Wednesday 30 June 2021

The Loss of Hindustan:The Invention of India-by Manan Ahmed Asif, Book review by Ajay Singha Raconteur Indica

The title announces a subject of deep concern to the people of the Indian subcontinent in present times. This is not a chronological narration of history, but a premise, which states that the people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh share a common political ancestry. A people who liked to describe themselves, at least in the past, as Hindustani. The book examines the very philosophy of understanding and narrating history especially as propagated by colonial historians. It seeks to explain what exactly was this idea of Hindustan? How did it evolve and come about? What made it persist for over a thousand years? What caused the eventual loss of Hindustan and why did it run out of steam? And finally how did it get replaced by the invention of India?
FIRISHTA 17th century Scholar-Historian

The author, Manan Ahmed Asif was born in Pakistan and went to school during the dictatorial regime of General Zia, where he was taught that his country’s history went back only as far as the advent of Islam. He went overseas for further studies and now teaches history at Columbia University. The abstract philosophies of history composed by Voltaire, Hume and Kant led the author on a wider search to examine their critical original sources. Discarding the interpretations of the ‘soldier-scribes’ whose writings dominated the region’s colonial and post-colonial historiography, the author hinges his research on pre-colonial sources, particularly Firishta, a 17th century scholar historian, located in the Deccan, outside the Mughal domains. The author believes that historians had relied on Firishta as a common source of information but deployed his writings to strengthen their own viewpoints.
Up until the 18th century, ‘Hindustan’ was regularly embossed on maps, travelogues and histories relating to the sub-continent, printed anywhere in the world. Operas and magic shows in Europe would use the term to describe and depict the sub-continent. The Mughals did not create the concept of ‘Hindustan’. It already existed as an area of territorial integrity where diverse communities of believers lived harmoniously. In Sanskrit, Prakrit, Arabic, Persian and later Urdu the idea of Hindustan persists.

The British ‘soldier-scribe’ historians constructed India’s past as a golden period of five thousand years which was disrupted by the invasion of outsiders who threw India into a dark age of tyranny and stagnation. British rule rescued India from this plight, putting it on the track of universally accepted modernity. Elaborating on the history of the sub-continent, James Mill set the ball rolling by describing the ancient ‘glorious’ period followed by the ‘dark’ medieval Muslim despotism and finally the fair and just British rule. By carving out selective information from historical sources these ‘soldier-scribes’ as the author calls them, greatly distorted the understanding of subsequent generations of writers and historians. Manan asserts that the colonial episteme worked to erase the idea of Hindustan, supplanting it with the concept of India. The “Loss of Hindustan” as a colonial project commenced in the early 18th century and their ideas had jelled by the early 20th century, finding final fruition in 1947. The Sarnath capital, as the excavation came to be known, established the visual vocabulary for an “ancient” and triumphant “Golden Age” before the Muslim conquests and the “decay” that came after. It gave ancient India a geography, an ethics of awareness, nonviolence, and tolerance as opposed to the darkly violent Muslim kings. Ashoka, the ‘chakravartin’ who conquered the four quarters of the world came at the beginning and after him, was the decline. With the discovery of Ashoka and the Arthasastra, ancient Indian history finally had a pronounced teleology outside of Muslim conquest.
In contrast, the entire history of Muslims, in the European imagination, came to be understood as one of “conquest” epitomized in the motif of the “sword of Islam.” In 1897, ZakaŹ¾ullah a late Mughal period historian produced the ‘Tarikh-i Hindustan’ perhaps the last great document to bear the title “History of Hindustan.” Though critical of European scholars, the author asserts that Zaka too was conceptually not too different from Elphinstone who had framed history as a corrective to the popular accounts of James Mill. He points out Sayyid Ahmad Khan, a historian who offered a lived history of his contemporaries in Delhi in which the houses and households gave testimony to the richness of the past two hundred years. A good hundred years after the battle at Plassey, during the 1857 rebellion, people spoke of getting ‘Hindustan’ free and getting rid of the firangi rule. But then quite suddenly the term began to fade from colonial archives and after 1857 ‘British India’ replaced the idea of ‘Hindustan’.

Brahmins presenting sacred Hindu texts to Britannia

The author introduces Firishta or Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah, a scholar of Persian descent. His patron Ibrahim Adil Shah II, who ruled the Deccan, gave him the mandate to produce a comprehensive history of Hindustan. Firishta proceeded to compile an archive spread across nearly nine centuries, covering themes ranging from politics and culture to geography. Written mostly in Arabic and Persian, he also included texts from the Mahabharat and Shahnama giving it his own novel interpretations. His account is not a chronology of empires and kings but a historical geography and his idea of Hindustan was thus beyond and even greater than the Mughal court. He writes that Hindustan was always a melting pot of multiple cultures, languages, religions and people within a geographically defined sub-continent. He saw Hindustan as an eminently hospitable space, with political structures that were accommodating to a diverse population.

Sultan Adil Shah II - Patron of FIRISHTA
With over a thousand folio pages, the writings by Firishta offer an elaborate account, becoming foundational to European historical thought in the century that followed. He writes that before the dawn of Islam, Maldeo was the last ruler of Hindustan who could unite its various regions under his rule and after his death, there were no more kings of consequence, as he puts it. Firishta’s history is the first serious attempt at describing Hindustan as a concept, an idea, and a place that contains multitudes of faiths and polities. Firishta starts his observations with the polities in the Northwest, moves to the sub-continent’s southern centre, travels up to the eastern shores and returns again to the South by the sea route. He expresses his love for this geography in the conclusion, titled “An Account of Conditions of the Heaven-Representing Hindustan.” Manan, the author of this book writes that “Not one community, nor people, are described in terms of ‘otherness’ nor does he remark that one faith supersedes another”. Firishta ends his treatise with the advent of the Portuguese and the English in Malabar and the arrival of the Jews and Christians to Hindustan. His words predict the coming apocalypse, for he understood the inherent dichotomy of the Europeans, who outwardly appeared at war with each other, but remained united in their intent to subjugate the sub-continent.
The colonial episteme has been regularly challenged from the nineteenth century onwards to the present times, prominent historians who have done so include Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib. Manan’s singular effort in interpreting Firishta’s treatise and drawing attention to his work will re-introduce Firishta as a reliable source in contemporary scholarship. Scholarly works delve deep into the subject to conduct their research and quote multiple references to support their thesis. With a third of its contents dedicated to notes, bibliography and index, this book is no exception. Those not conversant with the history of this sub-continent may therefore find the going a bit tough and may leave with more questions than answers. Then there is the question of the sources and texts on which Firishta built his own narrative. Perhaps these need to be examined and assessed more rigorously before building an authoritative voice, signalling a sort of finality in opinion. The central theme of the book ‘The Loss of Hindustan’ is replaced by the invention of India. But this begets the question, what exactly did ‘Hindustan’ replace in the first place? To retain focus on the subject under review the entire narrative centres around a few centuries of India’s history. This is understandable because a certain period of history is under scrutiny, but purely from a lay reader’s point of view, this deep dive does get a bit tiresome.
The author explains the position and interpretation of the Hindu ideologue Savarkar on this subject and the fine distinction in accepting the nomenclature with an additional ‘h’ calling it “Hindusthan” the place where Hindus reside rather than the land, east of the Indus. The book concludes with an appeal, perhaps to the people of the sub-continent, that we confront a terrible crisis emerging from the past. The author offers two insights: The acceptance that History can impact real lives as the narratives of separation gain momentum. More importantly, he suggests that we should not accept the past as a certainty or seek to romanticise what is lost. He suggests reimagining the past in order to rearticulate our extant understanding of the region’s history. This approach may certainly help us breathe easy, as the battle about writing history in the present is also the battle about the future of the sub-continent.