While V.D. Savarkar and his acolyte, Nathuram Godse, might have concurred with this view, yet, surely, there was much more to the 666 years of Muslim rule in Delhi from 1192 to 1858 than just “unreconciled relations” and “primeval religious hatred and animosities”. It was also a long history of cultural and spiritual interaction that gave rise to the Ganga-Jumni tehzib that constitutes the core of a secular idea of India. Hiro does not deign to even consider this perspective, arguing instead that “social intercourse between the communities was minimal, with inter-marriage non-existent”. But of course, at the time, inter-marriage was non-existent between different castes and sub-castes of Hindus themselves, not just Hindus and Muslims, and even the various communities of Muslims. One cannot transport 21st century values into a distant past. And as for other aspects of ‘social intercourse’, the emergence of Hindustani as the country’s lingua franca, the impact of Islam on the Bhakti movement, musical gharanas that belonged to Muslim as much as Hindu, qawwali as the counterpart of the bhajan, shared dress codes and cuisines, the mushaira and the kavi sammelan—all these could not have come about without fairly intensive ‘social intercourse’ between Hindus and Muslims. For centuries, the two communities have lived side by side in lakhs of villages all over the country and post-Partition India could not have become home to the second largest population of Muslims in the world, nor Pakistan itself riven by rival Muslim sects if, in fact, there is no more to our joint history than “primeval religious hatred”. Partition was the consequence of existential and exigent political realities during the Empire’s 1945-47 ‘scuttle’. They arose in the seven years between 1940 and 1947 and were principally caused by Jinnah’s wholly bogus slogan ‘Islam in danger’, which he himself endangered by his August 16, 1946, call for ‘Direct Action’.