Columbia University
january, 2021
Event Details
Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration Initiative presents The Loss of Hindustan – The Invention of India: Rana Safvi in Conversation with Prof. Manan Ahmed Asif on 10th January 2021 at 7.30 PM IST (9AM EST) on the Facebook Page of Karwaan.
Join us with renowned Historians Rana Safvi and Prof. Manan Ahmed Asif to discover the Loss of Hindustan and the making or invention of India.
Did South Asia have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? This is a subject of heated debate in scholarly circles and contemporary political discourse. Manan Ahmed Asif argues that Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Republic of India share a common political ancestry: they are all part of a region whose people understand themselves as Hindustani. Asif describes the idea of Hindustan, as reflected in the work of native historians from roughly 1000 CE to 1900 CE, and how that idea went missing.
This makes for a radical interpretation of how India came to its contemporary political identity. Asif argues that a European understanding of India as Hindu has replaced an earlier, native understanding of India as Hindustan, a home for all faiths. Turning to the subcontinent’s medieval past, Asif uncovers a rich network of historians of Hindustan who imagined, studied, and shaped their kings, cities, and societies. Asif closely examines the most complete idea of Hindustan, elaborated by the early seventeenth century Deccan historian Firishta. His monumental work, Tarikh-i Firishta, became a major source for European philosophers and historians, such as Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, and Gibbon during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet Firishta’s notions of Hindustan were lost and replaced by a different idea of India that we inhabit today.
The Loss of Hindustan reveals the intellectual pathways that dispensed with multicultural Hindustan and created a religiously partitioned world of today.
About the Speakers:
Prof. Manan Ahmed Asif is a historian and professor at Columbia University in New York City. He is the founder of the South Asia blog Chapati Mystery and co-founder of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. Prof Asif’s work often combines archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic, and literary evidence and focuses on the history of South Asia. He has written three books: A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia; Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination; The Loss of Hindustan.
Rana Safvi is a renowned writer, scholar and translator. She is the author of Where Stones Speak: Historical Trails in Mehrauli, the First City of Delhi, The Forgotten Cities of Delhi and Tales from the Quran and Hadith. Her blog, www.ranasafvi.com, is a repository of her writings on Indian culture, food, heritage and age-old traditions. She lives in Delhi with her family.