Marxist historiography had the great virtue of focusing on economic motivations as explaining historical developments. This tended to diminish the role of wounded racial pride or chauvinistic sentiments in the writing or reception of history. However, eighteenth century Anglo-Saxon historiography- though bitterly partisan- was already 'utilitarian' in that it highlighted commercial considerations without wholly eliding sectarian and other motivations. Most importantly, for Indians, English language intellectuals made a clear distinction between settler colonies and territories which had come under British paramountcy as a result of the vagaries of oceanic commerce or, later on, the 'scramble' for raw materials. This in turn meant that opposition to British rule was based on an economic argument- the 'drain' theory- which in turn ultimately depended on the terms of trade for primary products and the Bhagwati's 'immiserizing growth' thesis. Latin American thinkers like Prebisch (under whom Manmohan worked) influenced India though it does not appear that anybody followed up on Chichilnisky's pioneering work a little later on. The big problem was that high value adding services got off shored because of political agent principal hazard. Capital flight, by itself, would depress the terms of trade. But, as Mahatma Gandhi noted, his own 'bania' class had participated in capital flight away from native princes and towards the British Presidencies back in the eighteenth century itself!
Within India, in the Nineteenth century, a class of intellectuals- statisticians, lawyers, officials, entrepreneurs- developed a detailed economic critique of the administration to which British civil servants- like A.O Hulme, founder of the Indian National Congress- also contributed. Dadhabhai Naorojee, born in the 1820's to a poor family, is the towering figure in the development of a radical type of political economy which had a 'Listian' horizon. However, it is notable that by 1904, Naorojee was attending the Second International alongside Rosa Luxembourg and Plekhanov. The future seemed certain to belong to the Left and, under Nehru's leadership, India did indeed become a secular, socialistic, state- albeit one with Liberal laws and a high tolerance for dissent.
Sadly, Socialist economic policies did not work out well in practice. There was a division of labor, whereby Left-wing ideologues dreamed away their lives in the Ivory towers of Academia, while deals were done and vote-banks were mobilized in a cynical manner.
It may be that in India- as well as certain western University departments- Marxist historiography became complacent and lazy. The 'subaltern' turn was vitiated by a verbose Hegelianism and self-referential elitism. Still, India needs good socio-economic historians who take an objective approach and who can point a way for different communities to work together to improve outcomes.
Pakistan has produced some excellent novelists in the English language- Rushdie is only one such- as well as some far sighted Left wing economists like Anwar Shaikh. However- for reasons which are perfectly understandable- its historians are handicapped in writing about India.
A case in point is Manan Asif Ahmed who has a paper titled-
WHAT IS A POSTCOLONIZED HISTORY? SEEING INDIA THROUGH MEXICO . READING ACROSS FIRISHTA AND CHIMALPAHIN
This seems rather strange. Chimalpahin was part of a bilingual Spanish-Nahuatl aristocracy. Firishta was an Iranian soldier / scholar who served an Indian king but whose career progression stalled because he was of the wrong Islamic sect. The former was part and parcel of a colonial society in which some indigenous people were on a par with the Spanish nobility while two specific ethnic groups were given hidalgo status like the Basque people in Spain. Chimapalhin was an inspiration to the mixed Mexican culture which shook off Spanish Imperialism in the early Nineteenth century and then took a more Leftward direction than its Northern neighbor in the inter-war period. Firishta, by contrast, was an Iranian soldier of fortune in India who had no inkling that Europeans would establish their rule over the country where he resided.
In this essay, I reflect on the position of a postcolonized historian
which is what Chimalpahin was, but not Firishta.
traversing space and time, thinking and linking to histories of European arrivals to Mexico and India. The essay is concerned with early seventeenth-century histories by Chimalpahin and Firishta, who documented their worlds before and after the arrival of Europeans.
But Firishta had no reason to suspect that the Europeans would come to rule the sub-continent.
I argue for a transregional decolonial approach to thinking about historical violence and the formation of disciplinary histories.
This is an argument for nonsense.
How does one write about that frisson of recognition historians from one previous colony feel when they encounter another postcolony for the first time?
That frisson is delusive if it fails to recognize that Mexico is nothing like India. There is no mestizaje in India nor did European forms of religion prevail in the subcontinent.
Is the frisson itself an imprint of coloniality?
It is an imprint of foolishness. India simply wasn't a 'settler colony'.
Does the recognition come from knowing and living in the planned permanence of colonial architecture—whether they are the French and British constructions of Zamalek in Cairo or the cantonments of Lahore?
Lahore, like Cairo, is an Islamic city. But Mexico City is not.
Or is it even more granular, such as in the happenstance movement of the bungalow, a colonial architectural style that is now a signature construction from Calcutta to Aden, Singapore, and California?
Some buildings have only one storey. So what?
Yet again, it may be that the materiality that produces this instance of recognition lies in the very making of postcolonized bodies themselves:
postcolonized bodies are made when daddy puts pee pee in mummy's chee chee place. This has nothing to do with frissons of recognition.
in the smells of food cooked with spices that traveled this way and that;
not to mention farts that travel this way and that
in the infrastructure of colonizing language as the medium of communication;
Does a language have an infrastructure? Is that what the word 'grammar' means?
in the streams of labor that flow from the erstwhile colonies to the metropole;
but they also flow from places which were never colonies- e.g. Nepal.
in the globalized affect of academia
that affect is craziness
and the itinerant theories that radiate from one discipline to another.
like farts.
I felt all of it viscerally during my first visit to Cairo, my first time in Mexico City, and my first glimpse of Kampala:
why not his first glimpse of New York City? After all, the place was once a British colony.
the familiarity of a distant relative’s face when you meet them for the first time.
Cairo is Islamic and thus related to Lahore. But Mexico City is not.
I took the opportunity to live in Mexico City with the aim of finding time and space to read an early seventeenth-century Persian history of “Hindustan” (a name for what was later colonized as British India and, after 1947, partitioned as India and Pakistan).
Mexicans are very lazy. They are having siesta all the time. Thus, Manan relocated there to read some book about a country which his people wanted to separate from- probably because Hindus kept farting at them.
As I was making my way through the four-volume critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Firishta, I was also learning about another early seventeenth-century history of conquest, one that was written by the Nahua historian Chimalpahin.
But Firishta wasn't writing about a conquest. Muslims had been ruling the roost for centuries.
My own experiences of a frisson—having been born and raised in the postcolony of Pakistan—intersected with that frisson stimulated by reading two histories of colonial arrivals and conquests
so, Manan admits that the Muslims were a colonial power who arrived and conquered India as they had arrived and conquered Spain. But the indigenous people were able to reverse that outcome. It remains to be seen whether India- or at least portions of it- will become more like Pakistan in that ethnic cleansing of the minority religion occurs- or whether economic arguments and a sense of fair play will prevail. I think the latter outcome is more likely. The sub-continent faces an existential threat from climate change. Floods and landslides don't stop to ask your religion before obliterating you.
that were written nearly simultaneously by historians of two different disappearing worlds.
Iran hasn't disappeared. Islamic rule in India has disappeared but Pakistan is plenty Islamic.
Tārīkh-i Firishta, which Muḥammad Qāsim Firishta (who was born sometime in the 1570s) wrote in the first decades of the seventeenth century while he was at the court of Ibrāhīm ʿĀdil Shah II in the Deccan, was a key text used by Europeans to construct a violent template of Hindustani history.
Guys who win battles and who get rich don't need 'templates'. It was obvious that India- like other countries- had wars and victorious conquerors.
Tārīkh-i Firishta is the first comprehensive history of Hindustan addressing a complete temporal and geographic sense of the subcontinent.
The first Muslim historian of India is generally thought to be Hasan Nizami in the early thirteenth century. It is likely that there were earlier Jain works as well as regional histories- e.g. that of Kalhana.
At least two recensions exist—one from 1608 and another from 1614, though there are dated events in the manuscripts that occurred as late as 1623–24. Firishta labeled his history Gulshan-i Ibrāhīmī (The garden of Ibrahim) and Naurasnama (The book of the newest flavor), which were both references to his patron and employer, Ibrāhīm ʿĀdil Shah II. In his conclusion, he refers to his book as Tārīkh-i Firishta o Shahnāma (Firishta’s history and book of kings)—a gesture to the classic of Persian literary tradition, Firdawsi’s eleventh-century Shahnāma. In other words, Firishta’s history is deeply embedded in his political present and his literary and historiographic past.
Like Nizami, he was paid to do a job of no very great importance.
The work comprises over a thousand folio pages—a recent critical edition is in four volumes. Tārīkh-i Firishta has a long preface, which is followed by twelve chapters. Eleven chapters are histories of rulers in different places across Hindustan—Lahore, Delhi, Deccan, Gujarat, Malwa, Khandesh, Bengal, Multan, Sindh, Kashmir, and Malabar; the last chapter focuses on the Sufis and religious scholars of Hindustan.
This testifies to the circulation of manuscript amongst the clerisy who, however, were fonder of flights of fancy than analysis or the assemblage of facts.
Firishta, writing while the Portuguese, Dutch, and English settlements had appeared in Surat and Calicut, concluded his work by summarizing all of the qualities that make Hindustan a Heavenlike place and better than any other inhabited land in the world. Did he insist on characterizing Hindustan in this way because he sensed that his world was materially threatened by the Europeans?
No. He would have been considered mad had he done so.
Firishta’s contemporary, Chimalpahin (b. 1579), wrote a century after the conquest of Mexico; Chimalpahin was reconstructing a world that was already lost. What would Chimalpahin have said to Firishta,
The Europeans are going to win. Convert to Christianity. But Chimalpahin would have been wrong. The Indian climate forbade Europeans settling there in any great number.
and how would Firishta have responded to Chimalpahin’s work?
He would have considered it the ravings of an infidel.
The linking of Latin America and South Asia is generally done within the realm of postcolonial theory
i.e. stupid nonsense
or the rubrics of migration,
dot Indians are actually feather Indians.
economic development,
i.e. national bankruptcy
or third-world politics;
whining about Whitey
this is not what drives my effort here. My essay also is not an exercise in so-called connected histories, which, though valuable, posit agentive Europeans learning about the Orient.
It is a fact that some Europeans learnt a lot about the Orient. Why not admit this to be true?
These reflections also aren’t meant to be part of a “comparative” project,
because comparative studies can be useful and this fellow is useless
for I am cognizant of the extractive and exclusionary history of comparison that underlies the philological and ethnological projects of the nineteenth century.
Nineteenth century Europeans invented the invidious distinction between men and women. That's why I don't have a vagina of my own.
I am certainly not excavating any causal links or lineages of descent.
Come to think of it, there is an Indian origin Mexican saint- Catarina de San Juan
Rather, this project developed when I began to think about the histories that create frissons and the historians within whose bodies that shock of recognition is felt.
Very true! I recall reading a biography of the great Mexican mouse- Speedy Gonzales. Suddenly I felt a frisson and a shock of recognition! I too wear a yellow sombrero and am chased by a gringo pussygato.
There is, certainly, resonance in the histories that I felt within myself when reading them, but not as an artifact in history.
Because Manan's yellow sombrero was eaten by el gringo pussygato- right?
This provides some difficulties in conceptualizing my reading across archives.
Your reading across archives was stooopid. Conceptualize that you cretin.
After all, the self of the historian, especially the one writing an intellectual history, is meant to remain outside of felt experience,
whereas Manan was probably feeling himself up as he wrote this.
otherwise the historian’s work would not constitute social science (this is the discipline of the contemporary academy to which history most often claims membership).
coz claiming to be an alchemist provokes laughter- right?
The felt experience has to be mitigated by disciplinary gatekeeping—
don't let people into the library if they are likely to spend all their time feeling themselves up.
pushing it into other genres of writing outside of history proper.
e.g. porn featuring some Nahuatl dude getting gay with an Iranian.
Yet in taking the frisson of recognition that I felt while in Mexico City and extending it to link Firishta and Chimalpahin, I deploy Aimé Césaire’s notion that “poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.”
Which is cool if you are of African heritage and can claim to possess 'Negritude'. Sadly, a small todger disqualifies you from this type of poetic license.
I also take heed of the call for alternative epistemology that Patricia Hill Collins articulated as a challenge to “certified knowledge.”
Which is cool if you are African American and female and can point to a history of overcoming discrimination.
In the summer of 2017, I was wandering at the Monte Albán archeological site and looking up sources about the life of Alfonso Caso and the Mexican project of recovering material memories of its precolonial past.
which is the same as everybody else's project of recovering and preserving antiquities.
I was specifically interested in figuring out how European colonists had used violence as a mechanism through which to understand the region’s precolonial polities.
Did they beat people till they told them about past political events? No. Thus, violence was not the mechanism that was used.
I had only recently begun to read scholarship on Aztec and Mayan pasts and to recognize the ways in which some of the primary sources of information were themselves universal histories that were written around the same time as the colonial project.
They couldn't be 'universal histories' because the indigenous people knew little of the Old World.
While walking around Monte Álban, I found ample material evidence for how dynastic rule was upended and reestablished.
The place was abandoned circa 750 AD.
This material evidence contrasted the ways in which colonial historiography itself treated the question of violence.
No it didn't. Material evidence at Monte Alban can only tell us about the ancient Zapotecs. We know how colonial historiography treated the question of violence. Essentially, it celebrated it if the Whites won and the natives ended up dead or enslaved.
A rather pertinent example of this colonial historiography is Alexander von Humboldt’s
a great explorer
1811 Essai politique sur la royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, in which Humboldt deployed Spanish conquest accounts, such as those by Hernán Cortés that argued for a “new” continent cleared of the Aztec “barbarity,” in order to discuss nineteenth-century “Indian barbarity.”
Humboldt believed that 'all are alike designed for freedom'. There are no inferior races.
The process of making my way through Firishta’s lengthy, rich text, with its innumerable references to previous and current histories, epics, and stories, was slow going. At that time, I was mainly concerned with thinking about violence as depicted in colonial historiography. Temple destruction and the annihilation of enemy soldiers as well as of civilian populations have been major historiographic concerns for South Asian historians. This was largely due to the valence and credibility given by colonial historians to precolonial Persian histories and their often-incredulous claims about the wide-scale violence that helped facilitate the conquest of various parts of Hindustan.
What about the wide-scale violence the Pakistani army visited on East Bengal not so long ago? Any incredulity re. Islamic ethnic cleansing was laid to rest by the massacre of the Armenians over a century ago. The late nineteenth century may have had 'Whiggish' illusions- at least where Pax Britannica prevailed- but the Great War put an end to such day-dreams.
The British colonial state masked its own generative violence
Nonsense! The Brits celebrated their victories though people like Warren Hastings and Disraeli admitted that India hadn't really been conquered.
in thick descriptions of Muslim outsiders and invaders, collecting and excerpting snippets of Persian histories that spoke of “towers of skulls” and “rivers of blood.”
Sadly, the Twentieth Century provided plenty of such incidents.
With the help of this textual corpus, the British colonial argument was streamlined as follows: whereas the subcontinent had suffered under hundreds of years of Muslim despotism,
this was also the Hindu argument. The bigger question was why Hindus were so shit at fighting. The answer, more often than not, was that everybody hated their brother or cousin more than they hated the invader.
which was enacted through an originary violence of conquest
War involves violence. Conquest involves warfare. How shocking!
and maintained through deviant forms of power,
sodomy?
this state of affairs was being slowly reversed by the liberal light of British colonial rule.
Brits were discouraging Indians from mounting each other incessantly.
Colonial historians used Persian histories to make this specific case for the past and the present of British India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
But plenty of Indians- like Raja Ram Mohan Roy or Dwarkanath Tagore would have happily made the case for them. My impression is that Muslims were more patriotic in this respect though, no doubt, like Ghalib's uncle- or indeed the Emperor- they preferred the security of a British pension.
The two central theoreticians of this narrative template were James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, both of whom were employed by the British East India Company.
In other words, their pen was bought and paid for. Still, there already had been British writers who did well by publishing histories of India in the eighteenth century. Henry Beveridge published a comprehensive history of the British period in India up to the Mutiny in 1863 which displaced the Mills' earlier work. The future lay with the 'Orientalists', not the Calcutta 'Occidentalists'. Lahore University, it must be said, was a flourishing ornament to that approach.
Although the distortion of histories by British orientalists was known and contested even by early twentieth-century Hindustani historians,
Indian historians- like Savarkar.
the colonial paradigm remains calcified in contemporary politics in India.
Nonsense! Indians firmly believe that Viceroy used to surreptitiously enter the dwellings of their ancestors and extract the vital essence of the natives through egregious acts of fellatio and cunnilingus.
While in spaces like Monte Albán, the colonial state set about excavating proof of indigenous violence to buttress its so-called civilizing project;
One explorer, Guillermo Dupaix, was indeed commissioned by the Spanish to conduct archaeological expeditions. All subsequent work was done after Mexico had become independent. Leopoldo Batres, Aflonso Caso, Eulalia Guzman and others were passionate patriots who aimed to unify Mexico's ancient and modern heritage so as to create a sense of pride and social cohesiveness in an increasingly Left wing, anti clerical, polity. It is disingenuous to depict them as representing a 'colonial' state.
this archeological impetus to discover large-scale sites with human remains was completely absent from the subcontinental context.
Nonsense! Alexander Cunningham, a protege of Prinsep who deciphered Brahmi, had been lobbying for the creation of a dedicated Archaeological department from the eighteen forties. In 1861, the Archaeological Survey of India was created with Cunningham at its head. An annual journal was published from 1871 onward. This work was particularly important for an appreciation of the Buddhist contribution to Indian civilization.
From its beginnings in the 1830s,
The Asiatic Society was founded in 1784. However the first Indian members were only elected from 1829 onward.
the British Archeological Survey remained focused on uncovering “Ancient India”—
because an archaeologist who concentrates on uncovering contemporary India would be laughed at.
albeit almost always as a side effect of colonial railway or dam-building projects.
or a guy conducting a survey like T.S Burt who alerted Cunningham to the Khajuraho complex in the 1830s.
In the many excavations, however, neither mass graves nor burial sites with civilians, or even war casualties, have ever been discovered in South Asia.
Indians tend to cremate their dead. I suppose what Manan is getting at is that the Indians didn't go in for human sacrifice on an industrial scale.
This stands in contrast to the archeological projects carried out in Mexico.
Because the Aztecs were into human sacrifice big time.
Still, it was not as if violence was treated differently in the two contexts, for the European colonists used the Aztec sacrifices and collective burial sites in many of the same ways as the British used the Persian histories in the subcontinent.
I suppose Manan means that the Brits told the Hindus that the Muslims kept massacring them. But the Hindus were already aware of this. Many of them could read Persian.
As far as the British colonial administration was concerned, the Persian histories were the graveyards for Hindus who had suffered violent deaths.
Pakistan was certainly the graveyard for Hindus. Why read 'Persian histories' when there is plenty of TV coverage of Islamic violence against the infidel?
The Persian histories, specifically that of Firishta, were thus mined for their depictions of battles and their enumerations of killings.
But Muslim poets like Iqbal spent a lot of time praising 'Mard-e-Momin' like Timur and Nadir Shah. Even Changez (Genghis) was a popular Muslim name though the Mongol conqueror wasn't a Muslim.
For the British, the texts operated as sites that marked Muslim despotism and violence and could only be read or used to dig up and display the vagaries of Muslim despots.
Hindus and Sikhs didn't need the Brits to tell them about what they had suffered under Islamic tyrants. On the other hand, there were plenty of crazy and murderous Hindu kings. Indeed, the martial people of Coorg preferred to kick out their King and come under British rule so as to rise up and prosper.
Although this was an imperial historiographic project, it functioned very much akin to the archeological efforts in Mexico.
No. Mexican nationalism triumphed in 1821. Napoleon III tried to impose a European Emperor on that country. The poor fellow was shot.
Another resonance came from the ways in which Chimalpahin’s histories were treated as simple chronological accounts that could be mined for facts even as the European colonizers elided the social worlds depicted in these texts.
This is misleading. Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci was an important eighteenth century antiquary and ethnographer of Mexico. But he had been sent out there by a lady descended from Moctezuma to collect her pension. Chimalpahin's work had fueled Mexican patriotism and nationalism. It must be said that Franciscan missionaries like Sahagun laid the foundation for a composite Christianity in which indigenous artistic and scholarly traditions were mingled with Catholicism. By contrast, the British did not want to evangelize India.
The colonial soldier-scribes of the British East India Company in Calcutta were also keen to read the Persian histories from Hindustan as mere chronologies.
Because they had got into their heads that History books should feature dates. Briggs had given a full translation of Firishta in 1829 which included notes of a topical nature re. the ceded districts. There had been a great improvement in the availability of accurate maps, dictionaries and books of Persian grammar and thus Briggs's account is more lucid. However, as Macaulay would note, there was now an English speaking Indian class. Hindus like Roy and Tagore were lobbying Westminster. There was no need to brainwash the Hindus into hating Muslims because they did so already. As for 'Oriental despotism'- that ghastly reality had already caused a flight of capital and talent to the Presidency cities. There was no need for historians to write long books when there were Newspapers which made the same point more succinctly.
In 1863, for instance, William Nassau Lees published a study of Juzjani’s history, Tabaqāt-i Nāsiri (ca. 1260), that characterized it as an annals;
Tabaqat present material specific to a certain century. Annals is the correct translation.
Lees included the explicit proviso that such histories of Hindustan, written in Persian by Muslim authors, were of little use except for their capacity to offer a chronology of the subcontinent’s history.
This was also Sir Syed Ahmed's own view. The flowery nonsense in Persian histories had zero value. Come to think of it Ghalib was writing a history of the Mughals.
Lees’s dismissal of Persian histories was reinforced by Henry Miers Elliot’s The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, which was published in 1867–77. Elliot was adamant that a history such as Firishta’s was worth reading only in order to excavate details about past acts of violence, numbers of deceased, and destroyed temples. Hence, the same impulse motivated both sets of colonial historiographies:
No. The Spanish were settling in Mexico and wished to remain the ruling class. The Brits were not settling in India. They were there to make money. Wealthy Indians- like Tagore- spent money to lobby the Brits to increase their involvement in India because the Brits could keep the Muslims in check and were less rapacious than the Marathas.
colonial violence was distorted and displaced onto a native past.
This is revisionism pure and simple. A crazy Nazi lady- Savitri Devi- who toured post war Germany wrote as though Hitler & Co were sweet little lambs. The Allies pretended they had been genocidal monsters so as to excuse their own fire-bombing of Dresden etc.
The plain fact is that South Asia has recent evidence of Islamic ethnic cleansing (and the reverse, though the Hindus like to keep quiet about this). Thus, it is pointless to pretend- as Savarkar initially did- that Hindus and Muslims had spent all their time kissing and cuddling till nasty Britishers banned the practice and set up the Indian National Congress so as to drive a wedge between faith communities.
In the case of Mexico, colonial forces sought evidence of indigenous populations’ supposed barbarity by excavating mass graves;
In Mexico, contemporary archaeologists are constantly turning up mass graves of victims who were ritually beheaded. This isn't happening in India.
in the case of Hindustan, colonial forces figuratively excavated Persian histories in search of past acts of violence.
No. Some guys who wanted to make a bit of money, or to gain a bit of reputation, by translating an Indian book, just went ahead and translated it and, if they found a publisher, laughed all the way to the bank.
Experiencing Chimalpahin’s account through recent scholarship on it opened my eyes to rethinking Firishta’s work as a social history that contained a different way to write about Hindustan.
Manan has found a different way to write about Hindustan- viz. pretend Hindus don't exist. He mentions in a footnote that the Chief Minister of UP doesn't like the Mughals. The reason for this is that the dude is Hindu. Hindus don't like Mughals. Get over it.
From those beginnings, I recognized that Firishta was very explicit in making his case for writing a new type of history.
The poor fellow belonged to the wrong sect. He was given a writing job with explicit instructions to pay more attention to the Deccan. He did what he was paid to do.
He grounded his history in a geography
as opposed to what- chemistry?
comprised of intellectuals, resting on the works of seven centuries of historians and poets, including Firdawsi (d. 1025), ʿUnsuri (d. 1041), al-Bīrūni (ca. 1051), Abu’l Fazl (ca. 1600), and many others.
Firishta, as a literary cove, grounded his literary work in what was already the literary canon of his class.
Far from providing a year-by-year account that could be mined for historical facts, Firishta presented a world with elite political figures, nobility, rajas, and sultans as well as merchants, travelers, peasants, and traders milling about in city streets and agrarian fields.
Nonsense! There were no rajas and sultans milling around in the fields causing a nuisance to cows and cultivators.
For example, in his history of Gujarat, Firishta introduces to the reader a whole host of characters: a rebellious landed elite, a cabal of commanders and courtiers, thirty thousand rebel troops, a transgender palace guard, the Nizam Shahi Sultan, the Raja of Malwa, the Raja of Junagarh, a mediator, a butcher, an unjust governor, the Prophet (in a dream), Rajput bandits, a drunk elephant, groups of bandits and highway robbers, a community of animist pirates, four thousand Baluchi bandits, a scholar from Samarkand and his family, a Raja of an island who attacked the scholar from Samarkand, the governor of Khambat, the rebellious elite of Ahmadadbad, the people of Malabar, the Rajput Raja of Baroda, a group of merchants who attacked the Raja of Abu, a rebel commander of the Bahmani who took control of ports in Gujarat, a rebel commander of Gujarat who fled to Malwa, a rebel commander of Gujarat who went to Khandesh, rebellious commanders in Ahmadabad, Portuguese ships and troops at Chaul, a rebel commander in Thanesar, a rebel commander in Burhanpur, the Sultan of Delhi, a Sufi saint in Patan, and an ambassadorial mission from the Shah of Iran.
What is missing from this list? The Brits who eventually took over Gujarat. What is present in Chimalpahin? Spaniards who had taken over Mexico. Why on earth is Manan comparing Firishta with a Mexican dude whose grandfather converted to Christianity?
For Firishta, writing a history of Hindustan meant writing a history of the many people who inhabited Hindustan.
Modi is writing a new chapter in the history of Gujarat. It has little room for Firishta. It appears the majority of the 'many people' who inhabited that State had no great liking for Muslim rule. The question is why this is the case. My impression is that there is less anti-Muslim feeling in Rajasthan. What makes it worthwhile to answer this question is the fact that Modi appears likely to be re-elected in 2024. More worryingly, it is appears he may be the only viable candidate for the top job in that year. How have things come to such a pass? These are the questions historians need to answer. 'Colonial' historians who helped colonizers run things better deserved to get paid for their efforts. What use have our post-colonial historians been to us? This nutter is gassing on about some Mexican dude and some unrelated Iranian dude as if he has uncovered the secret of the Da Vinci code! But what is he actually saying? It's just the early Savarkar myth of Hindus-Muslim cuddling which was rudely interrupted by Queen Victoria who banned sodomy and then set up the Indian National Congress so as to divide the country.
It also meant documenting the many encroaching threats that were beginning to disrupt the lives of those people. And in his Tārīkh, he depicted no greater threat than what he described as the war-mongering farang (Europeans), who took territories and resources and fought among themselves in the Indian Ocean, all the while behaving cordially at the courts of the kings of Hindustan.
Aurangazeb did initially have some success in humbling the Europeans. However nobody thought that any European power could get the 'Diwani' of any important province or retain it by reason of superior administrative talent and fiscal solvency.
For Firishta, the Europeans adopted a facade in the courts of Hindustan by exhibiting deference to the king’s political power and trade relationships; such performances, he believed, hid the Europeans’ true intents.
Everybody hides their true intention at Court.
Firishta ended his comprehensive history of Hindustan where the Portuguese and English encounters began—in the western ghats of Malabar, where, he explained, sea trade had brought Jews and Christians to Hindustan eons before his own time. Firishta recounted the experiences of the Raja of Malabar, Samari, when he encounters a group of traders who, while returning from visiting Adam’s footprint in Sarandip, were shipwrecked in Kodungallur. Samari is intrigued by the message about equality that the traders relay. After they mention the Prophet’s miracle of splitting the moon, he asks his own court’s historians to check their records for any sightings of such an event. The historians verify the traders’ account, and Samari converts to Islam.
This is the origin story of the Moplahs.
Firishta detailed a few different accounts concerning whether Samari leaves Malabar to visit Mecca, but he concluded that the most important detail was that Muslims were allowed to build mosques, erect houses, and flourish in Malabar. The Jews and Christians were jealous of the Muslims, Firishta explained, but they remained silent because the Brahmin rulers supported the Muslims’ presence. Firishta bemoaned the arrival of the Portuguese, the wars that followed (in which the Deccan sultans were unable to come to the aid of the Malabari kings), and the creation of Portuguese enclaves along the coastlines. The ruler of Malabar repeatedly asked for help from Muslim rulers in Hindustan. After stating that his ancestral home was under attack, the king pleaded that what was most upsetting was that the farang were harming the Muslims; even though he was not a Muslim, he had always supported them. He claimed that he was too weak to resist the Portuguese without further aid, for the Portuguese had wealth and troops far exceeding his; the kings of Hindustan, and those of Muslim countries elsewhere, must come to his aid and repel the Europeans. Firishta explained that, by 1556 CE, the fear-inducing Europeans had taken the ports of Hormuz, Muscat, Sumatra, Malwa, Mangalore, Bengal, and beyond, extending all the way to the frontier of China. By 1610 CE, when he wrote the Tārīkh, the English and the Portuguese had settled in Surat, becoming inhabitants of Hindustan. Firishta feared that this was the end of Hindustan. Reading Firishta alongside his Latin American contemporaries, I was struck by the prescient nature of his comments about the Europeans. He saw them as unmoored from the lived histories of Hindustan’s peoples.
Hindus might say the same about Muslims. Pakistan has done a lot to expunge its Hindu past. One might say the Kalki Purana was 'prescient' about the intentions of Islamic and European invaders. If so, it isn't Manan's type of historiography which will affect the history of India. It is the type of history which Yogi Adityanath's Gorakhnath Math has preserved. Come to think of it, the Hindu Revolutionary movement gained great impetus from Sanyasis and other religious figures. Meanwhile, Persian has disappeared from India
He saw the Europeans as conquerors who were bent on ecological and social devastation.
Substitute 'Muslim' for 'European' and you have the credo of the Mahasabha. That should worry Manan.
He saw their Christianity as different from the Christianity that had existed in Hindustan before they arrived.
That was certainly the view of the Portuguese who introduced an Inquisition
Even as he recounted the history of Hindustan since 1498, could he have imagined what happened elsewhere in the world after 1492?
Yes. Gujarat had trade links with the Philippines and Mexico and so forth. Delhi was more insular.
Could Europe’s presence at the fringes of Firishta’s history offer a glimpse of a world that no longer existed?
No. Something which is present offers a glimpse only of what exists.
Firishta only mentioned the Europeans’ arrival (and the destruction that they brought with them) at the very end of his history—and briefly at that.
Anything which disrupted trade had an immediate impact on the royal exchequer and thus Firishta's chances of getting paid.
Alexander Dow, the British Army officer who “discovered” Firishta’s history in 1768, was content to read the first few chapters and interpret them as evidence of the supposedly foreign and despotic origins of Muslim rule in Hindustan.
Dow was a successful writer and dramatist. He published his own history of India up to the death of Aurangazeb. Muslim rule outside Arabia was always foreign. However, it was never despotic. Power was held by a feminist collective of disabled transgender Lesbians ably assisted by indigenous Shamans and practitioners of Wicca.
Firishta’s history was displaced and unmoored from the subcontinent when it was taken to Europe in excerpted translation.
Was it also sodomized during its voyage? Did it cry and cry and say 'please stop unmooring and displacing me from my beloved Hindustan! Also get your cock out of my bum?'
I suppose so.
Through its French and German renditions, it became a key text for the universal philosophy of history that Voltaire, Kant, and, later, Herder and Hegel argued into existence.
Only because it was sodomized so incessantly. Suppose Dow had kept his greasy cock away from Firshta's tome's ass hole, that book would have slapped Voltaire silly and made fun of Kant's puny genitals. Herder and Hegel would have bowed down to it and promised to give up universal philosophies of history so as to concentrate on masturbation.
Firishta was inserted into the section of Weltgeschichte labeled “India.”
Only because Dow had been inserting his greasy cock into Firishta's tome which totally 'unmoored' it- poor thing.
Thus implanted between China and the Persians, Firishta’s Hindustan—what had since been called India—also ended.
Firishta's Iran is now separated from India by Pakistan. Hopefully, the Ayatollahs are preventing any Persian books from being 'unmoored' and taken by ship to Yurop/Amrika. If history is any guide, such books may be viciously sodomized by Scottish savants. This will contribute to a 'universal philosophy of history'- which is totes uncool coz Whitey dun epistemically raped me- again!
Hegel evacuated historical thought from India.
India sought to evacuate its bowels on Hegel but the cunning fellow gave us the slip.
He only considered India in order to comment on its aesthetic theory and advancements.
It was a shithole.
The Muslims, deemed outsiders to India, did possess some rudimentary historical consciousness, but for Hegel, that thought was shaped by the Arabian desert.
as opposed to the Arabian ski slopes and alpine villages.
Thus, India lacked history
unless Hindus were kicking ass and taking names
and Muslims belonged to a specific geography:
unlike Christians who fly around the galaxy and make their nests on random asteroids
Firishta’s Hindustan would come to a historiographic end in the series of texts that followed Hegel’s.
Does this cunt's text 'follow Hegel's'? Is that why it is so shite? Anyway, it is good to know that Firishta's Hindustan has fucked the fuck off from India-that-is-Bharat's coral strand. Kids only study history so as to get clerical employment with the Government. Previously, we had to regurgitate encomiums to the Dynasty. Now, I suppose, our kids will have to memorize Puranas.
In reading Firishta’s text in Mexico, I wanted to reanimate his history.
Using necromancy? Cool.
I hoped to see the world that he saw, not the world that I know came to an end.
The same thing happens to me when I drink too much.
As a postcolonized historian,
i.e. an ignorant fool
I have long held that the precolonial episteme cannot be retrieved following the rupture of colonial thought.
Yet that is precisely what the Taliban have done. It is they who rule Afghanistan- where their only rival is the yet more Islamic Khorasan Caliphate. The Pakistani Taliban, too, seems to be making headway against the 'post-colonial' Army.
The postcolonized historian is shaped by the traumatized inheritance of colonial violence.
Plenty of Pakistanis were traumatized by the violence of Partition. But they worked hard and built up their country and did well for themselves in Scientific and technological fields. By contrast, there was little 'colonial violence'. It simply isn't true that India was a 'settler colony' where indigenous people were dispossessed and became second class citizens.
Yet I was surprised to find that thinking laterally from Latin America was a much more empowering framework for
telling stupid lies. By contrast, my own historiography is concerned solely with empowering Iyers to retake the Emerald Isle from which we were cruelly expelled by Maratha leprechauns like Taoiseach Varadkar.
thinking and saying something about the premodern subcontinent
viz. Hindustan had no Hindus. It was invented by a nice Iranian fairy named Firishta. Sadly, some Scottish soldier sodomized Firishta's tome which is how come Kant and Hegel invented universal history which is totes uncool.
than struggling through the dense colonial archive had ever been.
Just watch Bridgerton instead- or, if you are asli desi, watch Rajamouli's RRR.
Postcolonized historians of precolonial pasts are often accused of
being stupid fantasists
exhibiting nostalgia and attempting recuperation in their writings about the premodern.
Yet, this is what happened, and continues to happen, in 'India-that-is-Bharat'. Leftist historiography shat the bed. It now seems inevitable that Modi will get a third term. After that, it will be Yogi. India needs sensible economic historians who can offer a developmental narrative not rooted in ressentiment of invaders.
The historiography of South Asia has naturalized the colonial argument that violence shaped precolonial Hindustan and that Muslim difference is a fundamental analytic.
No. Actual history did so. Jinnah and Liaquat and Shurawardy weren't historians. They were lawyer-politicians who got Muslims to vote overwhelmingly for their 'two-nation' theory. Partition is an indisputable fact. Nobody wants to reverse it. Bangladesh and India may be perfectly friendly but Pakistan and India remain bitter enemies.
Reading across Firishta and Chimalpahin enabled me to develop a decolonial philosophy of history.
Which was like that of the early Savarkar- viz. Hindus and Muslims kept cuddling and kissing in the streets till Queen Victoria banned sodomy. Sad.
These works of history and their imbricated afterlives in European colonial thought revealed the importance of piecemeal disentangling of the colonial episteme in my own work.
Sadly, what is lacking in Manan's work is the British Raj episteme which focused on excellence in philology and a very detailed knowledge of castes and classes and economic motivations and arrangements. 'Minute particulars' matter. Gassing on about trauma and epistemic rape is a game for losers.
In writing The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India, I demonstrated the ways in which the ethics of history-writing that framed Firishta’s history offer us a way forward:
i.e. pretending there were no Hindus in Hindustan.
not toward an imagined or glorified past but toward a decolonial future.
What will Pakistan's future be? Some portions may be colonized by the Taliban. Other areas may be handed over to the Chinese in lieu of debt repayment. I'm kidding. Sooner or later, the Pakistanis will get their act together and the economy will take off so as to take advantage of Chinese infrastructure.
By using the decolonial methodology
which is only relevant to 'settler- colonialism' which India did not have
to think about Hindustan through Mexico—indeed, by reading across parallel and intersecting pathways—we can hear new and resonant echoes of history.
Very true! We can prove that Narendra Modi's real name is Nicholas Maugham. All these so called 'Hindus' are actually Scottish. When nobody is looking, they eat haggis. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.
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