Return to Roots : Emancipation of Indian Muslims

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Return to Roots : Emancipation of Indian Muslims is an attempt to educate Indian Muslims in this direction. The authorâ€™s earlier book, Indian Muslims: Who are they (1990), and the present one go together. The first discusses how Indian Muslims came into being, the second dwells on how they can return to their roots and to peace. Naturally there is some repetition in the two books, particularly with regard to the making of the Indian Muslim Community. V.S. Naipaul also deals with a similar theme. He does not deal with India but with Islamic countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran and Pakistan. But his study is very relevant to India also because Indian Muslims world-view is similar to the world-view of Muslims in other Islamic countries. His two books, Among the Believers (1980) and Beyond Belief: Excursions among the converted peoples (1998), also go together. They comprise oral history. Naipaul has found that countries which were once overrun by the revealed religions, are trying to seek their old links, their old religions. The phenomenon is world-wide. Europe and the Americas, in particular South America, which were once flooded with revealed religions are trying to rediscover their old deities, their old tribes. But it is different in Islamic countries. There Islamic fundamentalism suppresses freedom of inquiry. Among Muslims, the converts learn to lose regard for the land of their birth and the culture of their ancestors. They try to erase their past, and though they were once victims of an aggression, they are now on the side of the aggressor. This is exactly what has happened in India too. But India never became an Islamic country. Its ethos has continued to remain Hindu. Even Indian Muslims have not lost their Hindu moorings altogether. So, India can still be saved to live in peace. Arab Muslims call Indian Muslims Hindus. So also do the precision-seeking French. Therefore, if in place of asserting their separate identity, Indian Muslims could gather enough courage to reassert their original identity, all differences will disappear and peace will return to this vast landâ€”from Afghanistan to Bangladesh and from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR K.S. Lal

Professor Kishori Saran Lal (b. 1920) took his doctorate in Medieval Indian History from the University of Allahabad in 1945. Starting as a lecturer in the same University, he served in the Madhya Pradesh Education Service from 1945 to 1963 and taught at Government Colleges in Nagpur, Jabalpur and Bhopal. He was Reader in the University of Delhi for ten years (1963-73) and, for the next ten years, Professor and Head of the Department of History in the University of Jodhpur (1973-79) and the University of Hyderabad (1979-83). He has participated in many seminars and conferences, national and international, in India and abroad. In Madhya Pradesh, he was Secretary of the Madhya Pradesh Itihasa Parishad and Convener of the Regional Records Survey Committee. He presided over the Medieval History Section of the Indian History Congress in 1958, Punjab History Congress in 1975, Rajasthan History Congress in 1978, and Indian History and Culture Society in 1984. In 1977 he chaired a session at the Seventh International Conference of the Association of Historians of Asia, held in Bangkok. He has published a number of articles and monographs on Medieval Indian History. All his books have met a world-wide acclaim; they have been noticed in learned journals in London, Leiden, Chicago, Leipzig, Rome and other centres of learning.