On his deathbed Partap made his successor swear to eternal conflict against “the foes of his country’s independence.” This was in the sixteenth century, four hundred years after the first Muslim king had ascended the throne of Delhi. But a hundred years had hardly gone by after the event when the Hindus again questioned Muslim supremacy. The Sikhs in the Punjab, the Rajputs in Central India, and the Mahrattas in the Deccan, had started their campaigns before Aurangzeb died in 1707 A. D. The Muslim supremacy was destroyed by the Hindus and not by the British. _Muslim Rule in India not Foreign._ Yet it is not right to say that the Muslim rule in India was a “foreign rule.” The Muslim invaders were no doubt foreign in their origin, just as the Normans and Danes were when they came to England, but as soon as they settled in India, adopted the country, made it their home, married and raised children there, they became the sons of the soil. Akbar and Aurangzeb were as much Indians as are to-day the Moguls and Pathans in Delhi or elsewhere. Sher Shah and Ibrahim Lodi were no more foreigners in India than were the descendants of William the Conqueror or the successors of William of Orange in Great Britain. When Timur and Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali attacked India, they attacked a kingdom which was ruled by Indian Muslims. They were as much the enemies of the Mohammedan rulers of India as of the Hindus. The Muslims, who exercised political sovereignty in India from the thirteenth up to the middle of the nineteenth century A. D., were Indians by birth, Indians by marriage, and Indians by death. They were born in India, they married there, there they died, and there they were buried. Every penny of the revenues they raised in India was spent in India. Their army was wholly Indian. They allowed new families from beyond the borders of Hindustan to come and settle in India, but they very rarely, if at all, employed people who were not willing to stay in India for good and to make it their home. Their bias, if any, against the Hindus was religious, not political. The converts to Islam were sometimes treated even with greater consideration than the original Muslims. Akbar, of course, did away with that distinction, but even the most bigoted and the most orthodox Mohammedan ruler of India was not possessed of that kind of social pride and social exclusiveness which distinguishes the British ruler of India to-day. If the racial question ever came into prominence during Mohammedan supremacy in India, it was not between Hindus and Mohammedans, but between Mohammedans and Mohammedans, as for instance between _Tuglaks_ and _Pathans_, or between _Moguls_ and _Lodis_.[34]