Asif surveys the damage inflicted on the Indian subcontinent
by British colonial historiography, with its ideas of immutable religious divisions.
Must read!
-- Amitav Ghosh
[A]
remarkable book…Asif’s analysis and conclusions are powerful and poignant. His book
also raises certain questions and challenges. Some of these actually are products of
the real strength of the book which is his detailed reading and interpretation of
Firishta’s Tarikh.
-- Rudrangshu Mukherjee The
Wire
Dazzlingly erudite…An intellectual tour de
force…Exceptionally stimulating…with its meticulous piecing together of the jigsaw
that reveals an entire conceptual universe, complete with its own geography,
peoples, history, and archives.
-- Vivek Menezes Mint
Lounge
By examining Firishta’s understanding of the
history of Hindustan, and how the colonial historians re-ordered his work to fit
entirely different narratives, [Asif] argues for a re-examining of our understanding
of the pre-colonial past and a need for others in his field to acknowledge the
influence of colonial knowledge on the practice of writing history.
--
Rohan Venkataramakrishnan Scroll
An ambitious
endeavor to trace the genealogy of the concept of Hindustan and to embark on this
quest with a decolonial framework of the philosophy of history…An indispensable work
in the field of global intellectual history.
-- Sabeena Shaikh
Arc
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…Asif’s focus is Indian history but it is, at the same time, a
lens to look at questions far bigger.
-- Soni Wadhwa Asian Review of
Books
A tremendous contribution to how we understand
an influential premodern Indian historian, Firishta, and the colonial legacy’s
implications for how we encounter the past…This is not only a book that you must
read, but also one that you must chew over and debate.
-- Audrey Truschke
Current History
Through his archaeology of
colonialism’s discourses on the Indic past, Asif provokes us to contemplate what
fundamentally rethinking our periodization and emplotment of Indian history might
look like…A compelling contribution.
-- Elaine M. Fisher Journal of the
American Academy of Religion
Remarkable…Asif
uncovers how the production of India as a modern nationalist spatial category
effaces the Hindustan that appears in Persian and Arabic sources, which in turn were
misappropriated to serve European interests and still are largely ignored by Hindu
nationalists in the story of Hindustan.
-- Patrick J. D'Silva International
Journal of Hindu Studies
In this remarkable and
pathbreaking book, Manan Ahmed Asif peels back layer after layer of the colonial
histories of Hindustan. The result is a radical rethink of colonial historiography
and a compelling argument for the reassessment of the historical traditions of
Hindustan.
-- Mahmood Mamdani, author of Neither Settler nor
Native
The Loss of
Hindustan takes us far beyond critiques of majoritarian nationalisms
buttressed by colonial epistemology and reintroduces us to alternative histories of
India that once circulated globally. Manan Ahmed Asif has given us nothing short of
a master class in the ethics of history writing, illuminating the path to a South
Asian future free of intercommunal prejudice and the oppression of
minorities.
-- Cemil Aydin, author of The Idea of the Muslim
World
A sharp, gripping book. Asif
eloquently revitalizes Firishta’s Hindustan while also uncovering the colonial
epistemologies that sought to efface it. The Loss of Hindustan is
at once a reflection on a place imagined, remembered, and forgotten and a powerful
affirmation of the historian’s task in our present world.
-- Supriya
Gandhi, author of The Emperor Who Never
Was
How has the great Indo-Islamic
tradition of history-writing been used and misused, bowdlerized or simply effaced,
in more recent times? Manan Ahmed Asif delves deep into this question by focusing on
the legacy of the important Deccani historian Muhammad Qasim Firishta, a
contemporary of Akbar and Jahangir. This is a significant contribution to
intellectual history, as well as to the long-term political and cultural history of
South Asia.
-- Sanjay Subrahmanyam, author of Europe’s
India
