THE TYRANNY OF LABELS 5 dominating early history as did the Muslim equivalent in the subsequent period, with relations between the two becoming conflictual. These notions were in a sense summarised by Christian Lassen who, in the mid-nineteenth century, attempting to apply a Hegelian dialectic, wrote of the Hindu civilisation as the thesis, the Muslim civilisation as the anti-thesis and the British as the synthesis!1 Part of the insistence on the separateness of the two civilisations was the assumption that those who came with Islam, had been regarded even by earlier Indians as alien, in fact as alien as the Europeans. This however was an erroneous perception of earlier historical relationships. Those associated with Islam had come through various avenues, as traders, as Sufis and as attachments to conquerors. Their own self-perceptions differed as also did the way in which they were perceived by the people of the land where they settled. For a long while in India, they were referred to by the same terms as were used in earlier times for people from west and central Asia, suggesting that their coming was viewed in part as a historical continuity. And there are good historical grounds to explain such a continuity. The Arabs, Turks, Afghans and Persians were familiar to northern and western India, since they had not only been-contiguous people but had been linked by trade, settlement and conquest, links which went back, virtually unbroken, to many centuries. Central Asia was the homeland of the Saka and Kusana dynasties which ruled in northern India at the turn of the Christian era and later of the Hunas who came as conquerors and became a caste. In Iran, the genesis of the languages spoken there and in northern India, were Old Iranian and Indo-Aryan which were closely related languages as is evident from examples of common usage in the Avesta and the Rigveda. Persian contacts with India were initially through the Achaemenids who were contemporaries of the Mauryas and later through the Sassanids contemporaries of the Kusanas and Guptas. Territories in Afghanistan and the north-west were alternately controlled by rulers from both sides. Asokan inscription in Greek and Aramaic in Afghanistan attest to Mauryan rule and later dynasties with bases in the Oxus region and Iran brought north-western India into their orbit. Trading links were tied to political alliances. Close maritime contacts between the subcontinent and the Arabian peninsula go back to the time of the Indus civilisation and have continued to the present. There is therefore an immense history of interaction and exchange between the sub-continent and central and western Asia. The change of religion to Islam in the latter areas does not annul the earlier closeness. Interestingly even the Islam of these areas was not uniform for there were and are strong cultural and sectarian differences among the Muslims of central Asia, Persia and the Arab world, differences which can in some cases be traced to their varying pre-Islamic past and which