The Hindification of Muslim Culture

Something in a recent thread caught my attention. A commenter praised several khayal singers, almost all Hindu, while omitting equally eminent Muslim vocalists. Kabir pointed this out, but the exchange exposed a larger pattern: the slow Hindification of Muslim cultural inheritances in India.

This is not new. It has happened before in the Balkans, Spain, North Africa, and now South Asia. When Muslim political power retreats but its aesthetic legacy endures, successor communities begin absorbing, domesticating, and rebranding the cultural capital that Muslim rule left behind.

Hindustani music is a prime example. The foundational grammar, khayal, thumri, tarana, bandish, raga–riyaz discipline, gharana boundaries, was shaped by Persian, Turkic, and Indo-Muslim lineages. Yet today, the most visible custodians of this tradition are overwhelmingly Hindu: Bengali virtuosos, Maharashtrian stalwarts, the great Dharwad families, plus a handful of Muslim houses that continue against the grain. A few dozen performers make a strong living; a select few have global reputations. But the overall demographic shift is unmistakable.

Bollywood shows the same motion. Where Muslim lyricists, composers, and singers once defined the industry’s emotional vocabulary, there is now a steady rise of Hindu, especially Bengali, writers and musicians filling that space. The idiom remains “Urdu” on the surface, but the institutional carriers have changed.

Cuisine will follow. Biryani, Korma, Tandoori; these will persist, but the cultural ownership will shift as Hindu chefs, influencers, and restaurateurs become the primary transmitters. The pattern is not erasure; it is succession.

Historically, Muslim civilisation excelled at hybridisation. It absorbed Byzantine, Indo-Persian, Central & East Asian, African, and European elements and fused them into coherent forms; architecture, music, cuisine, calligraphy, court etiquette. The apex of Indo-Islamic refinement is the Taj Mahal, still the global shorthand for beauty. No cathedral, palace, or fortress in Europe, or elsewhere, commands the same universal awe. The Muslim aesthetic eye created something that continues to eclipse everything around it.

But civilisations are not static. They pass on their achievements to whoever is willing to maintain them. In India, that inheritor is now the Hindu middle class. As Muslim influence contracts in public institutions, Hindu society steps in—not by replacing the art forms, but by naturalising them.

A decade ago, before my own dramatic turn toward a Dharmic civilizational lens, I would have heard Ustad Naseeruddin Saami with a kind of melancholy reverence; one of the last great masters of a tradition that Pakistan cannot sustain on its own. Today, listening with a different sensibility, I recognise something else: continuity without custodianship is an illusion. If a community cannot carry its own inheritance, others will.

The Hindification of Muslim culture is not an ideological project. It is a demographic and institutional process. Traditions survive by passing into the hands of those who invest in them. India, in this moment, is reassigning stewardship.

The art will endure. The question is who will claim it, cultivate it, and give it a future.