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Colonial Episteme, Political Forgetting, and the Quest for Decolonising History
The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India by Manan Ahmed Asif, London: Harvard University Press, 2020; pp 321, ₹599.
History is haunted by the dread of erasure. This profound work of historical retrieval adds extraordinary depth to our understanding of the relationship between history and the sociopolitical consciousness in modern nation states in the Indian subcontinent. This relationship between the past and the present is premised
on the ethical responsibility of the historian in their pursuit of truth and the intrumentalisation of that narrative in the politics of statecraft. In his book, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India, historian Manan Ahmed Asif explores this fragile relationship by contextualising the reading of histories of native historians like Muhammad Qasim Firishta’s Tarikh-i-Firishta (The History by Firishta), a 17th-century comprehensive history of Hindustan, in the political and social undercurrents of modern South Asia that continue to grapple with questions of history, identity, and belonging.
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