How so? There are 172 million Muslims in India.

I think he means since they aren’t originally “Indian” but are colonizers of India who arrived through invasion.

That might have been the case 200+ years ago but for sure the majority of Indian Muslims these days are just descendants of converted Hindus and Buddhists, etc.

So are the brahmins. The indigenous religions of India are basically gone. Only remembered in various folklore.

Where can I read more about this? That the indigenous are gone?

'Why I am not Hindu', an essay by Kancha Ilaiah is a good starting point. In the west, the narrative is that India = Hinduism..however Hinduism is a term the British made up to describe anything other than Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The Brits classified Jains, Buddhists, and anyone else as Hindu.

However, when you get people to tell you various 'beliefs' of Hinduism , it's often very discordant, much more so than protestant/ Catholic / etc.

This is because there's hundreds of different sets of practices with various links. Due to migration selection, only some subset are commonly discussed in a western context.

But, in reality, the common people of India had a wide range of practice that is not the typical 'Indian' you hear about.

For example, many Indians in the west claim that Indians don't eat meat. This is a lie. Many groups have eaten meat since the time of the Indus Valley Civilization and still continue.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/why-i-am-not-a-hindu/iiaiah...