The Loss of Hindustan by Manan Ahmed Asif

The Loss of Hindustan
The Invention of India
by Manan Ahmed Asif
Harvard University Press
ISBN 9780674987906
Publication Date: 11/24/2020
336 pages
6–1/8 x 9–1/4 inches

Reviewing The Loss of Hindustan by Manan Ahmed Asif is a personal journey for me. Book reviewers often write about why the readers ought to pick up certain books. We indulge your individual senses, desires, and passions. For an observer, India looks candy-wrapped with its diverse delicacies, dialects, and festivals. Yet our television-worthy panoramas have a long tumultuous history behind them. This review creates a sense of belonging and assurance for me as a citizen of this country where cultural symbiosis has long prevailed. In the current political climate of this land where divisiveness has created tentacles of hatred and subversive intellectual discourse is frowned upon books like these give the readers to step away from the myopic narratives.

Once this subcontinental landmass was known as “Hindustan”. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century Mughal rulers were Shahanshah-i-Hindustan (emperors of Hindustan). But this word stars fading away from the early nineteenth-century to the advent of “British India.” This book is an erudite exploration of how the concept of Hindustan which was once paramount of this subcontinental cultural identity was systematically erased by colonial powers resulting in the act of “political forgetting” for its own imperialist gains.

The conventional thinking that this subcontinent was largely a group of “regional kingdoms” with no central political control before the British arrived is mistaken. The entire subcontinent spanning from the Himalayas to the Deccan to the southern coast of the Indian Ocean had an established territorial integrity and unity long before the Mughals ruled. Where lies the proof? Why and how was this concept of identity erased by colonial power? How did Hindustan become India in the historical archives? What purpose does the act of political erasure serve? What lessons can be learnt in the present day from the intellectual makeup of colonial historians? These are the pertinent questions the book tries to answer. A crucial summary of how colonial power creates political forgetting of identity is given by the author in the introduction. It says,

Colonization refuses the colonized access to their own past. By imposing a colonial language, it retards the capacity of indigenous languages to represent reality. It claims that the languages of the colonized lack “technical” or “scientific” vocabulary. It removes the archives, renders history as lacking, blurs faces and names. Thus, the colonized face a diminished capacity to represent their past in categories other than those given to them in a European language, or provided to them in an imperial archive. This rupture, brought about by the colonial episteme, erases the fuller memory or awareness of the precolonial. Now, a “translated” term for an indigenous concept is deemed sufficient to stand in for it by an academy more inclined to maintain citational coherence than the truth of history. The discipline of history, itself a colonizing tool, is resistant to the demands of the colonized.

Many historical works hold the political and spatial concept of Hindustan between the tenth and the nineteenth centuries. These works are in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sanskrit, or Prakrit. From these works, the author chose the historical work by Muhammad Qasim Firishta written in the early seventeenth century as the major source for this thesis. The work is titled Tarikh-i Firishta (The history by Firishta) and was written in the first decades of the seventeenth century at the court of Ibrahim `Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627). In the midst of a vibrant milieu that thrived in the Deccan polities of Ahmadnagar, Golkonda, Hyderabad, Gulbarga, Bidar, and Vijayanagar, Firishta created the first comprehensive history of Hindustan. It is an amalgamation of the histories, cultures, and geography of the subcontinent rather than a dichotomy of the Deccan or Mughal rule steeped in conflicts and successions.

Tarikh-i Firishta was instrumental in the understanding of the newly formed colonies to establish the British dominion over Hindustan in the mid-eighteenth century. A key player was Lieutenant Colonet Alexander Dow (1735- 1779) who acquired and translated Persian and Sanskrit texts (including Firishta) from Bengal and Bombay. Dow and other soldier-scribes of the British East India company transmogrified Firishta’s work as the history of Muslim conquest over the Hindus rather than a colloidal history of the subcontinent. The Loss of Hindustan shows how translations of indigenous texts played a role in dissociating the history of “Hindustan” from “India.” The former features Muhammadans or Muslim rulers and invaders and the latter features hapless and oppressed Hindus under Muslim rule whose only salvation was in the form of British colonial rule.

As a non-historian reader, Manan’s book was my foray into how revisionist historical writings are researched and structured. Historiography is often a slate where chalk marks are half wiped rendering the narrative stuttering and incomplete. The Loss of Hindustan is an exemplary work of making sense of that narrative without extrapolations but grounded in well-researched findings. The book is an education in intellectual history and how works such as Firishta’s influence history and the art of writing history itself.