Reading Sophia Khan’s superb piece on the lost Muslim cities of Hindustan, and then watching the BP comment-thread unfold, a few thoughts crystallised for me; less about “ownership,” and more about the intellectual pattern that keeps resurfacing whenever Indo-Muslim history is discussed.
First: I genuinely did not know that Khan was originally pronounced with a silent n, nor that paan had such a deep Islamicate turn in its social history. Much like music, I had long assumed paan to be a largely Hindu-coded practice. The article forces a re-examination of how intertwined everything actually was. The same goes for Hindustani music: I once thought of it as essentially a Hindu, temple-rooted tradition. Then you realise how much of the courtly synthesis, Persian, Hindavi, Turko-Central Asian, was shaped by Muslims, even if the Vedic lattice underneath remained foundational.
This is partly why I found Bombay Badshah’s objection (“Pakistan cannot claim any of this”) an odd line to draw. One can, of course, make the territorial argument; but it collapses immediately once you observe what India itself is doing: aggressively appropriating the Indo-Muslim aesthetic while deracinating its historical context. If Bollywood, tourism, cuisine, and the Indian cultural machine can freely claim Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, and Hyderabad as national inheritances, then Pakistanis whose families actually come from those cities are hardly crossing an intellectual red line by acknowledging lineage, memory, or loss.
And we have to be consistent. Indians lament the loss of Lahore; quite understandably. Nobody tells them, “Lahore was never part of the Republic of India founded on 15 August 1947.” Because everyone grasps the point: cultural grief predates and supersedes the modern nation-state.
Second: there is a broader dialectic underway. In Pakistan, writers, often for the first time, are producing a serious discourse about Indo-Muslim civilisational memory, unlinked from 20th-century nationalism. Simultaneously, India is engaged in an equally deliberate Hindification of formerly Muslim cultural zones. You can see it in cuisine, music, clothing, architecture, historiography; everything. Andalusia is a useful analogue here. As Fernández-Morera notes, modern Western academia mythologised Islamic Spain to advance a progressive narrative; Hindu nationalists today perform the inverse manoeuvre: they flatten the Indo-Muslim centuries into caricature so that modern majoritarianism appears as a “restoration.”
But both moves share the same flaw: they refuse to look at the subcontinent as it actually existed; messy, syncretic, violent, generative, hybrid, and impossible to reduce to one parentage.
Finally, and this is perhaps the quiet truth beneath all this chatter, most of us in this conversation are no longer fighting for these identities. I’ve moved fully into a civilisationally Hindu orientation; others into hyper-Islamic, secular, or diasporic ones. None of these debates are “hills to die on.” They become interesting only when the commentariat starts to polarise, or when a genuinely new insight surfaces, such as the Afghan provenance of so much North Indian Muslim elite culture, or the fact that classical paan, like classical music, flourished within an Islamicate context as much as a Hindu one.
The real point is simple: if India is free to selectively exalt pieces of this shared inheritance while discarding their historical custodians, then Pakistanis with genealogical and cultural ties to those cities are more than entitled to remember, and to claim, what their families carried into exile.
To deny one while permitting the other is not history. It is politics masquerading as philosophy.
I find the whole question of “ownership” kind of silly. The modern nation-states of “India” and “Pakistan” haven’t even been around for 80 years. The culture is much much older. Hindustani classical music belongs as much to Pakistanis and Bangladeshis as it does to Indians. It’s a different matter that in today’s Pakistan many people don’t believe Hindustani music is part of our culture (or they try to label it “Pakistani classical music”).
Urdu is another example. Who owns Urdu? It is the national language of Pakistan but historically it evolved in the area around Delhi, where it was the prestige dialect of Khari Boli. So is Urdu “Indian” or “Pakistani”? At a certain point this argument becomes ridiculous. Unless, of course, one is pushing the Indian nationalist argument to its extreme to say that there is nothing that is genuinely part of “Pakistani culture” since “Pakistan” was historically just Northwestern India.
I found BB’s argument to be disingenuous at best. Both modern nation-states were created at exactly the same moment. Lahore has never been part of “India” (it was part of BRITISH India, the Mughal Empire etc). Sindh has never been part of “India”. That doesn’t prevent Indians whose families are from those areas from longing for their lost homeland. The same applies to Pakistanis whose ancestors were from the UP. This is perhaps compounded by the fact that Hindus and Sikhs lost just one cultural capital (Lahore) while Muslims lost Agra, Delhi and Lucknow–all major Islamicate cultural capitals.
On the question of “ownership”, Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote in his 1968 Cultural Report: