My dissertation “Muslim Home-Making: Bengali Muslims’ Belonging in a Transnational Horizon, c.1880-1914” excavates some literary tropes that came to represent Bengali Muslim territorial identity and estrangement in fin de siècle British India. The existing historiography of modern Bengal claims that Bengali Muslims had a natural allegiance to their native land as an autochthonous, converts-descended community—in contrast to those of their North Indian counterpart, whose elites claimed foreign ancestry for themselves—until they began to doubt this allegiance under the malicious sway of communal-separatist propaganda. This prognosis posits a transition from past allegiance to present estrangement on the part of Bengali Muslims, accounting for their anomalous predicament as a “stranger in one’s own land” in British India/Bengal—vindicating V. S. Naipaul’s thesis that Muslims outside the Arab World had been denied by Islam any pasts whatsoever of their own and were bound to “honor Arabia only.” My dissertation expands on this inchoate notion of a “native stranger”—a curious species of “diaspora,” one might say—while rejecting the transition narrative embedded in the prevailing scholarship. The Muslim predicament as native strangers has been embodied in the contemporary Bengali, English, Urdu, and Persian sources, my research reveals, in a pair of contentions—or tropes—very frequently voiced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first of these in its various iterations traced the origin of Muslim territorial disloyalty to their “foreign allegiance”, i.e., to the fact that they cared for Arabia more than their native homeland. The second one spoke allegedly to Muslims’ separatist tendencies—it was Muslims’ refusal to build a shared homeland with their Hindu neighbors that foreclosed the possibility of a united Indian nation. My dissertation charts why and how such tropes rose to prominence in these decades and what did they mean, politically, for Bengali Muslims. Through extensive archival research in Dhaka, Kolkata, Delhi, and London, and drawing on methodologies derived from literary studies and intellectual history, my work delineates how, as a corollary of the introduction of political modernity in British India, Muslims emerged for the first time both as a “political entity” and a “demographic category” in colonial Bengal. It was only within this refashioned political space that the question of territorial belonging could be meaningfully raised. Confronted by the territorial question, both Muslims and their detractors mobilized this pair of claims as a test for Muslim loyalty, as a “bargaining counter” for negotiating political belonging, and as frontiers of what was possible or impossible in Muslim politics in British India.