What happened to Hindustan?
The Muslims wanted a separate state- Pakistan- which is what they got in 1947. India-that is Bharat- rejected Jinnah's suggestion that it should style itself Hindustan. The fact is, though 'sthan' is Sanskritic and Rajasthan is a perfectly fine, countries whose name ends in 'stan' tend to be shit. If the Persians themselves call their country Iran, why get stuck with the name they gave neighboring countries?
The Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French who visited, settled in, and conquered the subcontinent since the 16th century used Estado da Índia, Nederlands Voor-Indië, British India, or Établissements français dans l’Inde to denote their colonial holdings.
Because that is the Latin word for the country which itself is derived from the Greek Indike.
Often their maps depicting these settlements labeled parts of the subcontinent as “Mogor” or “Mogul India” to refer to the major native polity of the Mughals. In these renderings, it was explained that the Mughals, who claimed to be the kings of all the kings in southern peninsular Asia from the 16th century down to the 19th century, were called Shahanshah-i Hindustan (emperors of Hindustan).
Nonsense! The style was 'Shahenshah-e-Sultanat Al-Hindiyyah'. Hindiyyah sounds just like India. Why is Manan so obsessed with the word 'Hindustan'? Is it coz he is still miffed that Nehru didn't listen to Jinnah's suggestion that India adopt as shitty a name as Pakistan? When East Bengal freed itself of the Pak Army, it chose to style itself 'Bangladesh'. Desh is Indic, not Persianate. Now Pakistan has fallen way behind both Bangladesh and India. Afghanistan may be worse off but that can be little consolation. Meanwhile, Kazakhastan continues to toy with the notion of getting rid of the 'stan' in its name so as not to be bracketed with basket case nations to their South.
Hence, until the late 18th century, Hindoostan or Indostan was regularly embossed in cartouches on colonial maps.
This is misleading. From the sixteenth century onwards European maps used the European word for India which was India. However, in the eighteenth century, there were some maps titled 'Indonstan' or something of that sort, but the detailed inscription accompanying the map would use the word 'India'. Why was this done? The answer is that there was some confusion between the West and the East Indies. Moreover, though Mughal power was in continuous decline, power was often exercised by successor states in the name of the Emperor. This was certainly the case with John Company.
The European travelogues, histories, philological works, operas, and plays that wanted to signal their authenticity or knowledge of “Oriental languages” would also use this same word, with its varied spellings, as the “local” name of the subcontinent.
For the reason I have named. As Europeans gained a clearer picture of India as opposed to Indonesia or the West Indies, the practice became otiose. Still, those who didn't like the English might have preferred to pretend that some Grand Moghul might suddenly awake from slumber and kick the redcoats out. Equally, the Brits- facing the Marathas- might want to assert their own position as 'Na'ibs' of the Moghul till, as in fact did happen quite quickly, they replaced the Marathas as the prop of the Peacock Throne.
The erasure of the precolonial idea of Hindustan
never occurred. Those who had such ideas kept them. Those who never had them could not have had them erased.
has meant that it is taken as a truism
only by this cretin
that there was no coherent concept of peninsular India before British domination.
What this cunt is saying is- 'Muslims completely forgot all their own great scholars and historians and geographers.' How is this possible? If Muslims didn't forget their Scripture and Jurisprudence and great literary traditions how could they mislay basic ideas of history and geography?
It is true that there are some young Arab students who have bought into the notion that Muslims in the sub-continent are as ignorant and stupid as monkeys. Yet, when I was a child in Iraq, the best selling Islamic book was written by an Indian savant. If Indian Muslims could write so well in Arabic, how could they have forgotten Islamic scholarship about their own country?
Yet, in the early 19th century, the word Hindustan
was objected to by Bengalis. They have their own language and tended to look down on the Bihari or those from further west.
begins to fade from the colonial archive.
Why? It is for the reason I have given. The Brits hadn't taken power, at the centre, from the Muslims. They had taken it from Hindu Marathas. The sub-continent no longer had any great Muslim general or Islamic military capacity. Marathas, Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pandeys, Jats, and other more 'subaltern' groupings had martial capacity. The school of Waliullah had failed, in 1857, to create a coalition between Ashraf and Ajlis Mussulman. Muslim Meos raided the lines of the Jihadis in Delhi. The Red-coat certainly inflicted atrocities on the defeated denizens of that City but so did the Sikhs. As for the caravan trains of those expelled- including the Nehrus who had been 'vakils' to John Company- they were preyed upon by Meos as well as all sorts of other 'subaltern' elements. It is often forgotten that 'criminal tribes' were notified on the basis of lobbying by the ancestors of Indian National Congress politicians.
The major histories of the subcontinent, written in the early parts of the 19th century, were now histories of “British India.”
Because Britain had emerged as the paramount power.
With the British East India Company (BEIC) ascendant, the Maratha or the Sikh polities did not invoke Hindustan in their political claims.
But the King of Nepal declared himself master of 'asal Hindustan'. (real India)
There was a brief last resurgence of Hindustan in 1857. The rebels and revolutionaries who opposed BEIC rule rallied to the flag of the Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. He was, once again, hailed as the Shahanshah-i Hindustan—clearly there remained an idea of Hindustan.
Technically, Bahadur Shah was the Emperor of India- Badshah-e-Hindiyyah. Still, Hindustan was a useful term at a time when there was still some confusion between the various sorts of niggers toiling away in the Indies.
After violently crushing the revolution, Queen Victoria took British India under her direct rule and assumed the title of Empress of India,
This cretin does not understand that Victoria reigned. She did not rule. The Crown in Parliament took over from John Company. Later, Disraeli got Victoria the title of Empress so that she would retain precedence over her daughter who had become Empress of the Germans. Her grandson, the future Kaiser, was not amused.
sending Bahadur Shah Zafar to die in exile in Burma.
His sons and grandson were shot. Sir Syed Ahmed pretended that Zafar was senile and feeble-minded. The truth is he had wanted no part of the 'Ghaddar'.
His contemporary the poet Mirza Ghalib recognized the momentous change in the fate of the subcontinent with this verse: “Hindustan sayah-i gul pa-e takht tha / jah-o-jalal-i ʿahd-e visal-e butan nah puchh” (Hindustan was the shadow of a rose at the foot of the throne / the grandeur, the splendor of that age of union with the gods, don’t ask!). And so, per Ghalib, Hindustan became the past.
Ghalib knew very well that the Grand Moghul was just a pensioner of the British, as he was himself. He thought Calcutta was friggin' marvellous. Delhi sank back to what it had been after the depredations of Nadir Shah.
Yet, Hindustan lingered even after the formal end of the Mughal polity
till the Muslim League demanded and got Pakistan thus sinking both 'Hindustani' and 'Hindustan'. India is a Hindu country just as Pakistan and Bangladesh are Muslim and Myanmar and Sri Lanka are Buddhist.
and the entrenchment of colonial British India.
The Brits didn't want Partition. The Muslim League insisted. Currently, Pakistan looks pretty shaky. Maybe the Brits had a point.
The people of the subcontinent continued to be called, and called themselves, Hindustani.
Unless they were calling themselves Pakistani.
The early 20th century world encountered Hindustanis who were taken as indentured labor to the Caribbean and the Americas or who traveled on their own to Europe. North Americans experienced “Hindustanee” students, activists, and lawyers who came to California and Vancouver and rallied against imperial Britain.
Sadly, they would discover that British rule was better than what replaced it. To be South Asian, from the late Fifties onwards, was to desire to emigrate to somewhere White people were in charge.
This glimmer of Hindustan as an idea of anti-colonial politics was
predicated on Muslims not wanting to go their own way. Once they did so, the Hindus abandoned the Persianized language- Urdu- and the Persianate name- Hindustan. Sanskritised Hindi in Devanagari script became the official language of 'India that is Bharat'.
also present in the sub-continent. It was the idea behind the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, created by anti-colonial revolutionaries like Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh in 1928.
If they hadn't been hanged, they would probably have been killing Muslims in 1947-48.
It emerged in a slogan asserting independence as Jai Hindustan ki (Victory to Hindustan)—the rallying cry for Subhas Chandra Bose’s Free Hind Army in 1942.
One of Bose's lieutenants was a Minister in Zia's Cabinet. Did he refer to himself as Hindustani or Pakistani?
Later, when the Republic of India issued its first postage stamp on August 15, 1947, the day of independence, it depicted the tricolor flag, with Emperor Ashoka’s dharma chakra, and Bose’s anti-colonial slogan, shortened to Jai Hind.
Jai is Hindu and Hind sounds like Hindu.
Many of these ideas of Hindustan are now lost in the mists of time.
No. There was just one idea- viz. that Muslims wouldn't want to go their own way. Once they did so, there would be Pakistan and Urdu on one side and India-that-is-Bharat and Hindi on the other.
Over these many decades since the Partition, the conventional understanding has calcified that
Muslims in the Sub-Continent do ethnic cleansing when they can.
Hindustan is either a simple Hindi word for “India,”
but 'Bharat' is the Hindi word the country has chosen for itself. Bharat was the son of Shakunutala from whom all the great Emperors of old were descended.
an articulation of Hindu chauvinism, or, more rarely, something associated with the bygone era of the Mughal polity—itself understood by the Hindu Indian as a demonstration of the imperial violence of foreigners.
No. People understand that 'stan' means 'country of'. Hindustan means the country of Hindus. That's it. That's the whole story.
What was the idea of Hindustan?
It was the same as the idea of Indica or India. The upper caste Hindus have a notion of a territory where it is permissible to move and inter-marry without loss of caste. Where there are Brahmins there are Hindus but if a salt water sea has to be crossed then there is a separate country.
When did it come about and what made it powerful enough to persist for nearly 1000 years? What role did it play in organizing ideas of place, of history, of community?
Hindus know the answer to this or can easily find out by asking the family Purohit.
The erasure of the precolonial idea of Hindustan has meant that it is taken as a truism
by Pakistani Muslims in America who have shit for brains
that there was no coherent concept of peninsular India before British domination.
it was Bharatvarsha, Aryavarta, Jambudvipa etc.
What is nominally understood by this is that the British were the first to control or claim the entire territory of the southern peninsula.
No. People are aware that there were ancient Emperors in India just as there were such Emperors in China.
In this line of telling, the subcontinent before British colonization was an age of “regional kingdoms” with no coherent notion of territoriality nor the political control over the entire peninsula.
Every King had some sort of genealogical or wholly mythological claim to be the Chakravartin or universal emperor.
The only noted exceptions are of Ashoka, from the third century BCE, whose realm included Kabul, or the Mughal king Aurangzeb, who extended Mughal rule in and beyond the Deccan in the late 17th century.
So India was like the United Kingdom or Germany prior to 1870 or the European Community as it currently exists. But just as there was nothing to prevent the ancient kingdom of Scotland uniting with the Crown of England and Wales so too there is nothing preventing Europe coming together. India is luckier in that Hinduism is 'Hindutva'- i.e. ecumenical. There is nothing corresponding to the Catholic Protestant divide or the conflict between Shias and Sunnis. Muslims, it is true, appear unhappy in India but where they are a small minority, there is little they can do about it.
Such conventional wisdom,
does not exist.
these historiographic truths, are mistaken. Certainly, the Mughals did not create the concept of Hindustan.
There had been a Sultanate which extended down to the South in the time of Alauddin Khilji
There already existed an idea that Hindustan was a place of territorial integrity that encompassed the entire subcontinent, and that diverse communities of believers lived in this place.
But one group- Brahmins- weren't diverse at all. They held that there was a large contiguous territory where it was permissible to settle without loss of caste. Hinduism was called Brahminism at an earlier time.
Take as a small illustration this Persian inscription from 1325 found in a step well in Batiyagarh, Madhya Pradesh, in Central India.
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.
Here Hindustan is depicted as a political collective
No it isn't. Like 'Turkistan'- the country of the Turks- the country of the Hindus was a racial, not political, collective. Tughlaq is an Emperor or arbiter amongst the Hindus but it is his strong right arm which holds the Turks at bay.
Incidentally, by the fourteenth century, Hindu pundits and poet/saints were contrasting 'Hindu dharma' with 'Turaka dharma' with 'Turk' standing for 'Islam'.
(all who recognize the king’s justice) and as unique (distinct from the land of the Turks),
This is hilarious. This cretin thinks that Indians didn't know they were different from Turks even though Turks look different, have different customs, and speak a different fucking language!
long before the Mughal imperium.
The Mughals were Turks. How fucking stupid is this cunt?
Clearly, there is more to the story of Hindustan.
It is the story of Hindus and why they were so shite that foreigners came to rule over them.
This book is animated by a set of simple questions: What was the idea of Hindustan?
Like 'Turkistan' is was the idea of a country inhabited by people with similar languages, beliefs, customs, etc.
When did it come about
Long before the Greeks spoke of it as 'Indica'.
and what made it powerful enough to persist for nearly 1000 years?
the fact that it is still convenient to refer to peeps like me, or Rishi Sunak, as Hindus.
What role did it play in organizing ideas of place, of history, of community?
Ideas of Hindustan, like ideas of Germany, were based on what people thought the country of that name was like. In themselves, such ideas play no role in organizing other ideas. One may say that the 'idea of Germany' is shaped by ideas of Germany as a place or the history of the Germany people or the characteristics of German community life. One can't say that the idea of Germany has some sovereign power of its own to organize or actualize anything even if some German shithead's 'Idealistic Philosophy' is systematically misunderstood in that way by other shitheads teaching worthless shite.
These questions are straightforward,
They are stupid. Did attendance of a Pakistani school really cause this shithead to be brainwashed into thinking that Hindus never existed?
but they are frustratingly difficult to answer.
If you won't acknowledge that India is Hindu.
How does one, then, write the history of something that is not even realizable as missing or cannot even be fully articulated?
If one is sane one doesn't write it. If one is crazy, one might write as this cretin does-
To study the erasure of concepts or ideas is a difficult task, especially
if the thing never happened.
when it happens gradually and when the erased concepts are replaced by some hegemonic or majoritarian truth.
Before the advent of Islam, Indic religions were hegemonic over the length and breadth of the sub-continent. That is the fact- or majoritarian truth- which Pakistan's educational system has erased from this cretin's brain.
What was the name of “America” before the settler colonials arrived?
America. This stupid cunt doesn't get that first there are explorers who give a name to a place and then, after they return, they may persuade some brave souls to go settle in that new found land.
Can we even imagine how to answer that question?
I just did. It is easy. America was named for an explorer named Amerigo Vespucci.
Even when we can understand that “America” or “Australia” is an erasure of precolonial naming and being
But this simply isn't true. The precolonial names remained provided the precolonial people survived. Sometimes one colonial name- e.g 'New Amsterdam'- was erased and replaced by another colonial name- e.g. 'New York', but things get renamed all the time.
and we can understand that the indigenous peoples of the “Americas” were not “Indians,” we let these labels persist.
Americans don't. They now speak of 'First Nations', not 'Injuns'.
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.
But this is the truth of the matter!
That is to say, “Early Pakistan” or “Early Bangladesh” seem incongruous, but “Early India” a seemingly unproblematic periodization.
Because Indians like me- at least as we get older- derive an increasing amount of spiritual satisfaction from the Scriptures and ceremonies bequeathed to us by ancient Indians. Pakistanis are equally devout but they look to ancient Arabia- which was no slouch in spiritual matters.
This is puzzling, since there is critical engagement with “South Asia” as a 20th-century geopolitical toponym. What remains remarkably absent from such debates is the idea of Hindustan.
It isn't absent. People notice that Jinnah and the Muslim League killed the thing off.
How does one, then, write the history of something that is not even realizable as missing or cannot even be fully articulated?
This is foolish. I personally know a fair number of Pakistani writers and scholars whose oeuvre endlessly articulates nothing but this. Look at Salman Rushdie's latest novel. It may be crap, but it is about Vijaynagar. Rushdie was born in Bombay but his father migrated to Pakistan. Rushdie studied History at University.
Colonization refuses the colonized access to their own past.
The British Raj did no such thing.
By imposing a colonial language,
the Brits did not impose English. They did force both British and Indian Civil Servants to learn at least one modern and one classical Indian language. You had to hire a Munshi or Pundit and pass an exam to get your salary increment. The Brits encouraged the growth of vernacular languages like Hindi, Urdu, Tamil etc.
it retards the capacity of indigenous languages to represent reality.
The language of Iqbal, Tagore, Bharati etc. wasn't retarded at all. This dude's English is- but only because he studied worthless shite in Amrika.
It claims that the languages of the colonized lack “technical” or “scientific” vocabulary.
But knowledge of the classical language meant that Government appointed savants could quickly supply the lack.
It removes the archives, renders history as lack, blurs faces and names.
The Brits did the opposite.
Thus, the colonized face a diminished capacity to represent their past in categories other than those given to them in a European language, or provided to them in an imperial archive.
Nonsense! When Radhakrishnan argued for a separate 'Rayalaseema' (which the Brits referred to as 'ceded districts') he was basing himself purely on Telugu sources familiar to, and preserved, by his ancestors. I doubt Pakistan is wholly lacking in similar indigenous historiographical traditions.
This rupture, brought about by the colonial episteme, erases the fuller memory or awareness of the precolonial.
In Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs were ethnically cleansed. The Hindu heritage of the country was erased. If this made young people more devout, charitable, and cohesive, well and good. But if it made them stupid and paranoid, then God's purpose was not served.
Now, a “translated” term for an indigenous concept is deemed sufficient to stand in for it by an academy
which turned to shit because it wouldn't maintain even a modicum of quality control.
more inclined to maintain citational coherence than the truth of history. The discipline of history, itself a colonizing tool,
fuck off! Historians can't colonize shit. Fighting ability and Economic skill can create an Empire.
is resistant to the demands of the colonized.
Coz Pakistan is still a colony- right?
When there is no disciplinary recognition that something has been erased, the history of a concept must first deal with the act of political forgetting.
When the Head of the Department doesn't recognize that my certificate from Mummy testifying that I'm bestest Historian and should get Nobel Prize has been erased by the neighbour's cat's urine, the history of the concept of my being the bestest Historian must first deal with the feline act of pissing on my certificate and then forgetting all about it when I confronted that cat and demanded it either confess to the crime or else roll me another joint.
Political forgetting superimposes the present over the past such that all the conveniences and prejudices of the present overshadow the complexities and lived-in realities of the past.
Because neighbour's cat is not confessing that it pees on and thus erases all the multitudinous proofs of my being bestest historian in the whole world- albeit second best in Gujranwala due to my Aunty is Professor in Gornmint Collidge there and only she is knowing full history of how Beyonce stole my twerking routine for self-aggrandizing purposes of her own booty shake.
Political forgetting is an ongoing process that happens in the shadow of the inventions of origins.
But inventions of origins is only occurring in the iridescence of the arc of the neighbour's cat's stream of piss. Ask my Aunty.
Take, for instance, the efforts by
Jinnah to rename parts of India as Pakistan
the Republic of India to reclaim street or city names at first given by the British: Bombay to Mumbai in 1995, Calcutta to Kolkata in 2001.
These may be the original names. Prayag is certainly older than 'Allahabad'. Incidentally, Nehru always referred to his natal City by its Hindu name.
More recently, the reclamation has turned to the Mughal: the city founded as Allahabad (or Illahabad to its residents) by the emperor Jalaluddin Akbar in 1583, which is at the confluence of the Ganga and Yumna Rivers, was changed to Prayagraj by the elected government of the province in 2018. Now, Allahabad is a colonial word, and the Mughals a colonizing force.
That was how Babur saw himself.
Such political forgetting
Surely this is political remembering of a time when Hindus were ascendant?
is not unique to India in the subcontinent. We can look to Pakistan, where few contemporary Pakistanis recall that there was once something called “East Pakistan.”
Wow! How shit is the Pakistani education system?
The state of Pakistan has erased from its textbooks and its official narratives any indication of the existence of an eastern wing to its territory. Few Pakistanis connect the country of Bangladesh with a nation born out of Pakistani violence against the people of East Bengal in 1971.
So, Pakistan truly is the homeland of amnesia!
In order to imagine a Hindu-only Republic of India or non-Bengali Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the project of political forgetting targets minorities to deprive them of history, of the right to narrate, of the capacity for recognition in the collective.
Whereas political remembering does justice to those who were deprived by a cruel and tyrannical minority whose power, thanks to be God!, has waned and disappeared.
One is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s warning that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”
Which reminds us that Benjamin topped himself.
Political forgetting is an act of writing history.
One can say that American history books of a certain period 'forgot' the indigenous inhabitants. One can't say that any 'forgetting' is involved in reversing injustices done by invaders, or their descendants, to the indigenous stock. This is political 'remembering' and a rescue of 'the dead' from the enemy who denies having slaughtered them.
The political forgetting that this book explores concerns the idea of Hindustan. I am interested in Hindustan as an object of historical study, that is, Hindustan as the active or passive subject of history writing.
In 1946, Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim League and, therefore, the 'two nation theory' and the 'idea of Pakistan'. Previously, some Hindus were prepared to accept 'Hindustani' as a common identity. But, once it became clear that the the League would not cooperate with Congress in running the country, 'Hindustan' died in the same way that the pretence of loyalty to the British King Emperor died.
Manan simply won't accept this fact.
There is the political forgetting that is understood via the study of how Europe worked to erase Hindustan in its own practices of history writing.
In which case, there could have been no Hindustani identity in 1945- which is plainly false.
Under the guise of a purported universalism—the field of world history—it stripped “Hindustan” from geography and supplanted it with another concept, “India.”
India had existed in geography long before Islam. The term Indostan was only useful in distinguishing India from Indonesia and other Eastern or Western 'Indies'.
The colonial episteme collected, archived, organized, and excerpted textual and material forms to create histories of India.
The Pakistani episteme- as represented by the School where this cretin was brainwashed into thinking that Hindus didn't exist till 1947- collected and archived cretinism and excerpted shite to create shitheads like Manan. His parents sent him to Amrika hoping he'd study something useful. Had he remained in 'Zia's Pakistan', he'd either be a terrorist or an apologist for terrorism. Why? He has crazy beliefs about the powers of 'episteme'- presumably because of a religious indoctrination which holds whatever obtained before Islam was established to be 'jahilliyat'- undifferentiated ignorance which Allah would cause to be conquered and enslaved.
By “colonial episteme” I mean a domain of knowledge constituted beginning in the 16th century by the Portuguese, French, Dutch, German, and British about the subcontinent.
But that 'domain of knowledge' scarcely existed when European power was expanding and reaching its zenith in the sub-continent. Indeed, its burgeoning marked the decline and disappearance of such power- unless, as in the case of German Indology, it had never existed in the first place.
Europe’s making of “India” itself as a geography, and the ways in which historical change takes place in that geography, is the first and necessary act of political forgetting of Hindustan.
Yet Hindustan was not forgotten. It was only when Pakistan was created that India rejected 'Hindustani' and named itself 'India that is Bharat'.
In order to describe the idea of “Hindustan,” I simultaneously show the construction of the idea of “India.”
This ignorant cunt can't show shit. The plain fact is, European Indology was concerned with Indic religions. Islam simply appeared a barbarous version of Judaism only fit for savage Bedouins or nomadic Turks. Indeed, Iran- though never colonized- was moving towards 'Aryanism' and away from Islam till the fall of the Shah. The Young Turks, similarly, revived a 'Turanianism' which, under Ataturk in the Thirties was similar to Teutonic racial ideas. The Ba'athists too had a notion of Arabism independent of confessional faith. A Christian, Michael Aflaq, was Iraq's chief ideologue.
As for the 'idea of India'- it was constructed by Hindus and propagated by Brahmins and Sharamans. Europeans studied under those Brahmins and Shramans and relied upon their textual traditions till it had acquired a sufficient stock of texts and could develop its own bizarre and distasteful hermeneutics.
Keeping the colonial episteme in view
requires a deep knowledge of Sanskrit and Prakrit. This cunt has neither.
foregrounds the work of history writing and shared assumptions and ideas across genealogies of knowledge production.
Fuck off! This Pakistani has jumped on the 'Modi is Hitler' bandwagon. That is all.
Parallel to the colonial story is the history of the histories of Hindustan. The idea of Hindustan, as a political and spatial concept, was in the works of history written between the 10th and the 18th centuries. These are the Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit or Prakrit, and later Urdu sources in which the peninsular subcontinent is imagined, described, and peopled as Hindustan. This is the story of Hindustan that disappears under colonial works of history.
No. Those 'sources' provided Indology with- not 'raw materials', because shit is not a raw material- but manure as working capital.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
You are retarded.
Let me pause and walk through these concerns and claims one at a time. Let me begin with a telling of the fractious ideas about Hindustan from the beginning of the 20th century
when the Muslim League was created so as to frustrate progress towards self-government
and how they shaped the political forgetting that is our contemporary moment.
Killing Kaffirs causes people to forget any notion that Islam is a sweet and cuddly religion.
I then turn to the work of history in this loss of Hindustan as an idea. To do so I delve into the first and most consequential European History of Hindustan by Alexander Dow in 1768,
a successful playwright who served John Company in India. His work was not consequential. The loot gained by Clive and Hastings and Wellington etc. was highly consequential. An Indian who had emigrated to Ireland wrote in a similar vein but only acquired a measure of celebrity because he set up the first 'shampoo' establishment in London.
which defined early modern and colonial history writing on the subcontinent. In this discussion of the constitution of European history and the field of the philosophy of history, we see the instruments of the erasure of Hindustan.
This stupid Pakistani is saying 'if Whitey hadn't turned up, whole of India would now be Muslim. There would be no 'India that is Bharat'. There would only be Hindustan presided over by General Bajwa or Imran Khan or some other such shithead.
Next, I introduce the monumental history by Muhammad Qasim Firishta written in the early 17th century, upon which the European histories on India relied.
Dow relied on it. Firishta was an Iranian working for a Prince of the Deccan and his work was commissioned to highlight that part of the sub-continent. Since the Brits were entering India through the Southern littoral areas and had to face the Marathas, Firishta was a useful enough text for them. But, it was useless to the Indians who wished to keep the Europeans at bay. This Pakistani, quite naturally, appeals to Firishta as his Paraclete.
It remains the singular most important history of Hindustan inside and outside the subcontinent.
No. It is ignorant propaganda of a risible type. The most important histories of India are those which change the history of India. Since Indians make their own history and since Indians are overwhelmingly Hindu, it is Hindutvadi histories which are and will remain the most important histories of India.
It is a delusion to think that Ivory Tower academics- even if they get tenure at Ivy League- have any power or influence over events. True, they may be paid a little money to make fools of themselves during some 'war against terror' but their oeuvre represents nothing but a collective shitting of the bed in which they slumber. Will some nice Firishta fairy come and wipe their bums? 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
I had earlier hesitated to compare Manan with Musharraf but now the latter is dead, I have no hesitation to saying both are equal in intellectual stature.
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