Indian Muslims: Who Are They c7.1

c7.1

By the time Akbar the Great (1556-1605) embarked upon the policy of reuniting these kingdom under his imperial banner, Muslim population was rising all over the country. Still, despite all the exertion of the Muslims at proselytization, Hindu resistance to it was also admirably effective. Sind and Punjab no doubt had a sizeable Muslim population. But at the beginning of the sixteenth century, northern Sind (north of the River Indus) had, according to Portuguese accounts, a local Hindu as its ruler or governor.¹ In Gujarat, Malwa, and Khandesh Muslims were growing in numbers ever since Alauddin Khalji had conquered these kingdoms, but mostly in the cities and seaports. In the interior the Hindus predominated. However, the notices of some foreigners show that Muslim population in Gujarat had risen considerably. The people of Cambay were both Moors and Hindus, wrote Barbosa² and according to the impression of Pires, the Hindus had been reduced to almost the third part of the kingdom.³ On the Malabar coast, according to Portuguese estimates, the Muslims comprised about twenty percent of the population.⁴ The Bahmani kingdom had a large number of Muslims which went on growing with time. In Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Golkunda, Bidar, and Berar, the successor kingdoms of Bahmani, large number of foreign Muslims swelled the ranks of the indigenous. Writing on April, 7, 1561, C. Rodrigues remarks that in Bijapur the Moors are as innumerable as insects.⁵ Another region to which this epithet could be applied was Bengal. Even so the Muslims were not in a majority even in these parts. In the Vijayanagar empire there were a few Muslim contingents of soldiers and some Muslim citizens, but south of the river Krishna the Muslim numbers were microscopic. In the rest of the country Hindu population predominated. The Haryana, Delhi, Agra, and western U.P. regions formed the nucleus, first of the Sultanate of Delhi and then of the Mughal Empire. It was no enemy territory where warfare for conquest would have brought converts; its revenues in kind fed the capital cities of Delhi and Agra; and its aggressive Zamindars were left in restrained peace. Consequently this region remained largely Hindu. Here the small minority of Muslims was introduced as a result of early Turkish victories and Muslim immigrants were added largely under the Saiyyads and Lodis. Rajputana was Hindu; Muslims there were in insignificant numbers, because there Muslim rule could never get a foothold. Indeed when Father Pinheiro and his caravan were going from Cambay to Akbars court at Lahore through Ahmedabad, Patan and Rajasthan,⁶ in the course of the journey they passed through numerous large cities which were devastated, especially the mosques therein.⁷ In the east, according to Fitch, Banaras was a great city peopled exclusively by Hindus.⁸ He also says that the inhabitants of Kuch Bihar were entirely Hindu.⁹ The vast majority of the population of Orissa too was Hindu; and Muslim were very few.¹⁰ Similar was the case with Gondwana and Central India.