• If one reads your book, until 1857, Delhi under the Mughals is great symbol of inclusivist, pluralistic Islam.

A pluralistic culture where you find Hindus and Muslims sharing the same poetry, enjoying the same mushairas.

• Then, it begins to change. Can I give a conspiracy theory?

Please go ahead.

• It is said the British figured it and they figured that their future lay in pushing ahead that divide. If not creating a divide, then widening the divide. And divide and rule begins then, leading to the partition.

Well, you have references to divide and rule earlier, but what I think really is the case is that you get much more self-consciousness of Hindus and Muslim identities. Among Muslims, you have Deoband growing up. Among Hindus, you have the Arya Samaj.

• And the British thrived on it.

The British thrived on it but they didn’t have to discourage it very strongly either. I am the first to criticise the British. This book in the West has been accused of West-bashing and Brit-bashing. But I think there were enough willing collaborators to make divide and rule possible. It’s an important point to remember.

• But the story of the subcontinent’s marginalised Muslims, or the demonised minority begins in 1857? The marginalisation of Muslims begins in 1857.

What you get after 1857 is that the prestige attached to Mughal culture disappears. People are no longer interested in the whole gamut of Mughal attributes — the old Mughal politeness is regarded as elaborate nonsense. Mughal poetry loses its high prestige and people want to write like Wordsworth and there’s a wonderful description by Azad when he says — and the same thing you could say about America — that once the British won in 1857, suddenly everything about them became attractive. Clothes that were laughed at before suddenly seemed very attractive, their modes of education and so on. And you find that the Mughal culture shrinks in prestige and shrinks in its attractiveness and more and more people want to go into English language education. The most crucial thing is that the same year Ghalib dies is the year when Mahatma Gandhi is born. So you have one world going down and there is this new English educated, English-speaking world rising up. It’s that world which wins India’s independence. It isn’t the old feudal elite. It is the products of Anglicised schools and using, in many ways, the Western political methods, political parties, protest marches rather than, you know, a mass uprising.

... contd.