Muslim quest for space in india: Prospects and Challenges

Abstract

For centuries before the British occupation of the subcontinent, the Muslims were the rulers of the land. Being dislodged from the rule and finding themselves as a minority, subjected both to British wrath and Hindu highhandedness, the Muslims found themselves in troubled waters. "There was a strain in Indian Muslim attitudes that gave the communal division a peculiar political importance and objective. From its earliest days, Islam has been a conquering and proselytizing faith. Its tradition in India was one of conquest and empire. The tides and currents of invasion and warfare had flowed to and fro, and great Hindu kingdoms had risen in the wake of periodic Muslim retreats, till the time of the Marhatta Empire. But for hundreds of years, no Hindu Raj had loaded it over Muslims either in India or in the great basins of the Indus and the Ganges.