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.
well Punjab and Urdu’s interplay is quite fascinating..
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 🙂
https://thesouthasianidea.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/the-changing-world-of-urdu/
The Changing World of Urdu
By Anjum Altaf
The first case study, a story narrated by a person born in the 1940s, spans the lives of his grandfather (born 1880s), his mother (born 1920s) and his daughter (born 1970s). The genesis of the story was accidental – it just so happened that for a summer the narrator and a friend, a leading literary critic, had lunch every day at the former’s home where they were joined by the rest of the narrator’s family – his mother, wife and daughter.
A few days into the summer, the critic brought to the attention of the daughter the fact that her great-grandfather was a noted Urdu poet in UP; her grandmother knew thousands of couplets by heart; her father knew hundreds including the bahr-e taweel that probably only a handful of Urdu speakers can claim to know now. She, however, could not recite a single couplet.
Much handwringing ensued at this precipitous decline in familiarity with the heritage of Urdu literature and the critic proposed a remedial program: Every day he would discuss one couplet so that by the end of the summer the daughter would have a repertoire of the best of Urdu verse and be motivated and able to continue on her own. The proposal met with all round approval. It was agreed that the critic would recite a couplet, the daughter would clarify the meaning of any words unfamiliar to her, and the explication and commentary would follow.
The exercise was launched with the critic reciting the following couplet:
Mir in neem-baaz aankhon meN
saari mastii sharaab kii sii hai
It was the daughter’s turn to ask for the meaning of any of the words she had not understood. She thought for a while and said: “I understand all the words but what is the meaning of Mir?”
The critic, in turn, thought for a considerable time before deciding it would be wise to abandon the project. The foundation on which the edifice of knowledge was to be built had crumbled beyond repair. The lunch however was excellent UP cuisine that had lost none of its delicacy.
The second story evolved from a passing remark. A grandmother (born 1920s) at the dinner table asked whatever had happened to bayt baazi. The son (born 1940s) ventured that since few young people knew any Urdu poetry, it had gone out of fashion. Not surprisingly, attention was drawn to the granddaughter (born 1980s). Surely, she knew one couplet at least. Many minutes passed in attempts at memory recall before the following line was offered:
Advertisement
Privacy Settings
mujh se pehlii sii mohabbat merey mahbuub na maang
No one had the heart to mention that this was not a line from a ghazal. That, no doubt, yielded the granddaughter a great deal of confidence. At this point the grandfather, whose memory had faded to the extent that he did not know who was sitting around the table, said:
Ghalib-e khasta ke baghair kaun se kaam band haiN
roiiye zaar zaar kyaa kiijiiye haay haay kyuuN
The granddaughter, unbidden, attributed the couplet to Faiz. Attention shifted, once again, to the excellence of the dinner on the table.
The point of these stories is not that the generation born in the 1970s and 1980s is bereft of culture. Many of them are writing poetry themselves but that poetry is in English or in a reincarnation of rekhta having a few Urdu words thrown into a composition in a foreign language. Interaction with families belonging to the ahle-zabaan, those who claim Urdu as their mother tongue, suggests that these stories reflect a widespread phenomenon. The new generation of upwardly-mobile native Urdu speakers has little connection with Urdu as a literary language. They use it to communicate with their grandmothers or with others unfamiliar with English; they know a large number of Bollywood film songs (Antakshari has replaced bayt baazi) and are quite familiar with the language of StarPlus soap operas. The birthday cake of the granddaughter of the second story, served up a few days later, had the following inscription in English, iced under the chocolate face of Shahrukh Khan:
Janam din kii shubhkamna Munni
The point is not to lament this change, just to record it and reflect on its implications. The old cultural elite for whom Urdu was the medium of literary exchange has over the better part of a hundred years transitioned to English with Urdu serving to communicate with mothers-in-law and servants or to add local color to conversations in a foreign language. Other cultural functions are being filled by Bollywood and StarPlus Hindi.
Reason for this is low TFR of the mohajir elite. I am sure Punjabi elite in Lahore and Pashtun elite in Peshawar face the same issue but they have hinterlands from which their rural brethren migrate and “replace” them.
The rural mohajir component never migrated.
In 50-100 years Karachi and Hyderabad will become “Sindhi” again.
TFR makes no different to Pakistan’s elite, which congeals very effectively alas!!!
yes thank you
we are fairly in alignment; I just don’t know how many Pakistanis would be (maybe Furqan more than Kabir)..
I don’t agree with TNT but I do think there have to be accommodations to live with it..
btw what you said I had read years ago re Urdu transmission: https://thesouthasianidea.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/the-changing-world-of-urdu/
Kabir’s dad had relayed this fantastic narrative
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.
Agreed that there is no cultural homogeneity in Pakistan.
But there is a “high culture” (not a value judgement but a descriptive term) which is based on Muhajir culture. Urdu is a big part of this. Mughlai cuisine is presumed to be more sophisticated than “folk” cuisines. Ghazals are seen as more sophisticated than “folk” music.
Also things like “Coke Studio Pakistan” and “Pakistan Idol” bind the nation together.
On “Pakistaniyat”– I disagree with you to an extent. The fact is that we are one nation ( I would like us to remain one nation). Every nation-state on earth has a certain conception of itself that it needs to pass down to future generations. I grew up in the US and we were definitely taught a certain narrative of the “land of the free and the home of the brave”.
India has a certain conception of itself that it wants to pass down to people of all different ethnicities. If Tamils start thinking of themselves as distinct from other Indians, it can lead to balkanization. We already see that many Kashmiris don’t think of themselves as Indian. Obviously, there is a different issue there involving the territorial dispute.
yes but who made these value judgements.
TNT colonised both the Wings of India; the Northeast broke off but the NorthWest (mainly Punjab) seems to have imbibed it
yes Pakistan is complex; I forget that since in Diaspora everything is flattened.
The “heir of Lucknow” is an Indian professor in Ashoka University.
Difference between reality and the myth that Pakistanis believe.
In fact the “heir of Pakistan” is also an Indian citizen who owns an IPL team.
This is a stupid argument. Raja Sahab’s grandson is not the heir of an entire city.
He has more claims to it than some randos in Karachi.
One person cannot be the “heir” of an entire city. Don’t be ridiculous.
That’s what rulers are.
Greatest indictment of Pakistan as a country is people like Jinnah, the Raja of Mahmudabad’s progeny etc ALL live in India.
That’s neither here nor there.
I’m not going to go down this path of questioning individual people’s choices.
The Quaid’s daughter married a non-Muslim. Why would you have expected her to move to Pakistan? As it is, she lived most of her life in New York.
But her children live in India.
Not really
RFK Jr. is not the heir to the Kennedy legacy though he bears their name
hmm these are complex topics; Saif and the other chap are in a very different orbit
> 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
This is a really weak argument, bordering arrogance.
Jains in various parts of India (Karnataka, Rajasthan, Maharashtra) have kept their culture and religion alive over the centuries without asking to be the national reference points? Same can be said about Sikhs in Maharashtra or Buddhists in Himachal and Maharashtra.
Urdu also survives a living functioning state supported language in India, actively spoken by millions. Pashto, Dari, Baluchi, Sindhi: Fine with claiming them as Pakistani
> a sense of centrality that Indian Muslims no longer enjoy.
Indian Muslims are thriving, probably better than on the other sides. The Khans, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, Azim Premji, AR Rahman, Md. Siraj and many others are shining examples.
Pakistan is a breakout state still in search of an identity. Claiming to “refuse humiliation” doesn’t make sense because India never had that as active agenda so far.
You’re correct: there is a difference between learning about a culture and living inside it.
You don’t understand India because you’ve not lived in it.
Jains and Muslims are very different populations..
we can speculate about ‘culture’ and this/that all we want – but the blunt reality is that it boils down to nukes. That’s about it. If Pak didnt have nukes, post-9/11 treatment by the US would have been arguably very different.
Take the nukes away and splintering Kalat/Balochistan is as viable as slicing off East Timor was.
80 years of survival means now Pakistan has some semblance of a nationhood ‘narrative’. And nukes allow PakMil to keep kleptocratic zombie state alive and stumbling. Until it won’t.
it’s not just nukes
Exactly. RecoveringNewsJunkie is ignoring the fact that by and large most Pakistanis want Pakistan to continue to exist. Perhaps some people in Balochistan want independence but that’s an empirical question.
Speaking about “splintering” an integral part of Pakistan reveals a deeply anti-Pakistan mindset. Balochistan is not a Disputed Territory. Occupied Kashmir is.
yes but even so there is some truth to the fact that it’s not just a question of legal matters.