What have been the Historical Relationships Between the Islamic and Hindu religious traditions? Variations on this question inevitably come to mind in any attempt to assess the significance of the past dozen centuries of South Asian civilization, during which time significant Muslim populations have played important roles, interacting with Indian religions and cultures from a variety of perspectives. Although frequently this kind of question is posed in terms of assumptions about the immutable essences of Islam and Hinduism, I would like to argue that this kind of approach is fundamentally misleading, for several reasons. First, this approach is ahistorical in regarding religions as unchanging, and it fails to account for the varied and complex encounters, relationships, and interpretations that took place between many individual Muslims and Hindus. Second, it assumes that there is a single clear concept of what a Hindu is, although this notion is increasingly coming into question; considerable evidence has accumulated to indicate that external concepts of religion, first from post-Mongol Islamicate culture, and eventually from European Christianity in the colonial period, were brought to bear on a multitude of Indian religious traditions to create a single concept of Hinduism.

In his Provocative Work The Continent of Circe, The Anglicized Bengali Writer Nirad Chaudhuri recasts the legend of Circe and Odysseus as a metaphor for India's relation to her “European” conquerors. In his version Aryan tribes who migrated into and/or invaded the Indian subcontinent in the second century B.C. were the first such conquerors to be ensnared by the allure of India's wealth. Once there they utterly forgot their Eurasian homelands, abandoned their vigorous steppe culture and degenerated into the colonized Hindus of whom Chaudhuri spoke with caustic contempt during the Indian nationalist movement in the twentieth century:

Though Cambay is Now a Provincial Backwater, for Over Five Centuries—between the late tenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries A.D.—it was the main port of western India, home to a cosmopolitan population of merchants and traders from all over India and the Islamic world, and a major center of architectural and artistic patronage. Cambay is probably best known among Islamic art historians for its monumental fourteenth-century Friday mosque, the adjacent Kazaruni tomb complex (d.734/1333), and the large body of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Islamic inscriptions and tombstones that survives there. However, the port conceals many Islamic remains that have not been published.