The loss of Hindustan: the invention of India
Asif, Manan Ahmed
The loss of Hindustan: the invention of India - Cambridge Harvard University Press 2020 - ix, 321 p. Includes bibliographical references and index
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: The end of Hindustan
2. The question of Hindustan
3. An archive for Hindustan
4. The places in Hindustan
5. The peoples in Hindustan
6. A history for Hindustan
7. Afterword
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.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987906
9780674252745
Nationalism - India
Public opinion
Europeans - Attitudes
Historiography - India
954 / A8L6
The loss of Hindustan: the invention of India - Cambridge Harvard University Press 2020 - ix, 321 p. Includes bibliographical references and index
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: The end of Hindustan
2. The question of Hindustan
3. An archive for Hindustan
4. The places in Hindustan
5. The peoples in Hindustan
6. A history for Hindustan
7. Afterword
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.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987906
9780674252745
Nationalism - India
Public opinion
Europeans - Attitudes
Historiography - India
954 / A8L6