As India continues to argue over how its past should be taught and remembered, an intervention by Indian National Congress lawmaker Shashi Tharoor offers a useful starting point. Speaking in April at a conference on Muslim contributions to India’s history, society and civilization, Tharoor challenged the habit of reading India mainly through conquest. On India’s southern coast, he argued, Islam arrived through old Arab trading connections, “as news, not sword.” Pointing to the Qutb Complex, Humayun’s Tomb and the Taj Mahal, he described them as evidence of “a civilization in conversation with itself.”
The remarks matter because India’s argument over the past is really an argument over who belongs in the present.
A powerful Hindutva reading tells a different story. In this account, Islam enters India mainly through invasion and Muslims remain tied to that moment. The Hindu nationalist volunteer organization, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), once put it plainly: “Islam came to Bharat with invaders.”
No serious historian disputes that Muslim rulers conquered parts of the subcontinent. The sociological question begins elsewhere: how does a description of some medieval rulers become a classification of millions of people living centuries later?
