The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India

by Manan Ahmed Asif

A field-changing history explains how the subcontinent lost its political identity as the home of all religions and emerged as India, the land of the Hindus.

Did South Asia have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? This is a subject of heated debate in scholarly circles and contemporary political discourse. Manan Ahmed Asif argues that Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Republic of India share a common political ancestry: they are all part of a region whose people understand themselves as Hindustani. Asif describes the idea of Hindustan, as reflected in the work of native historians from roughly 1000 CE to 1900 CE, and how that idea went missing.

This makes for a radical interpretation of how India came to its contemporary political identity. Asif argues that a European understanding of India as Hindu has replaced an earlier, native understanding of India as Hindustan, a home for all faiths. Turning to the subcontinent's medieval past, Asif uncovers a rich network of historians of Hindustan who imagined, studied, and shaped their kings, cities, and societies. Asif closely examines the most complete idea of Hindustan, elaborated by the early seventeenth century Deccan historian Firishta. His monumental work, Tarikh-i Firishta, became a major source for European philosophers and historians, such as Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, and Gibbon during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet Firishta's notions of Hindustan were lost and replaced by a different idea of India that we inhabit today.

The Loss of Hindustan reveals the intellectual pathways that dispensed with multicultural Hindustan and created a religiously partitioned world of today.

Genres: History, India, Nonfiction, Asia, Pakistan, Politics, Islam

336 pages, Hardcover

Published November 24, 2020

About the author

Manan Ahmed Asif is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University and the author of A Book of Conquest

Reviews

[Haaris Mateen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a history of histories of India, specifically about those written through the medieval period right up to the turn of the nineteenth century. Asif meticulously and painstakingly dismantles dominant colonial narratives of medieval history and shows how they are linked to a colonial episteme and historiographic tradition that has long framed how we understand and analyze the subcontinent's past. He does this by focusing his attention on an influential medieval historian named Firishta. Firishta, who was based out of Bijapur in the Deccan, wrote a history of Hindustan, a fascinating work that begins with the Mahabharata, and concludes with the different places, peoples, and rulers of this land, somewhere at the end of the sixteenth century.

(tl;dr: Enlightening meta-history of history writing in the subcontinent. Academic style, only for very serious readers.)

Firishta's history was influential in the subcontinent during his time and the centuries after, and acted as a model for future historians of the region. It was also an important source for the British colonial project of re-constructing India's history, a project that was intimately connected with a tone of condescension and dismissal towards any historiographic tradition or, indeed, any tradition in India, along with a process of culling out details for an analysis that set the tone for justifying the British conquest of India. Firishta's Tarikh was used extensively in this vein -- his content and analysis were largely discarded; instead, it was used both to extract a chronology of historical events, as well as made to justify the colonial narrative about India being a land crying for British deliverance.

Asif starts with a number of medieval historians who were precursors to Firishta, who display a slow evolution in what they choose to write and how they write. What builds up is an inexorable and convincing march towards a syncretic identity of what it meant to be in Hindustan: a land of different places, of peoples of different faiths and cultures, of rulers who were good if they strove for public welfare, and most importantly, of networks and connections between all the aforementioned aspects.

This book can be called a meta-history. It demands patience. I would not recommend to anyone but the most serious, academic readers of history. But its conclusion is one that is oft-repeated these days but doesn't seem to lose its urgency -- to defeat the forces of toxic majoritarianism in South Asia necessitates engaging with the practice of history writing, and to defeat the prejudices involved in its writing.

[Divya Pal · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was a struggle to wade through this bilge.
Much before Hindustan or Sarvarkar’s Hindusthan – as the author sanctimoniously puts it – this geographical region was known as Bharata. Thus, the basic premise of the title is inaccurate.
According to this rabidly anti-Indian author, the Muslims came to India as peaceful traders and scholars and not as reaving marauders. He denies Gazni’s plunder yet contradicts himself Page 56. He does not accept Sanskrit as an ancient language. The other Pakistani obsession Kashmir – the raison d’etre of their army’s existence – is needlessly dragged in and in a painfully convoluted verbose arguement tries to prove the prehistoric peaceful conversion to Islam. It was the Sufi brand of Islam actually which peacefully existed along with the Hindu equivalent of Bhakti. He does not seem to comprehend that this is the land that gave birth to Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and was the saviour of Parsis.
Pakistanis can never reconcile to their lack of a glorious spatial history – everything boils down to the jihadi conquest of

barbarian people beyond the Indus river

In reality their history is a seven-decade old army rule after a painful sanguineous birth by C-section of India and the inevitable cleaving of this schizophrenic miscegenation of a nation based on theocracy. Whew! Got that off my chest.

[Mihr Chand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scholars well and truly need to use Ahmed's understanding of Hindustan to move towards throwing off the colonial episteme.

[Sami · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explores the impact of colonialism on the cultural and political fabric of the Indian subcontinent. Examining how British colonialism not only exploited the region economically but also used history as a tool to reshape the collective consciousness of the people through history writing - instrumental in distorting the once coherent identity of Hindustan. This colonial narrative constructed a perspective: the decline of Indian heritage with the arrival Muslim despotism. By doing so, the "soldier scribes," created a moral foundation for British rule, casting themselves as the "saviors" of the subcontinent, and reinforcing a sense of cultural superiority.

This colonial rewriting of history led to the political forgetting of Hindustan as a meaningful and diverse entity. As a result, by the late 19th century, "Hindustan" as a political system was no longer recognized as a political or social reality, and instead, the colonial term "British India" became the dominant framework. This shift erased the polyvocal nature of Hindustan, which had been a geographic, social, and cultural construct, and replaced it with a simplified, colonial perspective.

A key aspect that Asif touches upon is the shift in Muslim discourse as British colonial influence grew. Muslims began to increasingly be excluded from national narratives, with a growing emphasis on the concept of Umma. Dr Mubarak Ali also writes in In Search of History, that when the Muslims completely lost power in India in the 19th CE, and suddenly became conscious of their minority status, many began to explain themselves as part of a larger ‘Muslim ummah.’ Insecurity and vulnerability were the main reasons behind this reaction.

At the same time, ideologies like Hindu Rashtra and Hindutva began to take root among Hindus, further fragmenting the idea of a unified subcontinent.

British colonialism was not just a matter of economic exploitation and cultural despotism; it was also about rewcreated a new colonial order,riting history. This act of revisionism a more monolithic vision of India. Manan Ahmad Asif's work challenges us to reconsider the ways in which colonial narratives have shaped our understanding of history and to reflect on the lasting impact of this historical erasure on current identities and politics.

[Annikky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very learned book and as far as I am able to tell, makes important and well-considered points. But I must also admit that this was too academic for me and probably required a more detailed understanding of India's history than I currently possess. So the three stars reflect my enjoyment level rather than the quality of the book.

[Mehsaan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impressive research! Manan’s argument that a common regional identity (Hindoostani) transcended kingdoms, societies, religions and cultures in the subcontinent from Kashmir to Malabar, Sindh to Bengal and led to a multicultural Hindustan is an important one, especially in a decade where majoritarian politics believe one’s religion and linguistic heritage determine belonging and exclusion in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

[Revanth Ukkalam]

Actually the biggest take away from the book are the great historiographical tradition in India.

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The notion of Mahmud Ghazni as a foreign invader was critical to this [British] idea of the Dark Age of Muslim despotic rule. There was, however, an irony in the dual configuration of Ashoka as representative of the Golden Age and Mahmud Ghazni as herald of the Dark Age. British archaeologists, for instance, located three Ashokan edicts in Kandahar and three in Laghman (both locations are now in Afghanistan). The inscriptions were in Greek, Aramaic, or bilingual Greek and Aramaic. Archaeologists generally accepted that these marked the territorial reach of Ashokan governance—part of Ashokan’s imperial rule— where his edicts performed the work of publicly proclaiming his vision for his polity: "And the king abstains from (killing) living beings, and other men and those who (are) huntsmen and fishermen of the king have desisted from hunting." Ashoka’s Laghman is about forty miles from Kabul and a hundred miles from Ghazni. It was from Ghazni that the European prototypical representative of the so-called Muslim invader came...

"... It was [Henry Miers] Elliot who "corrected" the figure of the twelve raids of Mahmud to the now-mythical 'seventeen raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi on India.' Elliot also framed Mahmud as driven by avarice and characterized Mahmud’s Hindu adversaries as naturally weak and docile: 'It was to have been expected that Mahmúd, after establishing himself on the throne of Ghazní, would have embraced the first opportunity of invading India; for while yet a prince, he had seen how easily the hardy warriors of Zábulistán had overcome the more effeminate sons of India.'

"Elliot’s seventeen raids that Mahmud waged on India would become totemic—W. W. Hunter reproduced it in A Brief History of the Indian Peoples (1880), and Vincent Smith added the number to his The Oxford History of India. By 1920, everyone taking the Indian Civil Services Exam would reflect on the seventeen raids of Mahmud: Ashoka was the perfect Indian King; Mahmud, the perfect Muslim invader.

"If British colonial historiography recognized that Ghazni, Kabul, and Laghman were part of Ashokan Indian territory, then Mahmud’s 'plundering' would not qualify as one from 'outside' nor differ in form or ideology from other polities of Mahmud’s contemporaries, including his rival Shahis or the Gurjara-Prathiharas. Hence it is the explicit framing of Mahmud as Muslim that explains his foreignness, not the territory from which he staged his 'raids.'"

[Sohail Rauf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Manan Ahmed Asif’s “The loss of Hindustan: The invention of India” is an interesting read for anyone interested in the history of South Asia. The book’s thesis is that the concept of a pluralistic Hindustan that existed before the advent of the Britishers slowly gave way to that of an India which was divided along the religious lines. This transformation, Asif argues, begins when the British East India Company (BEIC) began to understand and document Hindustan’s history, a process which started primarily with Lt Col Alexander Dow’s first history of Hindustan, written in late 18th century. Later soldier-scribes associated with the BEIC based their work on Dow’s research which itself owes a great deal to Muhammad Qasim Farishta’s history written near the end of 16th century. Britishers clearly differentiated between a history of the Muslim period in Hindustan from the rest of time, thus portraying Muslims as outsiders and invaders. The word “Hindustan” according to these histories written by the British, was of Persian origin and not indigenous to South Asia. Mahmud Ghaznavi’s image of a temple-destroyer perhaps originated from the Britisher’s portrayal of Muslim rulers as invaders.
Asif argues that in fact Muslim rule in Hindustan was a continuation of the history of Hindustan. There was no “…Hindu period followed by a Muslim period”. Asif discusses in detail the histories written before the British, Farishta’s history being the chief one, and how the historiography of this period did not seek to demarcate along ideological or religious boundaries. Farishta, for example, starts his Tarikh with a discussion of Mahabharata, also intertwining it with Firdousi’s Shahnama. Reading Farishta informs the reader that Mahmud Ghaznavi sought more to form alliances than to destroy temples. Similarly, Amir Khusrau attached as much importance to Sanskrit as he did to Arabic and Persian.
What I particularly liked about this book is its delineation of Farishta’s (and of those whom he cited in his work) theory of history. Their historiography is characterized by certain principles. Farishta and predecessors (Baihaqi, Juzjani, Barani, Mir Khwand, Nizamuddin, and Abul Fazl) were aware that histories are meant to serve future generations. They believed that historiography is an incremental process with each historian adding to or improving upon the work of the previous ones. A defining concept was that history was first a project of ethics. Farishta, in particular, did not discuss the history of any community of Hindustan in terms of their “otherness”.
By contrast, the way the BEIC historians sliced the so-called “Mohammadan” history from the rest of the history of Hindustan seems to advocate a theory that history was merely a collection of facts. Alexander Dow was even guilty of misrepresentation as he displaced Farishta, a Deccan historian, to one based in Delhi. Also, the BEIC historians’ reading of Farishta’s Tarikh as a dissected and derivative text was the first step towards their project of dissection of Hindustan’s history and towards the project of forgetting Hindustan and inventing India.
In the last chapter, Asif discusses the 19th and 20th century Indian historians, such as Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Shibli, Azad, and Sharar, who did not share the Colonial reading of Hindustan’s history. Their work, which constituted an effort to recall a forgotten history, though was probably not enough and needed to be continued in the present time.
Some questions and thoughts that came to my mind while I was reading this book and after I had finished it are discussed below:
The book is subtitled “The invention of India” but this particular aspect of the discussion gets much less attention. How did the word “India” find it way and how did it displace Hindustan? In the introductory chapter, the author mentions Allama Iqbal’s poem on Hindustan, which implies that word “Hindustan” was still in vogue. How and when did this word disappear and was replaced by India? Is there enough statistical evidence that after the advent of the Britishers, the word “Hindustan” found decreasing use and that “India” begins to be used more often? I did not find enough discussion on it. Also, only one other work is cited which discusses the change of names from “Hindustan” to “India”.
I would have enjoyed more discussion on how colonizers deny the colonized access to their own past. Is this process of denial, which leads to the colonized community’s forgetting of history deliberate and planned? Or is it inherent in the colonization process, a byproduct of imperialism? Or does it arise from a prejudicial mindset? Asif does discuss briefly how the European understanding of the Muslim period of Hindustan was colored by the centuries old rivalry between Muslims and the crusading Europeans. He also discusses racial factors behind Britisher’s understanding of the locals and Britishers’ fascination with the Indians’ treatment of their women. But here it would have been useful to include discussion of and comparison with how similar processes happened in other colonized societies. Did something akin to the loss of Hindustan happened with them? Not a flaw of the book per se, but my wish.
A few points about the author’s prose and diction. Asif’s prose is scholarly – reads almost like a dissertation or a research paper – and may not be as enjoyable for the layman as, say, Dalrymple who has written several page-turning books on South Asian history.
Asif uses ‘delineate’ to mean something synonymous with ‘differentiate’, whereas the word ‘delineate’ means: to describe precisely.
The author uses the word “quadratic”. I am not sure what it means in a non-mathematical context. Did he mean “non-linear”?
All in all, a well-researched book with an important thesis.

[Sayani · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[krn ਕਰਨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A half-remembered ditty from childhood, lying undisturbed in the deepest mental crevices, re-emerged as I started reading this book.

Sikandar ne Porus se kee thee ladayee / Jo kee thee ladayee / to main kya karoon?
Kaurav ne Pandav se kee hathapayee / Jo kee hathapayee / to main kya karoon?
[ * see endnote for quick context & translation]

Annoying earworm. Try as I might, it wouldn't go away. So I looked up the reference. Turns out to be a song from a Hindi film (Anpadh, singer: Mahendra Kapoor), but I had the timing all wrong. More suitable to say it's from my parents's childhood.

But why was it playing in my head?

Maybe because the link between the two ostenisbly incompatible timelines - Alexander arriving in the subcontinent and The Mahabharata - is mentioned pretty early on in The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India. As the song lyrics suggest, generations of Indian children have grown up with the assumption that their history basically consists of a series of invasions, beginning with Alexander. This is framed against a backdrop of mythical time: the age of epics and sagas.

Manan Ahmed Asif lays out, in patient, exhaustive detail, the colonial origins of this narrative. Timeless India, ergo ahistorical, where history only begins with an interruption by the Greek (Macedonian) Alexander. Layered on top of this foundation is the medieval Christian/European bias against Islam - a hangover from the Crusades - which sees invaders as essentially Muslim (debauched, brutal, intolerant) and the natives of India as essentially Hindu (superstitious, weak, oppressed). Three basic periods: timeless Bharat, Mughal Hindustan, British India. And this way of telling the national story gets locked in as education itself comes to be defined as essentially a colonial, administrative project.

So far, so meh. Why should anyone care in 2022? (to main kya karoon?)

We should care, cautions the historian, because the past refuses to remain in the past. The way of telling the story about that which may or may not have happened hundreds of years ago continues to impinge on our own time. Asif is a serious scholar, engaged in sober and measured intellectual history, but even within the highly restrained academic language the warning is unmissable:

"History writing has the power to sanction retributive violence in the present" (p.62, emphasis mine)

Arcane debates about dated manuscripts, bloodless questions of methodology, endless rounds of revisions and amendments: why bother? Because history matters. How it's written, who gets to write it, which elements are accentuated, where the focal points of meaning are located. To properly demonstrate the divergences in the various histories of Hindustan, Asif takes the work of Deccan court historian Muhammad Qasim Firishta (1560-1620) as his guiding star.

[Wait, Firishta who? Never heard of him. One of the pre-eminent historians of India, whose magnum opus was instrumental in shaping history as a discipline, is unkown today outside very specialist circles. Personal moment of outrage and shame. Anyway, back to the review.]

Through a close reading of Firishta's text, Tarikh-i-Firishta, Asif uncovers a way of doing history that is polyvalent, sensitive to local nuances, and cognisant of multiple polities as sites of meaning-making. Asif then shows how colonial historians deliberately subvert these elements in Firishta's history to tell a more polarising story, the effects of which can be felt to this day.

This isn't by any means an easy read. A lot to take in: many unfamiliar names, personalities and texts. Narrated in prose that is dry as a bone. If I might also add a slightly critical note, Asif sounds on occasion a bit partisan himself. Counterpoints to his own readings are ignored. William Jones, for instance. The difference between how William Dalrymple approaches Jones in The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire and Asif's own take is quite glaring.

But on balance, I feel Asif has done us all a huge favour. His quest to unearth long-forgotten books in the archives and libraries of the world, and the countless hours reading and interpreting histories written in Arabic and Farsi, will no doubt open new pathways for lovers of Hindustan to connect more authentically with their past.

_______________________

* Alexander fought Porus (Indian king mentioned only in Greek sources)
If they fought / why should I care?
Kauravas fought Pandavas (warring cousins in The Mahabharata)
If they fought / why should I care?

[Ibrahim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book contrasts the european colonial historiography of ‘India’ which follows the coasts to the interior, focuses on the unique practices of the land compared to Europe and divides Muslims from the ‘natives’ of the land, to the Muslim historiography of ‘Hindustan’ mostly written in Persian, which at its zenith incorporates Hindu and Muslim origins to give a history of the land region by region (the central focus being where the patron of the historian is located). The civilizational clashes present in the European histories is not present in the Medieval Persian histories, which attempt to impart the moral of providing peace and security for all subjects of a ruler as the best practice to adopt for any ruler.

However, there seems to be a glaring issue with the book; while it talks about how Hindustan was seen as a diverse land where all belonged in the Muslim persian histories, there is no investigation whether Pre-colonial non-muslim indian histories had the same view? Again this might be an issue of a lack of existing sources, but without them, the muslim persian histories and the colonial histories both seem to talk about a significant chunk of the population without the reader directly hearing from them.

Another aspect: the colonial histories were written to further the company and colonial projects and just as the muslim histories were commissioned by muslim rulers and were provided to further the project of divine rule of muslim sultans in Hindustan. Where the colonial histories attempt to discredit the rulers before the colonials as despotic to further their aims, the muslim histories seem to analyze sultans and kings to impart lessons on governance to future rulers. What is missing in both is the accounting of how the different residents of India actually saw themselves and the community around them, but alas such sources are unlikely to exist.

[Ankush Rai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book - Loss of Hindustan
Written by- Manan Ahmed Asaf
Published by - Harvard University Press

India as a country or subcontinent has always been called with various names in the past - Meluha, Jambudwipa, Bharatvarsha, Hindustan etc. The most popular name in the medieval period was ‘Hindustan’ which was coined by the invaders, traders from the west. In this book Manan Ahmed Asif narrates the idea of Hindustan, its geographical extent and India in the medieval times under Islamic hegemony. Drawing parallels from the work of 16th century Persian Chronicler - Ferishta, the author traces the history of Hindustan, mentions the bustling cities, the sultans and Rajas who held sway in this land. The author takes help of the memoirs, books written by medieval scholars and historians. He also takes account of the sources from the Colonial period. Works of Jonathan Duncan, Macaulay, Elphinstone and Dow’s History of Hindustan also find mention. Most interesting chapter in this book was ‘The peoples in Hindustan’.
Ferishta’s works became the base for the colonial Indologists to further write about India of medieval times; the author has listed those books in the last chapter. In the afterword the author lists out the difference between the ‘India’ colonial historians portrayed as compared to ‘Hindustan’ of the medieval times. We are familiar with the white supremacy and divide and rule policy of the British which was reflected in their writings to disunite the gap between two communities. The author’s painstaking effort for the book is noticeable by the sheer size of the footnotes. Also, this book is a commentary on the ‘idea of Hindustan’ based on medieval period writings and chronological events. People have been mistaken with the title, considering it a thorough history of medieval India. Recommended read for History aficionados of Hindustan !

Review by @getthefactshistory IG
#getthefactshistorybookreviews

[Titas Bose · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history book that made me smile. Made me think a lot about writing as a method of thinking.

[Azam Ch. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a nice book to read, but most books about topics that we care about and don't drop midway seem like nice books to read.
the structure isn't very good and there is a lot and lot of incoherent name-dropping, A LOT of it, and then a few lines of information about the name dropped book/person and then more name dropping, the various chapters in it albiet possessing clearly different titles regarding what they are going to be talking about still talk about the same thing over and over again making you wonder why bother with that chapter format? and towards the end of the book i started feeling like how most of the things it talks about could just have fit in a 50 page introduction for some other book on/translation of the piece of document it keeps talking about for most of the book (firishta's tarikh).

so despite my criticisms and me saying it was overall a bad experience to read why did i rate it not 2 or 3 stars? because it is a book on history and although i accept it could have been better written by a more skilled writer, the research put into it by the author seems solid, and i tried asking myself if i or some historian i liked would have written this, could it have been any other way with the content it talks about? and i felt unsure of that,

so yeah, here it was, here was the review, that was all.

[Student · Rating 3 out of 5]

For those of you who won't read the book, in a nutshell, this is what I think Prof. Manan Asif is saying: The British planted the idea that the Hindus in Hindustan were weak, effeminate even. The Muslims were outsiders and despots. The Britishers rescued the Hindus and gave them India. In doing so, the British destroyed Hindustan.

An investigation into an idea as interesting as The Loss of Hindustan deserves more engaging writing. This was a touch too dense for my liking. At times, it felt like hard work. Still, Prof. Ahmed's book contains arguments that are undoubtedly provocative. But I would recommend it only to a persistent reader and history junkie. Happily for us, I am both.

[Paula Darwish · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brillilant, painstaking and forensic piece of historical research. A much needed book in an era when challenging colonial narratives and breaking down physical and mental borders is so crucial for the survival of humanity. The arrogance of the colonial historians and their loose relationship with the truth is really quite shocking. Manan Ahmed Asif's meticulous work is a testament to this.

[Pramod Pant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically, a Muslim perspective.

[abby]

read for hist400

[Ahana Mitra]

This is one of the most illuminating books that I have read on the question of colonial epistemic ruptures, and the complex disciplinary evolution of Orientalism.

[Faisal Hameed · Rating 4 out of 5]

If someone had defined history writing as “flower was picked from every garden and a drop from every ocean.” I would’ve started reading history books much earlier .

[Jeseentha · Rating 4 out of 5]

midway through the book and why does it feel like the author is lowkey bragging about Firishta's work being acknowledged by the colonial history compliers as the best work is laudatory (even though he explicitly critiques colonial historiography, it simultaneously and seemingly centres firishta's text of Hindustan and one of the threads it draws this legitimacy from is how the earliest colonial historical texts extensively drew from Firishta's work.)

Otherwise, Manan's book excellently with engages with historiography.