Names for communities

The labels "Hindu" and "Muslim" feel so natural today that we rarely stop to ask when they actually came into common use. The answer, as historians have found, is that these terms took a very long time to become the standard way of identifying religious communities. For centuries, people in the Indian subcontinent used a completely different set of names.

By studying Sanskrit texts and inscriptions from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, historians have discovered that the word musalman or Muslim was almost never used. Instead, people were often identified by the region they came from. Turkish rulers, for example, were called Turushka. People from Tajikistan were referred to as Tajika, and those from Persia were called Parashika.

Sometimes, older terms that had been used for entirely different peoples were simply applied to these new migrants. The Turks and Afghans, for instance, were often called Shakas (a name you have encountered in earlier chapters) and Yavanas — a word that had originally been used for Greeks.

The most general term for these migrant communities was mlechchha. This word carried a specific meaning: it indicated that these people did not observe the norms of the caste society and that they spoke languages which were not derived from Sanskrit. While mlechchha could sometimes have a derogatory connotation, it is crucial to understand that it rarely denoted a distinct religious community of "Muslims" in opposition to "Hindus." …