Letās take a look at the other theses put forth by X.T.M in this piece.
His second thesis is that āThe Muslim League won. Then most Muslims stayed.ā
How should we understand this? It could be said the sons of Abraham ā and perhaps especially those in the line of Ishmael ā are meant to stay untethered from bonds to the land upon which they live, seeing as they are (at least supposedly), nomads from the sand? I think the best description of the Islamic invaders of India comes from Deleuze & Guattariās Anti-Oedipus (1972/1977). Speaking of the āBarbarian Despotic Machineā which supplants the āPrimitive Territorial Machineā (which I take to be synonymous with localized Hindu communities, even if it isnāt a perfect fit):
āThe founding of the despotic machine or the barbarian socius can be summarized in the following way: a new alliance and direct filiation. The despot challenges the lateral alliances and the extended filiations of the old community. He imposes a new alliance system and places himself in direct filiation with the deity: the people must follow. A leap into a new alliance, a break with the ancient filiationāthis is expressed in a strange machine, or rather a machine of the strange whose locus is the desertā¦ā (p. 192)
Furthermore:
āAnd new perverse groups spread the despotās invention (perhaps they even fabricated it for him), broadcast his fame, and impose his power in the towns they found or conquer. Wherever a despot and his army pass, doctors, priests, scribes, and officials are part of the procession.ā (p. 193)
What the barbarian despotic machine takes over does not need to map perfectly onto the model of the primitive territorial machine, because as D&G explain:
āIn theory the despotic barbarian formation has to be conceived of in terms of an opposition between it and the primitive territorial machine: the birth of an empire. But in reality one can perceive the movement of this formation just as well when one empire breaks away from a preceding empire; or even when there arises the dream of a spiritual empire, wherever temporal empires fall into decadence. It may be that the enterprise is primarily military and motivated by conquest, or that it is primarily religious, the military discipline being converted into internal asceticism and cohesion.ā (p. 193)
As we can read in Derryl N. Macleanās āReligion and Society in Arab Sindā (1984), Sindhi, and by extension, Indian society was pretty complex and developed past being a purely localist social model, but D&Gās historiography still works in this case because of fact that it is more a repeating historical tendency than a singular concrete event.
In any case, theoretically, the invaders should have no attachments to the land itself and the ways of the folks that lived upon it, marking and being marked by them. Of course, by the time we come to Partition, Islam in India is already centuries old and the Muslims in the subcontinent have had a long time to settle down, whether by force or self-will, and undergo the process of marking and being marked by the land they have lived on for generations. The shape this has taken is at times immediately recognizable ā dargahs, masjids, mausoleums, beards, burkhas, linguistic registers ā and at others, more subtle ā genotypes, phenotypes, diets, fabrics.
Whatever the Muslims of pre-Partion India may have said they thought about about their supposedly insurmountable differences with their Hindu neighbours in the abstract sense, it shouldnāt have surprised us that, in their revealed preferences, they valued memories, sentimentality, and attachment to what they had known for generations over political and theological consistency. Of course, this is only all too human. But, it is also, in a sense, all too pagan.
Unfortunately for them, they were caught in a double-bind of sorts and were unable to perfectly reconcile their burgeoning sense of Indian-ness with the identity they had used to define themselves for centuries. Of course, as X.T.M says, the Congress deeply failed both them and India as whole through the sort of selectively secular course it tried to steer the newborn ānationā-state through. Whether that was due to the sheer self-delusion of an elite class hopped on premium-grade Anglo Liberal copium or willful malice is a question for another day. What does matter most, in a sense, is the resultsā the continuation of the British-origin Muslim Personal Law and Waqf related acts, both have been the source of controversy and problems in recent years.
I will say, donāt mistake my mention of the Congressā permitting these to continue to be a critique rooted in liberal ideas of equality before the law or secular legalism. Kabir, in response to whom X.T.M wrote the original piece, may care about secularism, but I donāt. The issue with how the Congress handled Muslim integration doesnāt lie in the fact that they implemented different law codes ā it lies in the fundamental dialectical tension that arises from the construction of the categories of Muslim and āHinduā, wherein the latter simply means anyone who is not a Muslim (or Christian), thereby establishing the Muslim as a sort of protagonist in the new Indian social drama, as he is made the sole bearer of a concrete identity whereas the Hindu is made out to be a more nebulous sort of entity, more of an abstract, anonymous force suffusing Indian society than a person himself.
Again, I donāt say this out of any wish that Hindus should also transmogrify ourselves to be thus legally ācapturedā. Only that we should recognize the legacy of Islamic and Anglo law in the modern Indian legal system, as well as the fact their forms seem to rhyme and resound with each other in ways that seem to render them more powerful than even the will of the Hindu majority of India at times (if any of those things even exist).