A cultural explanation, not an institutional one.
The comments on the last post revealed something important: there is a difference between learning about a culture and living inside it. The Indo-Muslim legacy sits precisely in that gap. It is not owned by a census or a successor state. It survives in people whose habits, tastes and instincts are shaped by it, even if they no longer identify with the religion that produced it.
Most arguments in the thread reduced the issue to arithmetic. “India owns the legacy because most Muslims stayed.” “Pakistan can’t own it because Delhi and Lucknow are in India.” These claims are tidy, but they miss the point. Culture does not follow borders. It follows continuity.
My own shift in identity made this clear. As I Hinducised through marriage, I also Persianised. The Islamicate part of me did not vanish; it was absorbed into a Bahá’í frame where contradictions resolved themselves in a Dharmic canvas. It taught me something simple: civilisations are not inherited by territory; they are inherited by people who keep caring.
1. Rushdie and the Islamicate Without Islam
Salman Rushdie is often treated as an outlier, but he illustrates the rule. He abandoned Islam but never abandoned the Islamicate mind; the cadences, humour, metaphors, and inner furniture of a shared civilisational world. His Urdu is not “Indian” or “Pakistani.” It is the Urdu of a class whose geography stretched across northern India and now stretches across the diaspora. That class still exists in scattered form, not in any one nation-state.
2. The Muhajir Fact
Migration is not a census event; it is a cultural filter. The people who left North India for Pakistan were not representative of all Muslims. They were the cultural elite. Their influence was far greater than their numbers, and it still shapes Pakistan’s bureaucracy, language, literature, and urban culture.
They resemble the WASPs in America: a founding stratum whose power declines by shaping the mainstream in its image, not by simply vanishing. A culture does not need a majority to lead. It needs institutions, confidence, and a sense of mission. Pakistan’s national idiom still draws from that stream. India’s does not.
3. India’s Argument: Custody vs Continuity
The claim that “Indian Muslims stayed, so India inherits the tradition” treats inheritance as property law. But culture does not behave like property. Europe maintains Jewish archives, synagogues, and neighbourhoods. Yet no one argues that Kraków or Vienna inherited Jewish civilisation. Custodianship follows people, not buildings.
Indian Muslims today do not form a cultural elite in India. Their centres, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Old Delhi, survive as enclaves, not as national reference points. In Pakistan, those same sensibilities became the national reference point, even for leaders who were not ancestrally culturally Muslim (Iqbal the Kashmiri Pandit; Jinnah the Lohana Gujarati). That fact alone tilts the axis of inheritance.
4. Urdu: Divergence, Decline, and Absorption
Urdu in India now bends towards Hindi through Bollywood and the northern demographic weight. The tradition survives, but as an aesthetic rather than a cultural system. Urdu in Pakistan survives as a living, adaptive language. It absorbs Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, and English. It mutates without losing its core. This ability to absorb and redirect is the Islamicate habit at work.
5. Dignity and Subordination
Cultural arguments are also dignity arguments. Many commentators insist that Indian Muslims are “better off because they stayed.” But subordination has an unseen cost. A culture loses its self-respect long before it loses its monuments. Pakistan, with all its failures, still protects a sense of centrality that Indian Muslims no longer enjoy. This is one of the reasons Pakistan remains coherent despite its crises. A poor country can survive if its identity remains intact. A rich country can break apart if its identity dissolves.
6. Why Pakistan Has Not Collapsed
The usual explanations, army discipline, foreign aid, geography, are incomplete. The deeper reason is cultural:
Pakistan anchors an identity that refuses humiliation.
It may lack functioning institutions, but it does not lack a civilisational self-image. That alone keeps the centre from falling away.
Final Thought
The Indo-Muslim legacy will never map neatly onto India or Pakistan. It survives in gestures, accents, family rituals, food, poetry, and inherited tastes. It survives wherever people still feel at home in that world. Ownership is not awarded by territory. Ownership is awarded by continuity.
And continuity today lies more firmly in the places, Karachi, Lahore, the diaspora, where the old Lucknow–Delhi sensibility still sees itself as central rather than marginal. The heirs of Lucknow may sit in Defence and Clifton rather than in Awadh, but the lineage they carry has not dimmed. It has simply moved.
“The Indo-Muslim legacy will never map neatly onto India or Pakistan”–Agreed.
Numerically, most people who migrated from India to Pakistan were Punjabis fleeing East Punjab to West Punjab in fear for their lives. The same operated on the other side. High level talk of the “Partition of India” obscures the fact that it was Punjab that was ethnically cleansed.
Muhajir culture was granted importance in Pakistan because it was seen as the “high culture” and because Urdu is the national language. Otherwise, the culture of the majority is actually Punjabi culture. But I think a lot of Punjabis also bought into the idea that true sophistication lay in Lucknow and Delhi rather than in Punjab.
Urdu was the official language in the Punjab
That was a British decision.
In a post 1947 context, many Punjabis bought into the idea of Urdu as the national language and spoke to their children only in Urdu (my own maternal grandparents did so). Many people view Punjabi as a debased form of Urdu–this is of course historically incorrect since Punjabi is a much older language than Urdu.
However, there are also many Punjabis who view Urdu as a colonial import. They tend to be left-wing Punjabi nationalist types.
Interesting post. I agree with a lot of it (sometimes with different valence), but “The heirs of Lucknow may sit in Defence and Clifton rather than in Awadh, but the lineage they carry has not dimmed. It has simply moved.”. I dont think this is correct. I dont mean I think it has dimmed, i mean they themselves think it has dimmed. 40 years ago our sort of elite school had many students who could recite dozens or even 100s of urdu verses, who read urdu short stories and novels as a matter of course and who were familiar with the basics of urdu literary history (because it was a well designed part of the curriculum)> Today their kids can do NONE of this. I know this because I ask them, ALL the time. That high culture is not in good health. There are still poets and writers and whatnot, but the audience is fading.. And someday, ask them about the punjabification of urdu 🙂
That said, sure, a new pakistani urdu culture is taking root, but it is not very familiar with its own roots, it may not be as superficial as Indian elite culture, but it is definitely superficial..
Yikes. Not 40 years, 50 plus years ago 🙂
First, no one can take Peshawar out of me. My olfactory nerves have experienced its fragrance deeply enough that even if I go to Antarctica, it will stay with me. But that fragrance belonged to geography – an ecosystem in which culture itself sprouts.
Secondly, there is no cultural homogeneity in Pakistan. Culture here is nuanced: from language to values, from weddings to funerals, and much more. Just because the state hasn’t collapsed (East Pakistan did collapse) doesn’t mean we have a universal culture; there can be myriad other reasons. For instance, Pukhtunwali (the Pashtuns’ way of life) is superior to “Pakistaniyat” – state’s imposed identity.