South India Makes British India Hindu?

TNT Saved Hinduism; Dravidia preserved Aryavarta?

S. Qureshi: “Muslims are today a majority of the population >50% of North British India. If peninsular south was made into its own country in 1947, India would be a Muslim majority country today. Many Muslims actually wanted South India to be a separate country and North India (including Pakistan/Bengal) to be one unit. To say that Indian Muslims who lived in the historical centre of Muslim power for centuries would just get up and leave for Pakistan is just farcical and delusional. These types of ideas were only proposed by extreme right-wing Hindu organizations after partition, and these ideas seem to become mainstream today with BJP. Historical reality, like always, is very different.”

The demographic map of the subcontinent tells a startling story. If South India had formed a separate state in 1947, the rest of British India — encompassing Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the northern Hindi belt — would today constitute a Muslim-majority civilizational bloc. This isn’t conjecture. It’s arithmetic.

The Numbers That Reorder the Narrative

Here’s what the Indo-Gangetic arc looks like today (please fact check me):

This zone — from the Indus to the Brahmaputra — forms the heart of historic Muslim rule and Indo-Islamic culture. It now holds a Muslim plurality by any fair reckoning.

Meanwhile, South India’s states — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana — collectively remain over 85% Hindu, with Muslims forming a small minority in each. Their inclusion at Independence was numerically decisive: it is South India that gives modern India its Hindu supermajority. Hence the importance perhaps of South Indians identifying by religion rather than racial or linguistic identity (the spectrum from Karnataka to Tamil Nadu is evident).

Partition Didn’t Remove Muslims — It Dispersed and Disabled Them

The post-Partition fantasy that Muslims would simply “go to Pakistan” never materialized. Over 100 million remained in India, and today, they form one of the world’s largest Muslim populations. Yet Partition fractured Muslim political coherence across the region:

• In Pakistan, the elite Muslim leadership fled from India but failed to root a stable democratic order.
• In Bangladesh, Muslims gained sovereignty but not ideological clarity, emerging from the trauma of being a colony within a colony.
• In India, Muslims became a politically orphaned minority, without the leadership or institutional protection to assert influence at scale.

Partition’s hidden function wasn’t to separate Hindus from Muslims — it was to atomize Muslim political power so that it could never again dominate the northern plain. There are over 20 Arab nations, more than 50 Muslim-majority countries, and dozens of post-colonial African states — fragmented, often weak, and locked in regional rivalries. Nothing builds enduring national success like scale.

That’s precisely why the American Founding Fathers didn’t just seek independence — they rebelled against balkanisation. They chose federation over fragmentation, understanding that power grows when you unify, not when you splinter.

Was the Internal Map Engineered?

Were India’s internal borders were also quietly redrawn to harden majoritarianism?

• The 2000 creation of Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, and Chhattisgarh carved out tribal and resource-rich regions from larger, more Muslim-heavy states — reinforcing demographic control. Or maybe it was vice-versa, them seeking liberation from larger entities?
• The merger and subjugation of Hyderabad after 1948 eliminated a powerful Muslim-led princely state from the federal imagination.
• The formation of Telangana avoided disrupting Hindu dominance, despite its linguistic and historical uniqueness.

These weren’t just administrative decisions. They were part of an unspoken strategy to perhaps moderate Muslim density and influence while preserving the political integrity of a Hindu-majority republic (80% is the golden mean).

The Indo-Gangetic Plain: Still Muslimesque, Still Marginalised

It’s worth repeating: the Indo-Gangetic plain — from Lahore to Patna — remains the civilizational core of Indo-Islamic heritage. These were capitals, not peripheries. Yet today, they sit at the edge of nationalist mythmaking — geographically central, but ideologically erased.

The attempt to recast Muslims as outsiders in this space is not just revisionism; it is an erasure of civilizational memory.

Conclusion

If South India had gone its own way in 1947 — as Qureishi claims some Muslim thinkers proposed — the rest of British India would today be overwhelmingly Muslim. Partition didn’t purify the map. It surgically amputated political capacity from the largest Muslim population bloc on earth.

South India (my favourite part of the Indian Subcontinent) didn’t just stay Indian.

It made India Hindu.