"During the 1891 census in Punjab 1,344,862 Sikhs declared themselves Hindus. When the decennial census was carried out in Gujarat in 1911 a total of 200,000 people in the province declared themselves Mohammedan Hindus. The community of Mole-Salam Girasia Rajputs had two names for its members, one Hindu and the other Muslim. Bengali Muslims invoked the Creator as ‘Sri Sri Iswar’ instead of the Islamic ‘Allahu Akbar’, and it was not uncommon for them,right into the nineteenth century, to have Hindu names.In Tamilnad when the most celebrated of the local Muslim writers, Umaru Pulavar (born c. 1655), composed a biography of Prophet Muhammad, he based it on a Tamil version of the Ramayana—this was quite similar to the Bengali anthologies on the lives of the prophet and his grandsons, Hasan and Husain, which were framed in terms of Hindu narratives. Many popular Muslim saints and their shrines in south India displayed features—particularly in terms of mythical episodes, religious objects and cultic practices—that were directly acquired from Saivite, Vaishnavite and goddess traditions. And in Punjab when the head of one of the foremost Muslim centres of pilgrimage was installed, those attending and participating in this key ceremonial included Hindus.” All these materials, I believe, are significant historical indicators that should make us rethink any simplistic usage of the categories Muslim, Sikh and Hindu. In the case of the subcontinent, the either/or dichotomy is not to be taken for granted, for the religious life of the people, particularly in the pre-colonial period, was characterized by a continuum. There was much interpenetration and overlapping of communal identities."