"In approaching Muslim historical writing on medieval Muslim India in the nineteen-twenties it must be remembered that Muslim historians were immigrants into an already settled colony. By 1925 Elphinstone, Elliot, and Dowson, Stanley Lane Poole, William Irvine, Henry Beveridge, Wolseley Haig, Vincent Smith, and W. H. Moreland among the British, and Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Ishwari Prasad, and C. Vaidya among the Hindus, had mapped out the territory and staked their claims. Either the Muslims had to challenge the whole land settlement or be content to prospect in the interstices of existing homesteads; whichever course they chose to adopt they were obliged to adapt their behaviour and modify their attitudes in relation to the existing settlers. Moreover, since they had been taught to use the same tools as those earlier settlers their own economy tended almost inescapably to conform with or to complement that which they found in being. That is not to say that Muslim historians of the nineteen-twenties and later did not challenge existing conceptions of medieval Indian history; they did, but often by merely asserting their opposites. They proposed to correct optical illusions about medieval India by prescribing different pairs of spectacles, not by advising therapeutic methods which would change the capacity of the eyes themselves."