syncretic traditions – Brown Pundits

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

Continue reading Why Hasn’t Pakistan Collapsed Yet?

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. Continue reading On the Question of Who “Owns” the Indo-Muslim Legacy