The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which has landed us where we are : where intellectual inquiry is shut out ; where our tradition are not e… - Arun Shourie

It is not the occasion but the ulema’s assessment of women per se which is of interest, for it pervades the fatwas through and through. ‘For the Quran says,’ declare the ulema of Deoband settling a matter to which we shall soon turn, ‘the husband is the master.’ .... And among these kafirs there are gradations, Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan declares: one hard kind of basic kufr is Christianity; worse than it is Magianism; worse than that is idolatry; worse than that is Wahabiyat; and worse than all these and more wicked is Deobandiyat...

In the bookshops in the Muslim areas of our cities—for instance in the bookshops around the Jama Masjid in Delhi— the collections of fatwas fill shelves after shelves. They are put together with great care, the sort of care one associates with sacred literature. The pages are well laid out. The calligraphy is often a work of art. The volumes are beautifully bound— ever so often with gilded embossing on the covers.

But here in India a simplistic recitation of the earlier phrases and categories remained enough. It is not just fidelity to the masters, therefore, which characterizes the history writing by these eminences. It is a simple-mindedness!
But there is an additional factor. Whitewashing the Islamic period is not the only feature which characterizes the work of these historians. There is in addition a positive hatred for the pre-Islamic period and the traditions of the country. Over the years entries about India in Soviet encyclopedias, for instance, became more and more ductile. They began to acknowledge ever so hesitantly that the categories and periods might need to be nuanced when they were extended to countries like China and India. They began to acknowledge that at various times there had been an overlapping and coexistence of different ‘stages’. And, perhaps for diplomatic reasons alone, they became increasingly circumspect – careful to avoid denigrating our traditions.
In the standard two-volume Soviet work, A History of India, for instance, we find more or less the same characterization of the different periods in Indian histories as we do in the volumes of our eminent historians. But the Soviet volumes have none of the scorn and animosity which we have encountered in the volumes of our eminent historians.