Manan Asif Ahmed is from Pakistan. Instead of doing an MBA or getting a PhD in a STEM subject in Amrika, the silly man did History. He now teaches at Columbia and writes worthless books.
His first was based on the ludicrous notion that the Brits, or anyone else, gave a toss for the 'Chachnama'. No doubt, cretins who had to get a degree in History before securing clerical employment, or other cretins condemned to teach the aforementioned cretins, might have heard of this silly text- or might even have pretended to read it- but that was long after Sindh had been brought under the Raj.
Ahmed's second book is titled 'The loss of Hindustan'- i.e. how come neither Muslims nor Brits now rule India- and focuses on Firishta, a Persian immigrant who wrote a History for a Muslim potentate in a place where no Muslim potentates now remain. Ahmed thinks it is because a different 'idea of India' was invented. Everybody else thinks it was because Hindus were the majority and they beat and chased away any Muslims who tried to hang on to power. You see, for Hindus, Hindustan wasn't lost at all. It was regained. This wasn't because they read or didn't read some Persian shite written by a Firishta or Djinna or whatever. It was because Hindus have good reasons not to want to be ruled by Muslims and to kill or chase away Muslim rulers or rebels if they are able to do so. But this is true of all non-Muslim peoples. They may emigrate to a well governed Muslim country and will obey the laws once there. But they don't particularly want their own countries to come under Muslim rule. Why? It is because the History of such places is well known.
Firishta, or Ahmed, may not matter but History does matter. Remembering who killed or robbed your people and who protected them and enabled them to get rich is useful. Telling stupid lies, however, is not useful. Sadly, this is what Ahmed was trained to do by the likes of Dipesh Chakrabuttfuck.
This is Ahmed being interviewed in Scroll.in-
What I argued in my first book and in this book about the post-colonised scholar is that as historians of the pre-modern or pre-colonial, we have not internalised what the colonial state or the national state does to our understanding of the pre-colonial.
There are no 'post-colonized scholars'. There is mere careerist stupidity as part of an Academic Ponzi scheme or Citation Cartel.
Since Ahmed's shite could be written by a Trushke- i.e. someone with no ancestral or other experience of a 'colonial state' or 'national state'- there is no need to 'internalize' shite about how some occult lobotomy has occurred with the result that dusky folk with Doctorates in shite subjects get to pose as not 'understanding' shit.
Where brains fed into the same sausage machine ends up spouting the same shite, it is clear that no deep psychoanalysis is required to explain why stupid cretins who study stupid shite have to pretend to be so epistemically maimed and mutilated that their inability to understand obvious things is nevertheless a fitting subject for scholarly study.
I’ll give you a very small example to illustrate. Let’s say the medieval historian says I’m going to study a particular manuscript that is the basis of my study and that particular manuscript has five copies, and one is in the Rampur library, two copies are in the British library, and two copies are in the Berlin library.
Actually, a lawyer may be required to do the same thing because the interpretation of some Treaty or the entitlements of some Waqf or other type of Trust necessitates this due diligence. What does the lawyer do? He gets copies made and attested and then submits them to experts. If all the copies are identical- cool. If not, there might be some point to examine discrepancies.
Why can't medieval historians act in the same way? Surely it is cheaper to get faxed, or emailed, photocopies of relevant manuscripts sent to you, rather than set off for Rampur or Berlin?
The scholars get grants and go to Rampur and London and Berlin, read these manuscripts and they write the book.
That's why their book is shite. These guys are too stupid to rely on photocopies and the opinions of experts. They think they are medieval clerks toiling their way up some mountain to get to the scriptorium of the monastery depicted in 'The Name of the Rose'.
What I mean by post-colonised is that the condition of postcoloniality is in the dispersal of this manuscript. When we visit these archives, we cannot write that out of the story.
This man has shit for brains. He doesn't get that
a) the manuscript does not matter very much. There are diminishing returns to sweating over it.
b) travelling to read that manuscript is not better than just getting a photocopy or viewing the thing on the internet
c) the condition of post-coloniality is shared by those who had some ancient manuscripts- e.g. desis- and lots of other people who had no fucking manuscripts of any sort.
When cretins like Ahmed, or Spivak writing her 'Rani of Sirmur' shite, visit archives to view particular manuscripts, instead of getting photocopies or p.d.f's sent to them, what they needn't bother to write into their account is a depiction of their own abject stupidity. The reader already knows that these are low I.Q types who are making an affirmative action niche for themselves in the Dept. of Grievance Studies.
We can’t say the manuscript exists somehow magically in Berlin or London.
But what can these cretins say? OMG! London was fucking us in the ass for two hundred years! Berlin- that's where Hitler was from! Boo hoo! Whitey been sodomizing and genociding the shite out of us! I iz being so diabolically triggered that I am actively shitting myself! Fuck you Whitey! Hope you are happy now!
And in my case, for example, in Rampur. As a Pakistani, I am separated from Rampur, maybe even more than I am separated from Berlin or London. All of this is because of colonialism.
Fuck off. The reason you are 'separated from Rampur' is because of ethnic cleansing which really took off only after Independence. If Pakistan wasn't so keen on cornering the market for exporting terror, its people would be more welcome elsewhere.
Earlier in the interview, Ahmed revealed-
I am one of the Zia-ul-Haq generation of kids whose parents thought that staying in Pakistan would be bad for my health. I was shipped off at the age of 18 to the United States from Lahore, like many of our generation, to become engineers.
How the fuck is Zia a 'colonial' product? Does this guy really think St.Stephen's indoctrinated its students in the sort of shite that was going down in Pakistan in the Eighties?
Who, ultimately, was responsible for that shit-show? One candidate is a guy who got infected with Marxism while at Columbia or the University of Wisconsin in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Hafizullah Amin was a godsend for Zia. Why did Columbia fuck Amin up so badly? One reason may be that American academics like writing shite like the following-
The majoritarian Sunni or Hindutva projects ask that we, as historians, consider them inevitable and immutable.
Fuck off! Sunni Islam affirms that God alone decrees what is inevitable and immutable. Historians can go fuck themselves. They are useless.
The Hindutva project says 'the essence of Hinduism (or any other theistic Religion) is something present in all possible worlds including ones where there is no economic or other reason for gender dimorphism or inequality in endowment or outcome. In such a world, on current scientific theories, there could be no hereditary or gender based privilege. Thus Hinduism is Hindutva- i.e. anti casteist, anti-misogynistic, work for universal welfare. Historians who say 'Brahmins brainwashed everybody else into believing in God' are welcome to fuck themselves but please don't do it in front of the cows. It upsets them you know.
Yet, this cannot stand…
or sit down properly because of incessant sodomization by the Neo-Liberal nomenklatura.
The history I have sketched here is a prompt to imagine ways forward that do not yield to the majoritarian present, that do not inherit the past as certainty, and do not romanticise that which is lost.
but which do suck the cock of stupidity in a manner that does not yield to the urge to romanticize their anal cherry's loss to that same organ
It is essential that, as historians, artists, activists, and thinkers, we
twerk on TikTok?
turn to the medieval period and recognise the ways in which it continues to organise how current prejudices are rearticulated…
Why not turn to the paleolithic period to recognize the same thing? How about we just watch Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C?
It is our collective task to re-imagine the past.
Only in the sense that it is our collective task to jerk off to Raquel Welch. The truth is the subcontinent will very quickly kill any Hafizullah Amin type nutter who returns from Columbia with a freshly re-imagined past. Mere masturbators, however, may write silly books so as to serve as 'drunken helots'. Grannies say- 'Do you want to turn into a tosser like Ahmed? No? Then crack MCAT and tell your History Professor to shove his books up his arse.'
Of course it is possible that Ahmed is playing an elaborate prank upon Indian libtards. He says-
The manuscript doesn’t fly by itself.
Yet manuscripts stuffed into appropriate packaging are transported by airmail across thousands of miles. But there is no need for this. Just get the archive to photocopy it and send you a pdf or jpeg or whatever. The fees are quite moderate. Indeed, they may be waived if you are an academic of eminence or a guy whose books sell well.
And so the post-colonised historian, when they’re writing a work on a 13th century text, cannot ignore this material reality.
What 'material reality'? Is it the notion that you can't just look the thing up on the internet? You don't actually have to travel to Rampur?
And in this book, I expand that to say this also includes the categorisations, the catalogues, the genre, descriptions, and colonial scholarship on these manuscripts.
Ahmed gets triggered by all these things because his ancestors were beaten, raped, sodomized and subjected to fellatio and cunnilingus by Colonists. Don't get him started about the epistemic rape and gynocide he feels subjected to by the state of the toilets in such places.
Such as when they say what you think is a piece of poetry is actually a piece of history, or what you think is a piece of commentary, is actually a piece of literature,
or what you think is a toilet is actually the chair of the Chief Archivist
and so on and so forth.
Well, who is it saying this is not history or not poetry or not literature?
The fact is, if enough people crap in the Chief Archivist's chair it will cease to be the place he sits in. Indeed, he may prefer a stall in the Gents for his office.
Where does that come from? It comes from colonial cataloguing. It comes from colonial classification systems.
If Archives have enough money, they can change the cataloguing so as to prevent people like Ahmed getting triggered and going potty in the Chief Archivist's armchair. Indeed, some Museums and Archives are now replacing Roman numerals with Arabic numerals. Why? Presumably it is because researchers like Ahmed get 'triggered' by Roman numerals. Did you know Caesar owned slaves? OMG! How horrifying!
Some historians have [addressed] it for the project of history writing. People like Sanjay Subrahmanyam and David Shulman and VN Rao, in a book titled Textures of Time, tried to say that history can be read in sources other than what the colonial state says is a source of history.
But they could say nothing about History which wasn't 'Vasco da Gama crapped out Barack Obama' level silly. Compare Sanju with his brother. At one time the former was more famous. We thought he'd settle down finally to write something sensible. But he never did. Rao & Shulman do have some literary merit. But their historiography is mere magical thinking.
They didn’t really paint it in the sense of the post-colonised that I’m speaking of. But that’s the spirit of the argument, which is that even if you’re studying the pre-colonial past we have to go through colonialism to grasp it.
But this means those sensitive little flowers will get triggered and start shitting all over the place.
Similarly, Partha Chatterjee and Shahid Amin have written about the sources for “alternative” histories.
But by then they themselves represented an alternative to being intelligent.
As a process question then, where did you get access to the manuscripts that you used for this book?
I started working on this particular book in 2016. A lot of the library work early on – I was able to travel to do that. But when I started writing, I needed to see these manuscripts that were in Scotland, that were in Manchester, Cambridge, Toronto, Paris, and Kolkata. All of those I only examined as digital artefacts.
So Ahmed has been lying all along. He knows 'examining digital artefacts' suffices for his purpose. Soon, he won't even need to walk across the campus to sit in a library. On the one hand, this means that Historiography will improve because the non-credentialised can move into these areas. A financial barrier to entry has been knocked down.
The sheer number of books and manuscripts you cite in the book seems daunting to me. Did it overwhelm you at some point, trying to tell the story of Hindustan?
The last chapter of my first book talked of the importance of Firishta [author of the Tarikh-i-Firishta, a 17th century history of Hindustan that The Loss of Hindustan focuses on]. When I finished that book, I knew I was going to tackle Firishta. But I didn’t know what it would look like.
We did. It would look like shit.
Would it be another focused study?
I started the project in Mexico City. I was teaching a class on colonisation and decolonisation.
About which this cretin understands nothing.
And I was really curious about 17th century Mexico and how Mexico’s geography dealt with the idea of colonisation.
Mexico's geography dealt with the idea of colonisation in the same way that it dealt with the idea of bharatnatyam. Of course, this could be said about every geography and every idea. But it took a genius like mine to match Ahmed's silliness.
I started reading a lot of work on the conquest of Mexico, around the early 17th century, so the same time as Firishta is writing.
Mexico was conquered in the early Sixteenth Century. All of it was Spanish about fifty years before Firishta started writing.
It was through that process that I began to understand that what I was doing was not about Firishta but about the project that Firishta himself is involved in – the study of Hindustan. Once that began to be clear to me, I can share a photograph [of that time] from my office where the entire floor is covered in books. I didn’t actually count, because I had to turn my bibliography into “works cited”, because there were too many books.
Ahmed wasted his time. Firishta wasn't 'studying Hindustan'. He was a Persian paid to a do a certain type of work which, for obvious reasons, the great mass of the inhabitants of India should not read lest their resentment against Islam be aroused yet further.
But I think I was lucky in the sense that I really figured out what I was focused on – the idea of Hindustan – so I could read a lot but I could keep that thread in my own brain so I don’t get overwhelmed.
This is an idea of Hindustan rejected by Hindus. Who cares about the brain of an Americanized Pakistani?
I know this is the argument of the book in some ways, but for the reader, how would you separate the idea of India from that of Hindustan? How are these two distinct?
India is an invented category that comes into being as the colonial states, not just British, but also Portuguese, French, Dutch, and German, begin to understand the subcontinent. And what they deploy are various versions of British India or Estado da India or the East Indies, various categories in which they understand the subcontinent.
In 1946, Hindus voted for the INC while Muslims voted for the Muslim League. India is not an 'invented category'. It is the place where Hindus are dominant or where non-Hindus can't secede for one reason or another. Pretending this is not the case is simply silly. A person with a surname like Dwivedi or Vajpayee may get to virtue signal by pretending to believe that Hinduism was invented by Annie Besant or Lord Fitztightly or Prof. Higgins. But Ahmed comes across as a Pakistani cretin who got to Amrika but didn't make mega-bucks in some arcane technological field.
As the colonial state starts to really flourish in the late 18th and 19th centuries, it begins to displace the notions of how to understand the subcontinent that the colonial actors had encountered 100 years before, when they arrived first – in travelogues, maps or merchant accounts.
How does Ahmed 'understand' America? Who cares? He got there and has somehow gotten a respectable job and is writing the sort of tosh that is required of him. What greater 'understanding' is needed?
And that’s the idea of Hindustan.
Which was derived from... what exactly? The answer is Puranic Hinduism which specifies where you can settle without losing caste.
Hindustan is something that was displaced, but it’s displaced in a way that it lingers, attached to the Mughal state and a little after that.
Another way to say this is that a State becomes Hindu to the extent that there is some patronage for Hindu scholarship and religion. Where this fails, India contracts.
By 1857 it is very much attached to the Mughals themselves.
Nonsense! The Mughals were a spent force.
The argument that British India makes is that, in 1857, when the Mughals go, Hindustan also vanishes.
Some Brits thought 'Mohammedan power' might revive. But, Sir Sayyad Ahmed kept telling the Hunter Commission that reading Urdu and Farsi made kids stupider than shit so the Brits realized that Islam was no threat.
India versus Hindustan becomes a kind of vanishing act. India extends back in time. So, something like ancient India, or early India become very clean categories. Anyone can talk about them and think about them.
Coz Islam wasn't around.
While we can say that after 1947, ancient Pakistan, or after 1971, ancient Bangladesh are not categories that have any real purchase.
Fuck off! Ancient Pakistan is well defined. It is stuff that happened in ancient times in places now part of Pakistan.
They are employed sometimes but people don’t really understand what that means.
How fucking stupid are those people?
Because everyone would say, well Pakistan didn’t exist before 1947, so there can’t be an ancient Pakistan.
because when a country is created, Allah causes land to rise up out of what was previously a void. Is that really what Ahmed was taught at the University of Punjab?
But no one says India didn’t exist before 1947 or 1857, so there can’t be ancient India. The idea is that the colonial state has raised another really prominent mental geography and that is what the book is about, that particular mental geography.
Ahmed thinks, in Pakistan, Professors say 'Pakistan came into existence in 1947. Allah created out of the void the land we are standing on. Obviously, there can't be any Mohenjo Daro or dinosaurs or whatever coz there was nothing here prior to Independence. ;
By contrast in India, because Colonialists said 'there used to be ancient India here before we established our Raj' the stupid Hindus believed that there used to be an ancient India. But for this stipulation by Lord Fitztightly or Professor Upmearsefurafiver, Indians too would affirm that their land was newly created by Ishvar in 1947.
I am not saying that the mental geography of Hindustan needs to be recuperated, it’s not a project of thinking about it in isolation.
No, indeed. A crowded psychiatric ward would be cheaper.
The book is doing two things simultaneously.
It is shitting higher than its arsehole while jizzing in its own eye.
It’s showing both what Hindustan as a concept, as a history, as a subject of history looks like.
to a cretin.
And simultaneously, how the colonial state is archiving it and erasing it.
despite having ceased to exist 75 years ago.
That, I think, is the methodological contribution that I make
through an anal orifice
We can’t just say there was a before and after, and talk about the before or the after, but that the before and after are actually overlapping categories, and we can’t speak about one without thinking of the other.
Cool. So if Prof. Ahmed says 'where is your term paper?' you can reply 'my term paper's submission overlaps with both the occurrence of what went before it and what can only happen after it. Thus, you can give me an A grade for it now because you can't really think about its current non-existence without also thinking of its pristine pre-existence.'
You use the term the “colonial episteme” as a way of thinking about this erasure. Could you define that? And also, I’m curious, do you see it as being in opposition to say a medieval Muslim episteme?
Episteme basically is how we know something.
No. We may know a thing through intuition or inspiration or 'synoida'. Episteme is a principled way of knowing things. Socrates says it is a second best solution- like plying the oars of a sail boat when the wind fails.
There is a specific way in which the colonial agents know the subcontinent.
The 'colonial agent' needed to know what orders he should follow and how much he could steal without getting into trouble. That 'specific way' was similar to the 'specific way' the sub-continent is now misgoverned. But it is based on heuristics of an empirical and provisional sort. It is not 'epistemic' at all. Civil Servants may have to cram to pass an exam in 'Nehru-Gandhi ideology' or some such shite but they aren't guided by that shite at all.
I define the colonial episteme starting as far back as the Portuguese arrival.
Why? The Portuguese, on first arrival, prayed in a Hindu temple thinking it to be a Catholic Church! There was no 'colonial episteme' at all.
Maybe other historians would say, well, the colonial state only begins in 1757.
But historians are as stupid as shit. Nobody gives a toss about them.
But the way of knowing the subcontinent in a particular fashion, which is what I call the colonial episteme, is something that predates and precedes the settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Why not say it predates and precedes the dinosaurs?
The colonial episteme is the kind of lever that is prying off Hindustan and inserting British India and all of these other categories or nomenclature.
Ahmed thinks epistemes cause regime change. Wow! Escaping Zia's Pakistan, the cretin internalized the 'Noble Lie' of Bush's America!
It is absolutely in opposition [to the medieval episteme] in the sense that the colonial episteme as a project has to create a political forgetting, it has to naturalise itself. British India has to become a natural category.
Why? Ireland was no such thing. Scotland still isn't. What made India so special? Ahmed, rather meanly, won't tell us.
James Mill, the father of [English philosopher] John Stuart Mill, is writing the History of British India, in the early 19th century.
This was a successful speculation on Mill's part. He provided for himself and his family well enough. But his work was transparently meretricious. He gained nothing further in terms of reputation.
Now, the idea that there is something called the “history of British India”, and that the first part of it would be the ancient or the golden age of the Hindus and the middle part would be the dark Mohammedan ages and then the third part would be liberal British India, becomes taken as a natural system, when it is wholly invented by Mill.
Ahmed does not appear to have read Mill. Perhaps he misspoke in this interview. But whom could he have been thinking of?
In that sense it is absolutely antagonistic to the notions with which we can think about history writing for someone like Firishta,
a Persian Shia being paid to raise the prestige of a particular Islamic Prince- with some rather strange syncretic tendencies- vis a vis other Muslim rulers
who is not making any such classification divisions in his history.
Because there could be no 'golden age of the Hindus'. There could only be 'jahaliyat'- a pre-Islamic epoch of ignorance and barbarism.
The historians writing after Firishta in Hindustan, people who are contemporary to James Mill, are also not using such distinctions.
Hindus were- in the opinion of Ranajit Guha. His Ramram Basu wrote the first history book in modern Bengali around the same time as Mill. Basu was a Kayastha- i.e. almost as anti-Brahmin as he was anti-Muslim. Ahmed may not know this but back then, Hindus genuinely hated Muslims even if they knew Persian and got on very well them personally. It was a different age.
So, that is a colonising effort in order to overcome the ways in which history is being written in Hindustan prior to and contemporary to the colonial episteme.
This is silly. Mill could make money for the same reason Firishta could make money. But, in India, that money ran out. So History vanished till it reappeared as 'Freedom at Midnight' and crap of that sort.
You pick out Firishta because he makes a distinction from a lot of other medieval Muslim histories of the time, particularly by integrating the Mahabharata in his work, instead of starting off genealogically from Adam. There is a different historiography here even when compared to other medieval Muslim historians.
Firishta is very self-conscious when he says I’m writing a new type of history. He takes it on as his project. He’s not the first person who’s writing a broad history.
So he is lying.
He has a whole archive that he can cite going back, 400 years, 500 years. He has a library.
More to the point, Hindu scholars were gaining some patronage at Islamic courts by this point. So, yes, shite historiography had a yet shittier ecumenical horizon.
He’s definitely very conscious about the historiography that he has inherited, which includes texts like Panchatantra, Mahabharata, the shastras.
Poor fellow, I think he means the Puranas.
Here he is not making a distinction between Hindu and Muslim historians.
Why not? They were different.
The innovation that I think he argues for is that, first, he defines his history or organises his history through space. He says, here’s Hindustan. Here are the contours of Hindustan made up of these regions, and I’m going to tell you a story of each of these regions. And within each one of them I will tell you how they came to be settled, how they came to be governed, their politics, who lives there, some stories about the good and the bad.
So far so good. Ferishta did an okay job and some Brits quoted him a couple of centuries later- by which time there were competitive exams in shite of this sort so as to secure clerical employment in India.
Firishta fractures the ways in which history had been written up to his time. Which was usually genealogies of descent from some god or heaven,
in an Islamic text? Really? Fuck off! This guy has confused Hindu texts with those written by Muslims. He may not know it but Islam denies that there are 'some gods' who have human descendants.
down to a particular king who was the personification of that cosmological order, or “here’s a town or a city, and here’s everyone who lives in it”. Those are the two ways that people focused on telling history.
Only the latter was licit for a Muslim.
Tucked away in the footnotes, you write that it is “important to re-enliven concepts translated out of experience during the colonial period.” But to me the metaphor seemed more like a dismantling of the edifice built by the colonial historian. How hard is it for us post-colonised subjects to even attempt to think of Hindustan before India?
Not hard at all. Watch 'Mughal-e-Azam'.
It’s important to say why Firishta works as a tool to dismantle [things].
So, Firishta was a tool. I suppose some people take a great interest in 'tools'. But they are fools.
Firishta is used by the colonial episteme to create the framework that we understand as the philosophy of history.
Nonsense! The colonial episteme was based on what smart people back in the home country were writing. These guys weren't converting to Islam or Hinduism or whatever after reading indigenous manuscripts.
Firishta is rendered into English as well as French at roughly the same moment, 1768-1769. On the English side by Alexander Dow, on the French side by [Jean Baptiste Joseph] Gentil.
Why? Because there was a market for this. Romanticism was displacing the rationalism of China with the 'sublimity' of an imaginary India. Also there was more loot to be secured in India.
These renderings then are taken up by philosophers like Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Kant’s student Johann G Herder, who are all engaged in the project of thinking about universal ideas of “man”.
Not really. Those guys might cherry-pick from fashionable tomes of the moment but they arrived at their systems by reflecting on their own circumstances- not Ind's coral strand.
For these universal projects, these European intellectuals need raw material. Raw material from what they think is China, from what they think is India, what they think is Africa, what they think is the “New World.”
This is false. They merely hand waved at ad captum vulgi fashionable ideas. These were merely 'memes'. We do the same thing, speaking of the ecological disaster that overtook Easter Island as symbolizing our own plight.
They want these “raw materials” in order to create this fabric or this fantasy of the universe that they are going to argue is the natural state of things. And Dow’s renderings become critically important for that world-making.
It had no effect whatsoever.
These figures themselves are incredibly important to the project of Enlightenment.
No. They didn't matter at all. The Enlightenment was about the decline of the power of the Church as Princes saw that 'toleration' could boost their fiscal resources.
When you fast forward to the mid-to-late 19th century, when history as a discipline is emerging in German universities, you see reliance on these big questions that constitute history’s object of inquiry.
But German professors saw themselves as Civil Servants first and last. There was a movement for German unification whose motivation was economic and military. Some German philologists and philosophers and historians and jurists jumped on this bandwagon. Others may not have done but nobody noticed.
And these same figures. Heder’s lectures, for example, are incredibly important to the philosophy of history,
But the philosophy of history, now Marxism is dead, is not important at all. It is silly.
and the ways in which history as a discipline recognises itself and polices what can be said. And even whose histories can be told.
To whom? Equally cretinous historians who know they are regarded with contempt and derision because of the uselessness of their subject?
And all of that becomes part of the colonial episteme. History-writing, we know from people like CLR James,
Whom actual black peeps no longer read
is a particular tool through which the colonial project is implemented upon the natives, by saying, “you don’t have a history, we are going to give you one” or saying, “what you have is myths and fantasies and here’s what disciplined history requires and this is how you do it.”
Myths and fantasies work better than actual history. We want Bridgeton and the glorious Kingdom of Wakanda and Eddie Murphy in 'Coming to America Part II'. Anyway, Science has told us we are all descended from apes so reading Romila Thapar is unnecessary to understand one's ancestors were abject creatures.
I’m not saying Firishta is the only tool for dismantling the colonial project,
Why ever not? You could pretend he had been bitten by a radio-active spider and thus could spin out narratives of a magical kind.
but Firishta plays a very significant role in placing the subcontinent into this fabric.
But 'this fabric' is imaginary.
So by taking apart how they think of Firishta, but more importantly, by telling the reader what Firishta had actually imagined, which was much more complex, much more durable than what the colonial state uses Firishta for, in a sense, I am hoping that the reader walks away with the idea that we need to challenge or in contemporary terms decolonise what the philosophy of history means.
Firishta thought Muslims could rule in the Deccan and other Hindu majority parts of the sub-continent. He was wrong. Saying 'fuck you Whitey. Fuck you very much!' won't alter this outcome.
And by that rationale also decolonise our understanding of what we have been told to say is an epic, or a history, or a romance. Those are some of the ways in which I am using Firishta to argue for a type of decolonised approach.
But people with this 'decolonised approach' can't change anything on the ground. They have wasted their time.
Your own training is firmly in the tradition of, let’s say, Western history writing.
As opposed to what? Eastern mystery singing?
And you teach at Columbia. And in this book, you use the tools that are available to historians today.
Like what? DNA analysis and advanced 'Cliodynamic' statistical work? No. Don't be silly.
One sentence in the book jumped out to me – “perhaps we ought to abandon this colonial tradition that masquerades as scholarship and exists only because the post-colonial states continue to harbour colonial prejudices.”
i.e. Muslims and Hindus don't get along- unless the State is strong enough to imprison rioters.
So I was curious, how do you square some of this internally? How do you use modern historical approaches to dismantle a colonised subject?
The answer is, Ahmed channels some crazy nutjobs to talk worthless paranoid bullshit.
I rely on a number of thinkers, influential to my understanding.
But they were useless.
I’m thinking about Aimé Césaire’s work,
a good poet who faced genuine bigotry of a fierce and unrelenting type.
where he’s not only writing what would now constitute political theory, but he’s also writing play translations of Shakespeare, like The Tempest [set on an island in the Caribbean].
I’m thinking about people like WEB Dubois, who was writing what we think of as science fiction or speculative fiction, just as much as he was writing sociology.
But Cesaire and Dubois were fighting legalized racism of a type Ahmed has no experience of! This is 'extractive introjection'. He is confiscating the psychic pain of genuine victims for a self-aggrandizing purpose.
I’m thinking of scholars like Marisa J Fuentes, who are thinking about silences and gaps.
Fuentes has ancestors who were kidnapped, enslaved, beaten, raped and often killed. She represents people with a genuine historical grievance. Ahmed does not.
These are scholars who are engaging in the same project, but are using different kinds of tools in order to get at the silences and the inequities of the historical profession.
Nobody gives a toss about the 'historical profession'. We feel contempt for cunts like Ahmed whining about how having to go to the archives in Berlin is really triggering and makes me feel like I'm in a cattle-truck on its way to Auschwitz and OMG I just read Kant said nasty things about darkies and I've just shit myself once again. Poor, poor me! Won't somebody find me a safer space where I can be protected from dem nasty racist Eighteenth Century Dead White Men?
My aim was to lay bare, to make naked the construction of the ways in which colonialism has elided, obfuscated and compartmentalised the history of the subcontinent, of Hindustan.
Did Ahmed have sex with that construction after he made it naked? Perhaps not willingly. It may have raped him.
Why is that important?
It isn't important unless we greatly care about Ahmed's epistemic rape or self-abuse.
It’s not simply the fact that in modern disciplinary history we must visit the archives, have footnotes, have bibliography, have citations.
Actually, it sounds like it is simply the fact that these cunts have to go in for this drudgery just to get tenure and citations.
It’s not just those things. I think it’s also that we question the modern disciplinary history class from a decolonial spirit.
Mao said exams were a tool of the bourgeoisie to oppress the students. But, once the students had beaten Mao's enemies, Mao brought in factory workers to beat the students and chase them into the villages.
We have to enter the archive that itself has to be decolonised.
Why? Just so these precious snowflakes don't get triggered? Why not simply defund History as an academic subject? Kill off the nuisance in one fell swoop.
We have to think about citational practices – drawing upon Sarah Ahmed’s work on citational practices – that these citational practices construct the world around that gives a historian or a theorist a gravitas or a way forward. And thinking about how black and brown bodies and how women are erased from such citational apparatus.
These stupid cunts set up their own citation cartel. Did it help anyone? No. Was it any good? No. Then why should we bother with it?
And so what does it mean for me to think about writing about Firishta? Drawing upon scholarship that came from Hindustan, actually reading what Firishta was reading, and thinking about those texts. Reading scholars from Hindustan during the colonial period. Not dismissing them as old histories or nationalist histories, but actually looking at the ethics of history writing, and trying to reconstruct what that ethics is, both for Firishta but for all the historians that follow.
That’s basically my purpose. To actually expand or force the discipline to rethink some of these very canonical issues. While recognising that other scholars or other theorists or other intellectuals have come at this question from different angles.
So, this guy is critiquing others of his own profession. But that profession is useless. Kill it off by defunding and decredentializing it.
The work of people like Stuart Hall and CLR James has been really influential for me as a historian.
But those guys were discovered to be useless tossers by black peeps in Britain.
One last reference is Meena Alexander, a poet whose poetry is deeply historical.
It was shit of the sort the Academy promoted back then.
Personal, but also deeply engages with the idea of us as decolonised individuals.
Coz u iz dusky in complexion, right?
Just drawing upon this wealth of great knowledge in order to inform how I do history. That’s been my thinking within the box that I’m put in.
The poor fellow has been put in a box. Have his arms and legs been chopped off so he fits better? Probably. Imagine this poor fellow being carried around in some anal rapists hand baggage from Berlin to Rampur. Now tell me the fellow doesn't have a point. Decolonize Historiography now! Release Ahmed from the hand baggage of some anal rapist! Pakistani-American Historians' Lives matter!
At the end the book you address the post-colonised historians, especially those grappling with the majoritarian projects in India and Pakistan, saying it is “our collective responsibility to speak against the confirms of prejudice.” Do you see the broader practice of subcontinental history picking this up? I know you just mentioned a few different names, but I’m curious why your final words in the book were such a call to action.
Many types of minorities – Ahmadis, Shias, Dalits, Muslims – are paying a very high price for being minorities in the majoritarian politics [of the subcontinent].
In Pakistan, yes. Not in India. Dalits have affirmative action and are rising up. By contrast, the position of Ahmadis in Pakistan is abject indeed. Even some Shias live in fear.
Will Ahmed stick his neck out to denounce persecution of Qadianis? Let us see-
I think insofar as I have anything to say or anything to contribute, what I want to think about with others is how these majoritarian politics are constantly affirming a particular idea of the past.
Qadianis were regarded as Muslim till about fifty years ago. It is not 'particular ideas of the past' which are responsible for their suffering.
And that affirmation of majoritarian politics, they can claim it as far back as they want it to go. And it’s a natural way of thinking.
And my hope is that we see two things. One, there is no such inviolable idea of the past that we are pointing out. And second that our history is also the history of resistances, mainly but not only to the colonial project.
But the 'colonial project' ended more than seventy years ago. Why resist something which does not exist? Is it because that is safer than standing up for the Ahmadiyas or criticizing the ISI?
And that when we look at these other Hindustani historians, which is what I spend time on in this book, we see all these Hindustani historians during the colonial period and during the nationalist period, writing and speaking about and against majoritarianism.
We have forgotten that history of resistance, that history of articulating other ideas. I think it is very important for us to reclaim that history, to re-engage with them.
But that history failed in 1946 because voters rejected it.
They’re all as flawed as we are. Nobody has one answer. But all of us collectively do and should present other ways of thinking about the past.
Why? It has done no good yet has taken up scarce resources.
One of the things that I did while I was writing this book, I was seeing a lot of voices of protest in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
I’m thinking of Hussain Haidary’s “Main Hindustani Musalman Hoon”.
Haidary is a Dawoodi Bohra. Does he approve of female genital mutilation? Will he ask Modi to ban this custom among his people? Perhaps. It looks as though the women of this community- who are highly educated and successful- may prevail in this matter.
And similarly in Pakistan they were seeing a very heartwarming expression of solidarity with the Pashtoon students and Baloch students. And just looking at these movements, in Bangladesh as well, around worker solidarity.
Thinking about how we can, as historians, because, that’s my battle, how we as historians can uplift their voices, uplift their theories such that we are able to see the significance of these claims. And they appear to us both as relevant and important for now, but also relevant and important in a longer history of anti-majoritarian politics.
Modi finds 'anti-majoritarian politics' consolidates the Hindu vote. Why? Hindus indulging in it cross the line to shower abuse on Hinduism as a uniquely evil religion. Muslims don't do that. They are better bred. Also, if they are Pakistani, they may well believe that the condition of Muslims in India is similar to that of Hindus in Pakistan. Thus, they are grateful for small mercies.
I think that’s where I see my work contributing in whatever small way.
The whole of the book is about misconceptions, so this question is a bit harder, but I’d still like to ask: What is the one misconception that you find yourself having to correct all the time?
I think it is one thing that I’ve made a part of both books, which is this idea of Muslim presence in the subcontinent being perceived as [that of] outsiders.
As opposed to enemies. Outsiders can make a big contribution. Enemies cut your throat and steal your shiny stuff.
In both India and in Pakistan. In India, because of the Hindutva [project]. In Pakistan, they say, we are descended from Arabs, and have nothing to do with the subcontinent.
This is a caricature. Few actually say any such thing. People remain proud of their identity as Rajputs, Arain, Pakhtoon, Jat or whatever. This does not mean you can't claim Arab blood. After all, some ancestor of yours must have married a person with that claim to fame.
So this idea of outsiderness, both in Pakistan and India. How does it work? You see disciplinary scholarship, studies that are wedded to this analytical framework.
The thing I notice the most is how colonial categories of difference and a national emphasis on difference is not questioned. We don’t put it in front and say this doesn’t make sense.
Islam makes a distinction between Muslims and Kaffirs. It is entitled to do so because it seeks to obey the Will of God as revealed by 'the seal of the Prophets'. Many Hindus and Christians and so forth have converted voluntarily to Islam. Some may then have engaged in 'jihad', but most did not do so because if is a collective duty which must meet certain legal and pragmatic tests. If it is bound to fail, don't do it. This is perfectly sensible. No one can doubt that Muslims are making a great contribution in Europe and America though, no doubt, there are a few bad apples- as with other communities.
What other research would you like to see on this subject?
I could talk about my colleagues whose work may not be directly connected to what I’m doing, but I’m thinking of Audrey Truschke or Abhishek Kaicker or Dipti Khera, these are all people who are doing important work on the pre-colonial period.
But they are not liked by Hindus and since they are not Muslims, they have no constituency there either.
They give importance to broadening our understanding of the pre-colonial as a space of diversity and inclusivity.
which was so utterly shit that the entire subcontinent got colonized. To add insult to injury, under the Brits, the Indian army was able to project force into the MENA and Western Europe and South East Asia and China. Then the Brits left and we started killing each other and dropping further and further down the Economic League Table.
And I think I want to see much more of this.
For Heaven's sake why? It did no good in the past and has done no good in the present. It is simply a sentimental sort of virtue signaling which may earn its way in the fantasy world of Bollywood.
The issue with the modern period is that modern historiography needs to not be so bored by the colonial period.
No. The issue of the modern period is modernity- which is based on Science, Technology, Mechanism Design, Infrastructure and Entrepreneurship. It doesn't matter if we are 'bored' with boring shite about the colonial period or the medieval period or the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
[There is this] idea that the subaltern studies said what they had to say
it was meaningless gibberish
and there’s nothing new there and now everyone should move on, to the Partition, or something else.
I think there is a lot more that needs to be done on re-thinking the colonial period.
By whom? Cretins like Ahmed? If he can't tell us anything about our own times, what great mystery of the past will he unravel?
Maybe along some of the lines on which I, as an outsider to the colonial period, have some engagement in my book with colonial individuals whom I call “soldier-scribes”. That’s what I would love to see – further dismantling of the thinking about the colonial period.
What we would love to see is a complete dismantling of this sort of shite Historiography within the Academy. Thirty years ago there was a theory that writing nonsense of this sort would keep the BJP out of power. But, because the cretin Rahul believes this shite, it has had the opposite effect. It made Congress and the Left unelectable. Political Correctness is the epistemic equivalent of chopping the arms and legs off academics so they can fit into the hand-baggage of perverts. As Voltaire was wont to say- écrasez l'infâme!
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