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. âIndia owns the legacy because most Muslims stayed.â âPakistan canât own it because Delhi and Lucknow are in India.â 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 BahĂĄâĂ 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