The Envisioning of a Nation: A Defence of the Idea of India patriotic statements about India and its natural and cultural greatness, then, surely Amir Khusrau's Nub Sipihr (1318) in Persian must be identified as the earliest and clearest of such statements. The author lauds "love for one's country" (hubb-i-watan). His country, India (Hind), he says, contains people speaking different languages, which he lists—a list that includes Kannada (Dhaur-samanduri), Telugu (Telangi) and Tamil (Ma'bari) (Malayalam does not seem yet to have been fully separated from Tamil, so its omission is probably not surprising in Khusrau's otherwise comprehensive list). All these languages he calls "Hindwi" (or Indian) languages, being used "by common people for all purposes." Besides them, he praises Sanskrit, the language of the learned, for its rich literature. He carefully records that Persian too has become a language of India, because people have learnt it "since the coming of the Ghorians and Turks." Here is then a picture of the Indian people with their various languages yet constituting a single whole. What makes Khusrau's verses especially patriotic is his avowed argument of the precedence of India over other countries. He speaks of the superiority of its products and fruits, its animals, the beauty of its women, the learning and piety of the Brahmans, and India's numerous cultural achievements such as the invention of numerals and chess, the compilation of the Panchatantra (Kalila-o-dama), etc. Clearly, such a comprehensive picture of India and of its culture, which is seen not as exclusive (as Alberuni had judged it), but open to all, innovative and tolerant, reveals a new understanding that could only have come because conditions had changed. This change was surely the one due to the confluence of the two civilizations, ancient Indian and Islamic, that had now taken place - a momentous confluence which my late friend Professor Athar Ali correctly described as the "medieval efflorescence". This conception of India and its distinct composite culture reached its high tide under Akbar, the great Mughal emperor (1556-1605). In his minister Abu-1 Fazl's A'in-iAkbari (1595) a book-length description is given of the culture of India, it being the most detailed account of its society, religious schools, learning, and arts of India written after Alberuni. Significantly, the Muslim component is also carefully included. The same reign saw the first history of India, the Tabaqat-i Akbari (1592), composed by Nizamuddin Ahmad, a book which in Persian would be followed by a succession of others on the same subject. This underlining of the concept of India as a country with a distinct history of its own could now be reinforced by the long and