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