra that re-
sulted in the 1947 Partition of colonial India. One articulation of this
idea was expressed in 1940 by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the All
India Muslim League and the first governor general of Pakistan:
The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philoso-
phies, social customs, and literature[s]. They neither intermarry nor
interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civili-
sations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and concep-
tions. Their aspects on life, and of life, are different. It is quite clear
that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspiration from dif-
ferent sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes
are different, and they have different episode[s]. Very often the hero
of one is a foe of the other, and likewise their victories and defeats
overlap.^2Jinnah's articulation of difference in regard to the past (an articula-
tion that mirrored early twentieth-century Muslim nationalism)
incongruently posits cultural practices as uniform•across a vast geo-
graphy. That is, the Muslims do not marry or dine with non-Muslims
either in the present or in the past-the Muslims everywhere in India
constitute a unitary body. In support of this reading of the present,
Jinnah asserts a difference in history and in historiography-that these
two communities have different pasts, and they have different sources
for those pasts and must therefore interpret history differently. Hence
to someone who may say that the Mughal elite intermarried with
non-Muslims, Jinnah's answer would be that we must interpret their
acts in accordance with different civilizational standards or look for
their depictions in different archives.
Like Jinnah's nationalism, Hindu communalism also looked to the
past, also relied on historiography, and also argued numerically, but
with a radltally different view of the past and the future. Hence in 1940,
the conservative and militant proponents of Hindu supremacy such
as V. D. Savarkar and M. S. Golwalkar would reinterpret the heroes and
the foes: "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hin-
dusthan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation ,has been