Indo-Persian culture

"The intellectual decline of the Muslims was hastened by the peculiar position of the faithful in India: They had made India their permanent home; many of them were Indians by race; and all had become so in their personal appearance, thoughts, manners and customs. And yet their religious teachers urged them to look back to ancient Arabia and draw their mental sustenance from the far-off age of the Prophet. The language of their religion must be Arabic, which not one in a hundred fully understood ; their cultural language was Persian, which a few more learnt with difficulty and used with an impurity that excited the laughter and acorn of the Persian born. The greatest Indo-Persian poet was Amir Khusrau, but even he was ranked with third-class poets among the natives of Persia. Faizi, our second best, was held to be still inferior. Witness the scorn poured by Babur and Shaikh Ali Hazin alike on the Persian style of the Indian Muslims."

"Persians often sneered at Mughals and Indians as semi-barbarians; they snickered at the Indian efforts to speak and write Persian, and ridiculed the Indian imitations of Persian courtly manners as vulgar, very much in the same way in which the British would later privately mock Anglicized Indians. Persians, says Bernier, often indulged in much ‘satirical merriment’ about Indians; Manucci says that Persians often called Indians ‘slaves’ or ‘blacks’."