ABSTRACT
By the time I set foot in India, I had been dipping into Indian History for three terms under the guidance of one of the handful in England at that day competent to teach it: Professor Dodwell of London. I knew, because the rotund sentence was in one of the prescribed books, that in India as nowhere else on the map of mankind the spectacle had been witnessed of two vast, strongly developed and yet radically dissimilar civilizations meeting and mingling. And Dr Grahame Bailey in the same interval had succeeded in arousing my interest in Urdu. Here, at all events, I thought, was proof of the blending of the two cultures. ‘Urdu’, our word ‘horde’, is Turkish for ‘camp’; and the Urdu language is the Hindi spoken around Delhi overlaid by the Persian speech of Muslim invaders of Turkic stock who had descended upon India from the north. Surely after eight or nine centuries of partnership there would be countless other proofs of harmony. But as yet I was no better equipped than the next Englishman to give any thought to the crucial question: These Indo-Muslims-were they more Indian than Muslim or more Muslim than Indian?
