What prevented India/China from being Christianized or Islamicized?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Tell me you know nothing of the history of India without telling me that you know nothing of the history of India.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Tell me you know nothing of the history of India without telling me that you know nothing of the history of India.

This post tells no one not a thing about anything. Care to expand further?

Approximately how many Muslims are there in the Subcontinent and what has been the general cultural impact of Islam on it since the Middle Ages?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I and this thread is asking you this question

To which I responded with a rhetorical question, because this is very much in the territory of 'extremely basic knowledge'. There are approximately half a billion Muslims living in the Subcontinent, incidentally; about a third of all Muslims on Earth.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And yet India is not Islamicized. Why?

What do you even mean by that? Most of the Subcontinent operated under Islamic law of one form or another from the Middle Ages until the Maratha rebellions and the rise of the East India Company in the 18th century. During this period Islamic cultural and political supremacy was absolute: it even shaped modern Hinduism to a considerable extent.* Large parts also ended up with Muslim-majority populations: they are not in the modern Republic of India because they were hived off during Partition (which I presume you've heard of) to create Pakistan.

_{*The divergent character of Hinduism in the south of India (parts of which were always out of reach for the various Islamic empires or which were only ruled by them for brief periods) and elsewhere is often noted and, well, this is the reason for that.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This may sound disengenous and/or off topic, but the fact is that until the 1930s and 1940s when the British began using religion as a wedge issue to divide Indians and M.A. Jinnah and the Muslim League began to drift away from Congress (basically, greater religious polarization and division), religion wasn't a massive issue. It's true. I believe that Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and others lived in relative harmony without religion being a particularly divisive issue. As I said, this began to change in the 1930s and 1940s as religion became a bigger issue, and the polarization, unfortunately, culminated in the Great Partition and all the bloodshed that resulted from it. Having said that there were, as others have said, regional differences - what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh did have more Muslims, what is now Punjab was more Sikh, and the rest of the land was mostly Hindu.

While there's little doubt that the Raj engaged in a very dangerous game of playing with fire without realising that fire is hot, this isn't a fact, it is a comforting pseudo-history. The direct ancestor of the Pakistan Movement - the Aligarh Movement - emerged in the 1870s in opposition to the collapse of Muslim cultural prestige and political power. Specifically the big trigger was growing demands for the recognition of Hindi, which was seen as the thin end of the wedge. Meanwhile the RSS was founded in 1925 and Savarkar's Hindutva was published in 1922: Savarkar led his first anti-Muslim pogrom at the tender age of twelve (!) in the 1880s.