A rising Hindu middle class begins to assume dominant positions in industry, education, the professions, and the civil service following the Indian Mutiny.

Muslim leaders have been discredited in the eyes of British rulers.

As a consequence, the landed Muslim upper classes in the north Indian heartland retreat into cultural and political isolation, while fellow Muslims in Punjab are rewarded for assisting the British.

The former group fails to reemerge economically and produces no large group comparable to the upwardly mobile British-educated Hindu middle class.

They do not revise the doctrines of Islam to meet the challenges posed by alien rule, Christian missionaries, and revivalist Hindu sects, such as the Arya Samaj, attempting reconversion to Hinduism.