An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Indeed, for all the British encouragement, the Muslims of India as a whole did not think of their futures as anything but entwined with their Hindu compatriots. It is striking that, as late as 1918, in his most substantial book on ‘the Indian question’, the Aga Khan articulated a vision of India as a confluence of four civilizations —‘Western’, ‘Far Eastern’, ‘Brahmanical’ and ‘Mohamedan’—and expressed an ‘Indian patriotism’ that assumed close understanding between Hindus and Muslims (including a common desire for India, rather than Britain, to colonize East Africa!) Similarly, he is dismissive of ‘political Pan-Islamism’, speaking of Islam as a social, cultural and spiritual force that unites believers morally around the world, but stressing that ‘religion has more and more become a spiritual force in the modern world, and less and less a temporal one.