The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

Our own Hindufication

We write this not as outsiders pretending to diagnose India, but as people who have undergone a gentler version of the same process. Over fifteen years of family and work on the subcontinent, our own Islamicate inheritance has been quietly sifted. The Persianate was retained. The Arabic was allowed to fall away. The qawwali, the food, the manners, the ghazal, the Mughal grammar of taste. All survived. The devotional Islamicate self did not. We arrived as something close to a Anglo-Islamicate hybrid. We are leaving, slowly, as a Hindu-Persianate one. We did not plan this. We watched it happen to ourselves.

The Persian survives. The Arabic does not. The poetry survives. The prayer does not. This is the formula. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

We made this passage with privilege, with distance, with choice, and with somewhere else to be if we changed our minds. The Indian Muslim, the one with no other passport and no other country, is being asked to make the same passage on terms set by people who never had to make it themselves. That asymmetry is this post.

The morning song

The news this week was Memo No. 470-ME, dated 19 May 2026, signed by the Director of Madrasah Education, Government of West Bengal. The order makes the singing of Vande Mataram mandatory at morning assembly in every state-recognised madrasa: government, aided, unaided, all of them. Immediate effect. Approval of competent authority.

Note the date. Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the first BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal on 9 May, ten days earlier, on a 207-seat mandate that ended Mamata Banerjee’s fifteen-year run. The order is ten days into the new government. Of all the actions available to a freshly-installed state administration, this is the gesture chosen. The first major item on the agenda was the Muslim schoolchild’s morning. The signal is the signal.

The Pakistani faction of our commentariat is aghast, and not unreasonably. The song is a hymn to the Great goddess Durga, drawn from a novel that called for war on Muslims, and forcing a Muslim child to recite it is a small humiliation that announces a large arrangement. One of our Pakistani commenters compared it to forcing a vegetarian Hindu to eat beef. The comparison overstates and understates at the same time. It overstates because nobody is forcing food into anyone’s mouth. It understates because food is forgotten by the afternoon, and a song sung daily for ten years writes itself into the spine.

The row is the symptom. The disease is older. Bengal is the latest frontier, not the first.

The Persianate without the Muslim

The Taj Mahal is read in India as Indian architecture. It is, in fact, Timurid-Persianate, with closer cousins in Samarkand and Bukhara than in any pre-Mughal Indian building. Mughal food is read as Indian. It is, in fact, a Persian and Central Asian transplant adapted to Indian spice. Urdu is read as Indian. It is, in fact, a Persianate register of Hindustani that the upper-caste north Indian Hindu has spent a hundred years either disowning or absorbing, depending on the political weather.

The strategy is clear and largely effective. Keep the form. Discard the producer. The shell of the Persianate is welcomed into the national pantheon. The people who made it are walled off as a problem to manage.

The strategy has a limit, and the limit is depth. The biryani at the Lucknowi Dadi’s table, made by the eighty-year-old aunt who still speaks a mix of Urdu and Persian and cooks with a vocabulary the Brahmin caterer simply does not have, is better than the biryani at any five-star Hindu-run restaurant in Gurgaon. The best Muslim food in India is still in Old Delhi. The best hummus is still in Jaffa, not Tel Aviv. When you divorce a high culture from its inheritors, you can serve the dish, but you cannot reproduce the depth. The inheritor holds something the appropriator cannot copy. That is small comfort, but it is real comfort, and it is the one card the Indian Muslim still holds. It is unclear how long he will be allowed to hold it.

The Ashraf bargain

The Hindufication of the Muslim does not happen at one level. It happens at two, in opposite directions, and that is the part that gets missed in most South Asian commentary.

At the top, the bargain is generous. The Indian Muslim who carries Persian, Turkic or Arabic ancestry, the Ashraf, the Sayyids, the Mughals, the Pathans, the families with a recognisable foreign quantum, will be quietly re-read as upper-caste-adjacent and admitted to the elite tables on those terms. Their Urdu will be praised, their adab celebrated, their cookbooks published, their daughters welcomed into mixed marriages with Hindu Khatris and Brahmins. They will be invited to opine on television and play in the cricket team and act in Bollywood. They will sit on heritage trusts. They will be permitted to be Muslim in the limited register the new mainstream tolerates: cultural Muslim, secular Muslim, syncretic Muslim, anything but the praying Muslim.

This is not absorption against the will of the ashraf. It is a bargain. They get class continuity. The price is the rest of their community.

At the bottom, the bargain is harsher. The pasmanda, the converts from Dalit and OBC ancestry who are eighty to ninety percent of Indian Muslims, will be re-read as nothing in particular and treated accordingly. No ascendancy. No invitation. No representation in the consultant rosters of charitable hospitals or the IAS short lists. They will be Indian Muslims the way the Indian Dalit is Indian: present, counted, and structurally excluded from the rooms where things are decided. Islam is their bulwark.

Caste reabsorbs Islam

The parallel is the African-American experience, and it is exact, though it is rarely named in South Asian commentary.

The light-skinned house slave with white ancestry rose. The dark-skinned field slave with West African ancestry did not. The mulatto ascendancy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Frederick Douglass through W.E.B. Du Bois to the Harlem Renaissance figures, was structurally the elevation of those African-Americans whose blood was closest to that of the conqueror. The Indian Muslim ashraf elevation, when it comes, will play out the same way, by the same logic, for the same reason. The conqueror’s blood confers entry. The conquered’s blood does not.

This is the pathology, and it is close to universal except in the case of African-American slaves, who were barred by the one-drop rule. In most documented cases, every descendant of a conquered population identifies with the conqueror rather than the conquered. The mixed Indian identifies with the Aryan, not the Dravidian, not the Dalit. The mixed Muslim identifies with the Persian or the Arab, not the local convert. The mestizo in Latin America identifies with the Spaniard, not the indio.

There are dignified exceptions, Ambedkar foremost among them, but the gravitational pull runs only one way. The body remembers the wrong side.

Watch this running live in our commentariat. One of our Hindu commenters offers a list of urbane Muslim chefs who eat pork, Bollywood Muslim stars who marry Hindu women, Muslim cricketers who do puja on Eid. The list is offered as evidence of beautiful syncretism. It is evidence of something else. It is the inventory of the Muslim subset that has been judged safe to admit. The same commenter, when asked about the absence of Indian Muslims from elite medical consultancies, replies that it reflects their backwardness. The slip is the thesis.

The same commenter, in the same week, recommends an “Ataturkization” of Indian Islam: a reform from above, conducted by the state, in the name of liberalism, against the wishes of the community. The Muslim is to be modernised on terms set by people who did not have to modernise themselves. When pressed on caste, the conversation collapses into deflection and counter-example, and the privilege never quite arrives at the surface.

The Hindu liberal who tells you about his wonderful Muslim friend is doing the exact work that the liberal white American does with his wonderful Black friend. The friend is loved, but only on the host’s conditions, and only so long as the friend does not start making demands.

Pakistan and the three paths

Pakistan has been the great accelerant. Every time Pakistan acts as a Muslim state, the Indian Muslim pays a small tax. Decades of those small taxes compound into the long dark night. Without Pakistan, the consolidation might have taken another fifty years or it might have been savage civil war, counterfactuals are anyone’s guess.

With Pakistan, it is nearly done. The Hindu-Muslim conflict, once internal to the subcontinent, has externalised into the India-Pakistan conflict, and the minorities caught inside the wrong state, Pakistani Hindus, Bangladeshi Hindus, Indian Muslims, are devoid of leverage unless they conform or escape.

So what does the Indian Muslim do.

Three options, as far as we can see.

Conform, and become a Hindu-Persianate Indian with a Muslim name, like the three Khans of Bollywood, who married Hindu women, raise composite children, perform Diwali on Instagram, and execute the new mainstream with practiced ease.

Exit, to the Gulf, where he becomes a brown labourer in an Arab state and lives in perpetual subordination, working twenty years for a passport he will never receive.

Hold, and accept that he will be increasingly minoritised in the country his ancestors built much of. The fourth option, which was Pakistan, has already been taken. It is not on offer to those who stayed.

The precedent is not encouraging. The Bengali Muslim earned his independence in 1971 through what was, by any honest accounting, near-genocide. The Punjabi Muslim earned his by surrendering his own ethno-linguistic identity to an Urdu-speaking elite from Lucknow and Karachi, a surrender (Faustian bargain) he is still negotiating in real time. Neither path was a triumph. Both were survival under terms set by others. The Indian Muslim now faces a third version of the same negotiation. The terms are not yet final. The direction is clear.

The Hindu-Persianate morning

We do not write this in despair. We write it as observation, the kind we have earned by watching it happen to ourselves over fifteen years from the outside, and to our extended family from the inside.

The subcontinent is consolidating. Every great civilisational mass eventually consolidates, and the consolidation always feels like a long dark night to whoever is being absorbed. The Dravidian under the Aryan. The Dalit under the savarna. The Buddhist under the Hindu. The Persianate under the Hindustani. The Indian Muslim is the latest to walk through it.

The morning that follows will be a Hindu-Persianate morning. Whether the Indian Muslim is in it as a Muslim, or only as a Muslim-named Indian, is the question that will define the next fifty years.

The Lucknowi Dadi will still cook the better biryani. Her grandson will be forced to sing Vande Mataram at assembly, the next morning. Both things will be true.