ABSTRACT
The notion of cultural renaissance, roughly equivalent to that in Europe, has little purchase in the historiography of South Asia except in histories explicitly informed by two ostensibly distinct but connected ideological strands: colonialism and anti-Muslim nationalism. The British association of medievalism with Muslim rule ensured that India's renaissance meant a rejection of language and culture associated with Islam and Muslims as backward and corrupt and therefore to be discarded, an association with fateful implications for the subsequent history of South Asia. This chapter shows how "renaissance" came to be defined in India by its deemed antithesis: pre-British Muslim rule, generally dubbed "medieval". It suggests that terms such as "renaissance" emerge from an empire-centric orientation that was natural to colonial writing but was eagerly adopted, along with the tripartite ancient-medieval-modern format, into the majority of mainstream nationalist postcolonial histories.
