Not a little excited when I got an invitation from the Anwar-ul-Uloom College, Hyderabad, Deccan, to an Indo-Pak mushaira and seminar, I thought this was my opportunity to see something of India beyond the usual Pakistani run of Delhi and Agra.

But excitement mixed with some trepidation, I must confess. For Anwar-ul-Uloom sounded more madressah than college. I wasn't travelling across half the subcontinent to visit a madressah. There were enough of those in Pakistan.

Knowing something of the living style of the subcontinental cleric, I was also assailed by thoughts of communal bathrooms and of having to cross some sort of a quadrangle in the morning, lota in hand, that indispensable item of subcontinental ablution.

I am all for peace and understanding but not if it involves a shared bathroom. Four years ago, misled by God knows what demon of misunderstanding, I allowed myself to be persuaded to take a trip to India in the company of some retired gentlemen from the army, a lieutenant-general, a major-general and two brigadiers.

Our Indian hosts, card-carrying peaceniks, put us up in a students' hostel. As if that wasn't enough I was told I was to share my room with the lieutenant-general, not quite my idea of a fun-filled holiday.

I rebelled and while these soldiers-turned-peace-warriors went on to Calcutta early the next morning I stayed behind in Delhi. I have learnt to keep my distance from certified peaceniks since. No doubt they do a fantastic job but I'm made of weaker stuff. Each, as they say, has his own way to the devil.

But I needn't have carried my fears to Hyderabad. We were put up royally and treated by our hosts to some of the best food in the subcontinent: exquisite biryani, shami kebabs the likes of which I've never had and, amongst other things, to a memorable rice dish which it was no exaggeration to call 'Zewar-I-Behisht' (jewellery of paradise). The old Hyderabad which disappeared when brutally annexed by India in 1948 was known for its culture, its learning and its extraordinary cuisine.

To my great relief Anwar-ul-Uloom College was not the bleak madressah of my frightened imagination. It's a great institution dispensing modern knowledge, with about 18,000 students on its rolls.

What's more, it has a unique place in modern Hyderabad history. Today education is a big buzzword among the Muslims of Hyderabad. Everywhere you go they talk education both as an end in itself and as a means to improve the condition of the community. But it wasn't always like this.

What in Muslim folklore is still referred to as Saqoot-i-Hyderabad or the Fall of Hyderabad was a traumatic experience for the Muslims of the state. Four centuries of uninterrupted Muslim rule came abruptly to an end. Many of the rich, losing their landholdings, became paupers overnight.

The best of the educated and upper classes fled or migrated to Pakistan. A general massacre (no kidding) in some of the outlying districts completed the circle of tragedy for the Muslim population.

If Hyderabadi Muslims fed on despair you could hardly blame them. They had lost everything. At this juncture institutions like Anwar-ul-Uloom College stepped forward to resurrect the shattered spirit of the Muslim community. The Aligarh of the south, that's what Mehboob Alam Khan, the honorary head of the college, calls it. Which is not to say the burden of resurrection was borne by this institution alone but it played its part.

Today the Muslims of Hyderabad are a self-confident people, conscious of their culture and their proud heritage but, and this is important, with their eyes on the future rather than the nostalgia-laden images of the past. It's been a long and hard struggle and only after forty or fifty years can they claim to have truly emerged from the shadows.

Was the last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, right in not making his peace with India? I put this question to many of the very articulate Hyderabadis I met. With the benefit of hindsight they felt that the Nizam could have protected the interests of Hyderabad and its people by entering into some kind of an agreement with India: the cession of sovereignty in return for internal autonomy, something offered him by Pandit Nehru. Tragedy might thus have been averted.

For a year after Partition relations between Hyderabad and India were governed by a standstill agreement. A week after Muhammad Ali Jinnah died on September 11, 1948, the Congress strongman, Vallabhbhai Patel (was he waiting for Jinnah to die?) oversaw the invasion of Hyderabad and its annexation to the Indian Union.

Mir Osman Ali Khan was reputed to be a wise ruler. Why did he procrastinate over the question of Hyderabad's future? Joining Pakistan was not really an option. Nor, with no outlet to the sea, was independence.

Part of the blame must be borne by hardline Muslim elements represented by the likes of Qasim Rizvi and his Razakars who wove fanciful accounts of how they would inflict a crushing defeat on the Indian army if it dared attack Hyderabad. In this charged atmosphere compromise became a dirty word. Thus the Nizam, no longer his own man, was a prisoner of events he couldn't control.

My other question: should the Muslim elite have migrated to Pakistan? The universal answer: no. They should have stayed on, for what they did was cut and run, leaving the rest of the Muslim community, which badly needed leadership, high and dry.

But history has its own way of levelling out old scores. In a way these tribulations have been good for the Muslim soul. For it is only by facing challenges, standing up to discrimination - and let no revisionist history of India claim there has been none - that the Muslims of Hyderabad have acquired resilience and fortitude, the will to stand on their feet and the ambition to move ahead.

Hyderabadi Muslims are very strong in their religious beliefs, a bit too strong for my taste. But as I was told more than once, their Muslimness did not come at the cost of their Indianness.

They felt strongly about Pakistan as a Muslim country. If something good happened to it they felt happy. But they deeply resented the fact that because of Pakistan and its fraught relations with India they had to prove their Indianness over and over again.

We have a vested interest in good relations between India and Pakistan, I was told time and again, because when things go bad on that front it is we who suffer the fallout.

When we talk of India in this country it somehow slips our mind that there are 150 million Muslims in India. What happens to them when tensions rise somehow does not figure in our calculations. Which is a great slippage of memory for the aim of the Pakistan movement was to protect the Muslims of Hindu-majority India - UP, Bihar, Bhopal, Hyderabad, etc, those who felt vulnerable and insecure - not the Muslims of Punjab, Sindh, the Frontier, Balochistan and Bengal who needed no protection.

Thanks to the BJP and its spiritual godfathers - in the RSS, the Shiv Sena and the like - the fires of communalism are burning bright in India. The entire philosophy of Hindutva turns on India being a land meant only for Hindus. To India's credit, enlightened and liberal Indians get as much upset by such talk as Muslims or Christians.

It's a bit different with the young. That technology and being into the latest gizmos can go hand in hand with fascism in politics is something which, I suspect, very many young educated Indians, riding the crest of consumerism, do not realize. They forget that Germany under Hitler was both modern, in every sense of the word, and fascistic.

One of the raw materials of Hindu fascism is hatred for Pakistan for fascism needs an enemy to feed on and the enemy all along has been Pakistan. The more cricket is played between the two countries, the more travel there is between them, the more this raw material is depleted.

Pakistan's problem is different. It lies not in the fire-spouting religious firebrand for that would be to over-state his importance. It lies in the generals dressed in khaki who think they know the answers to everything. The less India is demonized, the more difficult it becomes for them to sustain their commanding position. Both countries thus have a vested interest in good relations.