History is commonly thought to be a subject about discovering the past in terms of exploring the origins and beginnings. Manan Ahmed Asif has previously written about resisting the need to look for beginnings and focusing on belonging.
In his recent book The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India, Asif continues his work on exposing origins as an approach to history, especially South Asian history, as a deeply flawed one. Asif argues that early British East India Company historians like Alexander Dow and John Briggs erased a political, cultural, and geographical marker called Hindustan in their translations of the works of Indian historians and simultaneously created a notion of India. He points out that the shift from Hindustan to India was not merely about naming (for India is known as Hindustan and Bharat too) or language (“India” is a European term, “Bharat” is Hindi, and “Hindustan” is, well, complicated). It was an exercise in projecting the second millennium of Indian history as one damaged by Muslim invaders. The likes of Dow read (actually misread) and translated Indian history written in Persian to dismiss them as works written by people who have no conception of history. Asif uses Firishta’s early 17th-century Tarikh as a case study to explain how these works entered European imagination as “distorted fragments” to make way for the British East India Company’s tampering with records of Indian history that would be read not just in Europe but would come to be internalized by the Indians as well.
While these arguments about history-writing seem obvious to readers as part of the British divide-and-rule project, the brilliance of Asif’s book rests in the way he makes readers think about the name “Hindustan” itself and the various connotations it holds. In one sense, it is seen as a Persian word (with the “stan” as reminiscent of several regions with Muslim majority); in another, it refers to a nation of Hindus. One can’t miss the irony here: a Persian word for an entity that in the majoritarian sense seeks to resist connections to all things Islamic, including the Persian language.

Asif’s focus is Indian history but it is, at the same time, a lens to look at questions far bigger:
What was the name of “America” before the settler colonials arrived? Can we imagine how to answer that question? Even when we can understand that “America” or “Australia” is an erasure of precolonial naming and being and we can understand that the indigenous peoples of the “Americas” were not “Indians,” we let these labels persist. We are thus content with the convention that while Pakistan came into being in 1947, “India” was something that stretches back to an “ancient” period. That is to say, “Early Pakistan” or “Early Bangladesh” seem incongruous, but “Early India” a seemingly unproblematic periodization. This is puzzling, since there is critical engagement with “South Asia” as a twentieth-century geopolitical toponym. What remains remarkably absent from such debates is the idea of Hindustan.
These questions unpack the names that South Asians and scholars working on South Asia take for granted. The Europeans referred to the region as “Hindustan”, the “local” name, to flaunt their knowledge of the region as well as the language in the maps that Europeans produced but gradually the name was translated and replaced as “India”. The Loss of Hindustan is an exercise in investigating how it came to be. Hindustan had to be made to disappear so that India, British India, could be invented.
Thanks to this scrutiny of names and naming, readers will find themselves thinking about other questions about history. Contrary to the widespread notion that Indians never wrote history or never recorded their past, Indians did produce historical works. These works, however, remain invisible because South Asians and historians working on South Asia do not treat them as sources.
Turning to Indian sources would help historians discover that India, as a postcolony, might be a product of European notion of nation (a lot has been written about nations as “imagined communities”) but there was indeed a Hindustan as can be understood from the way Hindustanis expressed themselves. For instance, a Persian inscription from 1325 found in a step well in Madhya Pradesh refers to Hindustan:
In the reign of king Ghiyathuddin wa-Dunya
the foundation of this auspicious edifice was laid
May such a king live as long as this world lasts
Because in his reign, the rights of none are lost
In Hindustan all are grateful for his justice
In Turkistan all are fearful of his supremacy.
The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India offers insights into the practice of translation, into history as a colonizing tool, into ways of recognizing historical narratives, into the practices of reading itself. Like Asif’s previous book on The Chachnama, this book too is anchored in his method of textual mining to open a different world view, to highlight prejudices, to teach better and smarter ways of reading without disorienting the reader. His work is a testimony to the fact that getting better at reading can make one not only a better historian but also a better human being. His originality lies in making a reader’s journey into a historical text a transformative experience: one notices meanings and spots connections that weren’t obvious earlier. That’s what makes him as much a writer as a historian.
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