This book examines the changing political identities of Muslims in Tamil Nadu between 1930 and 1967. It assesses the protean character of the influences that played upon the political culture of Tamil Muslims by investigating their location in relation to the important political movements of the time: the Dravidian movement, the Congress and Indian nationalism, pan-Islam and Hindu revivalism. In doing So, the author asks how the contradictions between being Tamil, Muslim and Indian emerged and how Tamil Muslims addressed them in politics. For Tamil Muslims, being Tamil was as crucial as being Muslim. The author argues that it was the rise of the Dravidian movement and its rhetoric that enabled Muslims to straddle and combine multiple identities -- Non-Brahmin, Dravidian/Tamil, Muslim and Indian. This was made possible by the political language of the Dravidian movement which constructed the 'Dravidian' community on the basis of caste and language Consequently, Tamil Muslims were accepted as a caste seeking to share power in the competitive and plural political arena projected by the Dravidian movement. In this way, Dravidian rhetoric generated a political space in which diverse identities could be combined and asserted under its own capacious umbrella. This study goes beyond 1947, the great divide in the history of and thinking about twentieth-century India. Historians terminate their study at partition and political scientists rarely foray into the colonial period. But this volume comprehensively proves that questions surrounding communal and religious identities cannot simply be studied in a static frame or captured exclusively within the confines of a single discipline.