Manan Asif Ahmed’s new guide, The Lack of Hindustan; The Invention of India, ends with this cri de coeur:
“Throughout the subcontinent we now confront a disaster of the previous, with an express understanding of distinction as future…
The majoritarian Sunni or Hindutva tasks ask that we, as historians, contemplate them inevitable and immutable. But, this can’t stand…
The historical past I’ve sketched here’s a immediate to think about methods ahead that don’t yield to the majoritarian current, that don’t inherit the previous as certainty, and don’t romanticise that which is misplaced. It’s important that, as historians, artists, activists, and thinkers, we flip to the medieval interval and recognise the methods wherein it continues to organise how present prejudices are rearticulated…
It’s our collective activity to re-imagine the previous.”
Asif, an affiliate professor at Columbia college who additionally based the weblog Chapati Thriller, examines the methods wherein colonial histories of the subcontinent, usually utilizing a simplistic non secular lens, overshadowed and overwhelmed a really completely different understanding of Hindustan held by medieval students.
The guide trains its give attention to the Tarikh-i-Firishta, a monumental historical past of the subcontinent written by the 17th-century Deccan historian Firishta, whose work was massively influential within the area but additionally grew to become the premise – after large reinterpretation – of colonial histories that portrayed the previous in Hindu-Muslim phrases that proceed to impression the political trajectories of South Asia a long time after independence.
By inspecting Firishta’s understanding of the historical past of Hindustan, and the way the colonial historians re-ordered his work to suit solely completely different narratives, Ahmed argues for a re-examining of our understanding of the pre-colonial previous and a necessity for others in his area to acknowledge the affect of colonial data on the apply of writing historical past.
I spoke to Ahmed about “decolonising” historical past, the way it squares along with his coaching within the Western historic custom and why his work is deeply related to the subcontinent at this time.
How did you come to check and train historical past?
The marginally lengthy brief reply is that I’m one of many Zia-ul-Haq technology of children whose mother and father thought that staying in Pakistan could be dangerous for my well being. I used to be shipped off on the age of 18 to america from Lahore, like a lot of our technology, to develop into engineers.
I began pc engineering however sooner or later, I dropped out of that. It took me some years to determine what I wished to do. In Pakistan I had been a Physics and Maths pupil. I had by no means achieved humanities or historical past.
So I did one other BA – my third – in historical past. One of many motivating elements was that I used to be working in quick meals on the time and studying loads of artificial biographies – these broad issues, like Will Durant on civilisations. I used to be interested by the place we slot in – we being desis, individuals from the subcontinent – on this world image.
After my BA in Historical past, I went straight into my PhD. For the PhD I targeted on the arrival of Muslims to the subcontinent, the reminiscence and historical past of Muhammad Bin Qasim as a “conqueror”.
I used to be specialised as an “early Islam” scholar, engaged on the primary couple of centuries after the Prophet. My first educating job was in Berlin, and it was really a contemporary South Asia job. So I needed to reinvent myself as a contemporary historical past individual. I did that for 3-Four years after which I bought this job in New York [at Columbia University] and I used to be again to medieval historical past. At Columbia, I began to suppose severely about find out how to publish (or not) my dissertation. I ended up reimagining the challenge as a two-book challenge.
My first guide [A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia] was on this Persian historical past referred to as the Chachnama. My guide does two issues. It desires to grasp how we learn this textual content [from the 13th century]. Which is a primary query. What theories of interpretation do you deliver, how do you perceive that world from the textual content?
So as to reply that, a part of my methodology was to stroll in Uch Sharif (Sind) the place the textual content was written and speak to individuals who have been custodians of the reminiscence of the textual content with a purpose to perceive how they have been dwelling with it. I’m additionally dwelling with the textual content, however within the self-discipline of historical past.
Secondly, I’m attempting to grasp how the colonial state appeared on the textual content, and argued that that is proof of Muslims as conquerors and invaders and never belonging to South Asia. That this Chachnama justifies the hassle by the colonial state to liberate the “enslaved” Hindus of Sind.
My guide thus had twin objectives: On the one hand, how can we learn one thing written centuries in the past and then again, what occurs to that textual content, particularly throughout the colonial interval.
That grew to become the set-up to this challenge [The Loss of Hindustan; The Invention of India].
This guide has a really robust name for a sure method, not as post-colonial however as post-colonised students. I’m curious how a lot your concepts butted up towards the sorts of historical past you have been taught as you entered the topic?
In historical past, you find yourself being skilled very particularly. In case you do medieval historical past, you’re being skilled by medieval students. No matter interval you’re finding out, your essential coaching is from students in that area.
On the College of Chicago, I used to be fortunate sufficient that I used to be really getting skilled by people who find themselves fashionable historians, like Dipesh Chakrabarty and Shahid Amin. Shahid Amin was visiting and taught a category that was the premise of each books that I wrote. I discovered from fashionable historians engaged in how the nation state offers with historical past, and the way the nation state owns historical past. Their difficulty is what the colonial state is doing, what the nation state is doing.
I used to be additionally being skilled by medieval students like Fred Donner or Muzaffar Alam. Their emphasis is way more on the pre-colonial and the world earlier than colonialism. I used to be skilled below these countervailing views.
Being from Pakistan, I grew up with the concept the nation-state claims all rights on the previous. It says what I ought to take into consideration the previous.
What I argued in my first guide and on this guide concerning the post-colonised scholar is that as historians of the pre-modern or pre-colonial, now we have not internalised what the colonial state or the nationwide state does to our understanding of the pre-colonial.
I’ll provide you with a really small instance as an example. Let’s say the medieval historian says I’m going to check a specific manuscript that’s the foundation of my examine and that specific manuscript has 5 copies, and one is within the Rampur library, two copies are within the British library, and two copies are within the Berlin library.
The students get grants and go to Rampur and London and Berlin, learn these manuscripts they usually write the guide. What I imply by post-colonised, is that the situation of postcoloniality is within the dispersal of this manuscript. Once we go to these archives, we can’t write that out of the story.
We will’t say the manuscript exists by some means magically in Berlin or London. And in my case, for instance, in Rampur. As a Pakistani, I’m separated from Rampur, possibly much more than I’m separated from Berlin or London. All of that is due to colonialism.
The manuscript doesn’t fly by itself. And so the post-colonised historian, once they’re writing a piece on a 13th century textual content, can’t ignore this materials actuality. And on this guide, I develop that to say this additionally contains the categorisations, the catalogues, the style, descriptions, and colonial scholarship on these manuscripts.
Similar to once they say what you suppose is a chunk of poetry is definitely a chunk of historical past, or what you suppose is a chunk of commentary, is definitely a chunk of literature, so on and so forth.
Effectively, who’s it saying this isn’t historical past or not poetry or not literature? The place does that come from? It comes from colonial cataloguing. It comes from colonial classification programs.
Some historians have [addressed] it for the challenge of historical past writing. Folks like Sanjay Subrahmanyam and David Shulman and VN Rao, in a guide titled Textures of Time, tried to say that historical past could be learn in sources apart from what the colonial state says is a supply of historical past.
They didn’t actually paint it within the sense of the post-colonised that I’m talking of. However that’s the spirit of the argument, which is that even should you’re finding out the pre-colonial previous now we have to undergo colonialism to understand it. Equally, Partha Chatterjee and Shahid Amin have written concerning the sources for “various” histories.
As a course of query then, the place did you get entry to the manuscripts that you simply used for this guide?
I began engaged on this specific guide in 2016. Loads of the library work early on – I used to be in a position to journey to do this. However after I began writing, I wanted to see these manuscripts that have been in Scotland, that have been in Manchester, Cambridge, Toronto, Paris, and Kolkata. All of these I solely examined as digital artefacts.
The sheer variety of books and manuscripts you cite within the guide appears formidable to me. Did it overwhelm you sooner or later, attempting to inform the story of Hindustan?
The final chapter of my first guide talked of the significance of Firishta [author of the Tarikh-i-Firishta, a 17th century history of Hindustan that The Loss of Hindustan focuses on]. Once I completed that guide, I knew I used to be going to sort out Firishta. However I didn’t know what it will appear like. Wouldn’t it be one other targeted examine?
I began the challenge in Mexico Metropolis. I used to be educating a category on colonisation and decolonisation. And I used to be actually interested by 17th century Mexico and the way Mexico’s geography handled the concept of colonisation. I began studying loads of work on the conquest of Mexico, across the early 17th century, so the identical time as Firishta is writing.
It was by means of that course of that I started to grasp that what I used to be doing was not about Firishta however concerning the challenge that Firishta himself is concerned in – the examine of Hindustan. As soon as that started to be clear to me, I can share {a photograph} [of that time] from my workplace the place the whole ground is roofed in books. I didn’t really depend, as a result of I needed to flip my bibliography into “works cited”, as a result of there have been too many books.
However I feel I used to be fortunate within the sense that I actually discovered what I used to be targeted on – the concept of Hindustan – so I may learn so much however I may preserve that thread in my very own mind so I don’t get overwhelmed.
I do know that is the argument of the guide in some methods, however for the reader, how would you separate the concept of India from that of Hindustan? How are these two distinct?
India is an invented class that comes into being because the colonial states, not simply British, but additionally Portuguese, French, Dutch, and German, start to grasp the subcontinent. And what they deploy are numerous variations of British India or Estado da India or the East Indies, numerous classes wherein they perceive the subcontinent.
Because the colonial state begins to essentially flourish within the late 18th and 19th centuries, it begins to displace the notions of find out how to perceive the subcontinent that the colonial actors had encountered 100 years earlier than, once they arrived first – in travelogues, maps or service provider accounts.
And that’s the concept of Hindustan.
Hindustan is one thing that was displaced, nevertheless it’s displaced in a method that it lingers, hooked up to the Mughal state and slightly after that. By 1857 it is rather a lot hooked up to the Mughals themselves. The argument that British India makes is that, in 1857, when the Mughals go, Hindustan additionally vanishes.
India versus Hindustan turns into a form of vanishing act. India extends again in time. So, one thing like historical India, or early India develop into very clear classes. Anybody can speak about them and take into consideration them.
Whereas we are able to say that after 1947, historical Pakistan, or after 1971, historical Bangladesh should not classes which have any actual buy. They’re employed typically however individuals don’t actually perceive what meaning. As a result of everybody would say, properly Pakistan didn’t exist earlier than 1947, so there can’t be an historical Pakistan.
However nobody says India didn’t exist earlier than 1947 or 1857, so there can’t be historical India. The concept is that the colonial state has raised one other actually outstanding psychological geography and that’s what the guide is about, that specific psychological geography. I’m not saying that the psychological geography of Hindustan must be recuperated, it’s not a challenge of fascinated by it in isolation.
The guide is doing two issues concurrently.
It’s exhibiting each what Hindustan as an idea, as a historical past, as a topic of historical past seems to be like. And concurrently, how the colonial state is archiving it and erasing it.
That, I feel, is the methodological contribution that I make. We will’t simply say there was a earlier than and after, and speak concerning the earlier than or the after, however that the earlier than and after are literally overlapping classes, and we are able to’t discuss one with out considering of the opposite.
You utilize the time period the “colonial episteme” as a mind-set about this erasure. Might you outline that? And in addition, I’m curious, do you see it as being in opposition to say a medieval Muslim episteme?
Episteme principally is how we all know one thing. There’s a particular method wherein the colonial brokers know the subcontinent.
I outline the colonial episteme beginning way back to the Portuguese arrival. Possibly different historians would say, properly, the colonial state solely begins in 1757. However the best way of realizing the subcontinent in a specific vogue, which is what I name the colonial episteme, is one thing that predates and precedes the settlement within the 18th and 19th centuries.
The colonial episteme is the form of lever that’s prying off Hindustan and inserting British India and all of those different classes or nomenclature.
It’s completely in opposition [to the medieval episteme] within the sense that the colonial episteme as a challenge has to create a political forgetting, it has to naturalise itself. British India has to develop into a pure class.
James Mill, the daddy of [English philosopher] John Stuart Mill, is writing the Historical past of British India, within the early 19th century. Now, the concept there’s something known as the “historical past of British India”, and that the primary a part of it will be the traditional or the golden age of the Hindus and the center half could be the darkish Mohammedan ages after which the third half could be liberal British India, turns into taken as a pure system, when it’s wholly invented by Mill.
In that sense it’s completely antagonistic to the notions with which we are able to take into consideration historical past writing for somebody like Firishta, who will not be making any such classification divisions in his historical past. The historians writing after Firishta in Hindustan, people who find themselves modern to James Mill, are additionally not utilizing such distinctions.
So, that may be a colonising effort with a purpose to overcome the methods wherein historical past is being written in Hindustan previous to and modern to the colonial episteme.
You select Firishta as a result of he makes a distinction from loads of different medieval Muslim histories of the time, notably by integrating the Mahabharata in his work, as an alternative of beginning off genealogically from Adam. There’s a completely different historiography right here even when in comparison with different medieval Muslim historians.
Firishta may be very self-conscious when he says I’m writing a brand new sort of historical past. He takes it on as his challenge. He’s not the primary one who’s writing a broad historical past. He has a complete archive that he can cite going again, 400 years, 500 years. He has a library.
He’s positively very acutely aware concerning the historiography that he has inherited, which incorporates texts like Panchatantra, Mahabharata, the shastras. Right here he isn’t making a distinction between Hindu and Muslim historians. The innovation that I feel he argues for is that, first, he defines his historical past or organises his historical past by means of area. He says, right here’s Hindustan. Listed here are the contours of Hindustan made up of those areas, and I’m going to inform you a narrative of every of those areas. And inside every one in all them I’ll inform you how they got here to be settled, how they got here to be ruled, their politics, who lives there, some tales concerning the good and the dangerous.
Firishta fractures the methods wherein historical past had been written as much as his time. Which was often genealogies of descent from some god or heaven, right down to a specific king who was the personification of that cosmological order, or “right here’s a city or a metropolis, and right here’s everybody who lives in it”. These are the 2 ways in which individuals targeted on telling historical past.
Firishta very consciously writes a brand new historical past.
Tucked away within the footnotes, you write that it’s “essential to re-enliven ideas translated out of expertise throughout the colonial interval.” However to me the metaphor appeared extra like a dismantling of the edifice constructed by the colonial historian. How laborious is it for us post-colonised topics to even try to consider Hindustan earlier than India?
It’s essential to say why Firishta works as a device to dismantle [things]. Firishta is utilized by the colonial episteme to create the framework that we perceive because the philosophy of historical past. Firishta is rendered into English in addition to French at roughly the identical second, 1768-1769. On the English aspect by Alexander Dow, on the French aspect by [Jean Baptiste Joseph] Gentil.
These renderings then are taken up by philosophers like Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Kant’s pupil Johann G Herder, who’re all engaged within the challenge of fascinated by common concepts of “man”. For these common tasks, these European intellectuals want uncooked materials. Uncooked materials from what they suppose is China, from what they suppose is India, what they suppose is Africa, what they suppose is the “New World.”
They need these “uncooked supplies” with a purpose to create this cloth or this fantasy of the universe that they will argue is the pure state of issues. And Dow’s renderings develop into critically essential for that world-making. These figures themselves are extremely essential to the challenge of Enlightenment.
Whenever you quick ahead to the mid-to-late 19th century, when historical past as a self-discipline is rising in German universities, you see reliance on these huge questions that represent historical past’s object of inquiry. And these identical figures. Heder’s lectures, for instance, are extremely essential to the philosophy of historical past, and the methods wherein historical past as a self-discipline recognises itself and polices what could be mentioned. And even whose histories could be advised.
And all of that turns into a part of the colonial episteme. Historical past-writing, we all know from individuals like CLR James, is a specific device by means of which the colonial challenge is carried out upon the natives, by saying, “you don’t have a historical past, we’re going to provide you with one” or saying, “what you have got is myths and fantasies and right here’s what disciplined historical past requires and that is the way you do it.”
I’m not saying Firishta is the one device for dismantling the colonial challenge, however Firishta performs a really important position in inserting the subcontinent into this cloth.
So by taking aside how they consider Firishta, however extra importantly, by telling the reader what Firishta had really imagined, which was way more complicated, way more sturdy than what the colonial state makes use of Firishta for, in a way, I’m hoping that the reader walks away with the concept we have to problem or in modern phrases decolonise what the philosophy of historical past means.
And by that rationale additionally decolonise our understanding of what now we have been advised to say is an epic, or a historical past, or a romance. These are among the methods wherein I’m utilizing Firishta to argue for a kind of decolonised method.
Your personal coaching is firmly within the custom of, let’s say, Western historical past writing. And also you train at Columbia. And on this guide, you employ the instruments which might be obtainable to historians at this time. One sentence within the guide jumped out to me – “maybe we should abandon this colonial custom that masquerades as scholarship and exists solely as a result of the post-colonial states proceed to harbour colonial prejudices.” So I used to be curious, how do you sq. a few of this internally? How do you employ fashionable historic approaches to dismantle a colonised topic?
I depend on plenty of thinkers, influential to my understanding.
I’m fascinated by Aimé Césaire’s work, the place he’s not solely writing what would now represent political concept, however he’s additionally writing play translations of Shakespeare, like The Tempest [set on an island in the Caribbean].
I’m fascinated by individuals like WEB Dubois, who was writing what we consider as science fiction or speculative fiction, simply as a lot as he was writing sociology. I’m considering of students like Marisa J Fuentes, who’re fascinated by silences and gaps. These are students who’re partaking in the identical challenge, however are utilizing completely different sorts of instruments with a purpose to get on the silences and the inequities of the historic career.
My intention was to put naked, to make bare the development of the methods wherein colonialism has elided, obfuscated and compartmentalised the historical past of the subcontinent, of Hindustan.
Why is that essential? It’s not merely the truth that in fashionable disciplinary historical past we should go to the archives, have footnotes, have bibliography, have citations. It’s not simply these issues. I feel it’s additionally that we query the fashionable disciplinary historical past class from a decolonial spirit. We have now to enter the archive that itself must be decolonised.
We have now to consider citational practices – drawing upon Sarah Ahmed’s work on citational practices – that these citational practices assemble the world round that provides a historian or a theorist a gravitas or a method ahead. And fascinated by how black and brown our bodies and the way ladies are erased from such citational equipment.
And so what does it imply for me to consider writing about Firishta? Drawing upon scholarship that got here from Hindustan, really studying what Firishta was studying, and fascinated by these texts. Studying students from Hindustan throughout the colonial interval. Not dismissing them as outdated histories or nationalist histories, however really wanting on the ethics of historical past writing, and attempting to reconstruct what that ethics is, each for Firishta however for all of the historians that comply with.
That’s principally my function. To truly develop or pressure the self-discipline to rethink a few of these very canonical points. Whereas recognising that different students or different theorists or different intellectuals have come at this query from completely different angles.
The work of individuals like Stuart Corridor and CLR James has been actually influential for me as a historian. One final reference is Meena Alexander, a poet whose poetry is deeply historic. Private, but additionally deeply engages with the concept of us as decolonised people.
Simply drawing upon this wealth of nice data with a purpose to inform how I do historical past. That’s been my considering throughout the field that I’m put in.
On the finish the guide you deal with the post-colonised historians, particularly these grappling with the majoritarian tasks in India and Pakistan, saying it’s “our collective duty to talk towards the confirms of prejudice.” Do you see the broader apply of subcontinental historical past selecting this up? I do know you simply talked about just a few completely different names, however I’m curious why your remaining phrases within the guide have been such a name to motion.
Many forms of minorities – Ahmadis, Shias, Dalits, Muslims – are paying a really excessive worth for being minorities within the majoritarian politics [of the subcontinent]. I feel insofar as I’ve something to say or something to contribute, what I wish to take into consideration with others is how these majoritarian politics are continuously affirming a specific thought of the previous. And that affirmation of majoritarian politics, they’ll declare it way back to they need it to go. And it’s a pure mind-set.
And my hope is that we see two issues. One, there is no such thing as a such inviolable thought of the previous that we’re declaring. And second that our historical past can also be the historical past of resistances, primarily however not solely to the colonial challenge. And that once we take a look at these different Hindustani historians, which is what I spend time on on this guide, we see all these Hindustani historians throughout the colonial interval and throughout the nationalist interval, writing and talking about and towards majoritarianism.
We have now forgotten that historical past of resistance, that historical past of articulating different concepts. I feel it is rather essential for us to reclaim that historical past, to re-engage with them.
They’re all as flawed as we’re. No one has one reply. However all of us collectively do and may current different methods of fascinated by the previous.
One of many issues that I did whereas I used to be penning this guide, I used to be seeing loads of voices of protest in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
I’m considering of Hussain Haidary’s “Fundamental Hindustani Musalman Hoon”. And equally in Pakistan they have been seeing a really heartwarming expression of solidarity with the Pashtoon college students and Baloch college students. And simply taking a look at these actions, in Bangladesh as properly, round employee solidarity.
Eager about how we are able to, as historians, as a result of, that’s my battle, how we as historians can uplift their voices, uplift their theories such that we’re in a position to see the importance of those claims. And so they seem to us each as related and essential for now, but additionally related and essential in an extended historical past of anti-majoritarian politics.
I feel that’s the place I see my work contributing in no matter small method.
The entire of the guide is about misconceptions, so this query is a bit more durable, however I’d nonetheless wish to ask: What’s the one false impression that you end up having to appropriate on a regular basis?
I feel it’s one factor that I’ve made part of each books, which is this concept of Muslim presence within the subcontinent being perceived as [that of] outsiders.
In each India and in Pakistan. In India, due to the Hindutva [project]. In Pakistan, they are saying, we’re descended from Arabs, and don’t have anything to do with the subcontinent.
So this concept of outsiderness, each in Pakistan and India. How does it work? You see disciplinary scholarship, research which might be wedded to this analytical framework.
The factor I discover essentially the most is how colonial classes of distinction and a nationwide emphasis on distinction will not be questioned. We don’t put it in entrance and say this doesn’t make sense.
What different analysis would you wish to see on this topic?
I may speak about my colleagues whose work will not be immediately linked to what I’m doing, however I’m considering of Audrey Truschke or Abhishek Kaicker or Dipti Khera, these are all people who find themselves doing essential work on the pre-colonial interval.
They offer significance to broadening our understanding of the pre-colonial as an area of variety and inclusivity. And I feel I wish to see way more of this.
The difficulty with the fashionable interval is that fashionable historiography must not be so bored by the colonial interval. [There is this] concept that the subaltern research mentioned what they needed to say and there’s nothing new there and now everybody ought to transfer on, to the Partition, or one thing else.
I feel there may be much more that must be achieved on re-thinking the colonial interval. Possibly alongside among the strains on which I, as an outsider to the colonial interval, have some engagement in my guide with colonial people whom I name “soldier-scribes”. That’s what I’d like to see – additional dismantling of the fascinated by the colonial interval.
What three suggestions would you have got for these desirous about studying additional?
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