I'm sorry I didn't, you know, allow anybody to say hi. Do you also walk breathlessly long to get to this?
OK. So, yeah, no worries.
I can see we're late now. So I'm assuming we're broadcasting. Hello, everyone.
Hi. Welcome to the third modern South Asian Studies seminar of this academic term at the University of Oxford.
I'm very, very sorry for the slight delay in joining. We had some technical difficulties.
We all hate teams, of course, and there were some problems with getting it going.
But we are very, very delighted to see Manon make an appearance with this gorgeous Moglia as opposed to behind them.
So we're all sort of sceptical. My name is Netcom Martin, and it's my very great pleasure to be chairing the seminar today with Professor Emma.
I'm going to do a very quick introduction of Professor Emma.
And he's going to then launch into stock. But before I do so, just a quick housekeeping announcement.
So Professor Emmett's going to speak for about 45 to 50 minutes. You will see that there is a queue in a box.
Right. Which is open at this point. If you have any questions during Professor Woodstock, please feel free to type them in.
And hopefully Professor Smith can pick them up at the end of a stock.
We could have a fairly brief Q&A for about 15 to 20 minutes after stock for the sort of public end of the lecture.
I think yeah. So I think that's the only sort of housekeeping announcement to make.
So Professor Emma is associate professor in history at the University of Columbia.
His it has a specialisation include intellectual history in South and Southeast Asia,
critical philosophy of history, colonial, colonial and anticolonial thought.
He has extensive background in digital history,
in the history of archives of the Global South and in the problems of access and control of digitised materials.
Now the summit is widely published.
His had a book out in 2016, which was called The Book of Conquest The Charge NAMA and Muslim Origins in South Asia.
But today he is, however, going to be talking about his brand new book, which is sort of fresh off the press and is already creating waves.
And we're all sort of reading voted and hearing about it. And so we are absolutely delighted to have him speaking to us today about this book.
The book is called The Loss of Hindustan The Mention of India. It was published by Harvard University Press just a few months back.
Indeed, 2020. So although to end with apologies again for the slight delay in starting the seminar, over to Professor Edward.
Thank you, Danica. Everyone I relive can I know, let the world can see us.
Yes. And hopefully because I'm getting some text messages that that this is the event has not started.
That's why I was asking if the world can see us or hear us give some indication.
World security box. And I didn't.
So I apologise. I apologise for the late start.
And I apologise that I wasn't able to get my credentials sorted into different e-mail accounts, which led to, you know, our today.
So thank you. Let me start, however, formally by thanking my gracious,
gracious and kind hosts for inviting me to your forum and giving you this opportunity to speak to you today.
I'm thankful to Professor Bunker.
Professor O'Hanlan Midnight, Stephen BNA, Professor Matau and of course, Clare Sledder Selter, who tried her very best to help me.
And I let everyone down on that end.
So it's a great honour to be here today and to talk to you about the work that Professor Matthew mentioned has recently come out.
And the title of the talk today is A Contrapuntal History of Hindustan.
And I want to preface what I'm going to do today just to give you overall pictures.
I want to try to say a little bit about the kind of methodological framework of this talk and and then get a bump jump into a little bit of specifics,
mainly because I think oftentimes with the book, when you're introducing books to audiences, it's difficult to figure out, you know, what?
How do you know? Do you give a overall picture?
Do you do you kind of jump in to some of the detail that I thought, because this is a forum with students as well as scholars.
I should actually give some real content. So with that, let me begin.
My my my reflections today. How does one think about Hindustan after colonialism?
The previously colonised subject faces a stark challenge when it comes to writing history.
The disciplinary histories and classrooms and research institutes are often written by erstwhile colonisers.
Yet are paradoxically the only legible form of recognition afforded to the colonised.
The previously colonised subsects also learnt history through origin remits.
These myths are prevalent in the memoir On Grandmothers Knees Inside of political, social, cultural, ethnic and Linguistic Identities.
These originary myths, whether or not their inventions do not feel as such.
Do not feel inventions. They lived in even natural.
In the subcontinent, the radical difference between Hindus as outsiders and Muslims,
Hindus as insiders and Muslims as outsiders is one such naturally felt history that has also significantly shaped disciplinary history.
So how do we think about the history of the subcontinent when colonial historiography continues to hold such discourse to power?
When we think of history as cause and effect, as change over time, as rise and decline,
we become implicated in the arrangement of it before and an after.
This temporal issue for the history of the subcontinent is that our prevalent and predominant before and afters are an inherited,
inherited teleology created by the European sciences of history under colonialism.
The challenge historians face is that they have to provide a history of continuity
that is not ipso facto a history of stagnation or of martial determinism.
Esteem erase the history of India around the notion of five thousand years within this enduring idea.
There were two organising concepts that the Golden Age,
which featured a majestic Hindu polity and monumental Sanskrit epics, initiated the 5000 years of unchanging,
quote, unchanging into this society and that of the mediaeval Muslim invader kings
who pushed India into darkness and maintained their power through despotism.
History as a field of knowledge lies at the centre of these constructions past.
The structuring of this assessment lies in an interlocking quadratic formulation that can be most simply expressed as follows.
India's past is 5000 years old. Just half way, I think, has been updated to twelve thousand years in the most current political regime in India.
So India's passes 5000 years old,
during which there was a golden age best epitomised by an emperor shoka who ruled over the
entirety of the subcontinent that golden age was disrupted and destroyed by Muslim invader.
My mother. It wasn't me who launched 17 invasions on the subcontinent and destroyed many temples, including the temple of Somnath.
Doesn't it inaugurates a dark age of Muslim despotic rule with the only respite in
that eight hundred years of tyranny being the enlightened rule of Jalaluddin puppet?
It was British colonial rule that provided a means to an end of missioner for Germany and the advent of liberal secularism after partition.
Five thousand years, the golden age of a Shogo, the 17 raids of Mahmood Wazni and the Muslim despotism.
That is the central logic and the philosophy of history that has organised the colonised historiography of the.
It is this a pastime that needs to be properly historic sized in order to undertake the project of reassessment.
When conceptualising how to think of this time, it is important to take seriously the intellectual genealogies of history.
Incursion from the 11th to the 19th century is to put Europe in a quote unquote proper historical case by demonstrating
how universal claims of history do specific violence to our understanding of the past and call them that's geography's.
At the heart of my work is a call to reassess and we learn Hindustani historical writings from the 11th century to the 20th.
The need to reassess early relearnt arises precisely because these texts have been rendered as biased,
limited, lacking the necessary, valid insights into the or presence that they purport to address.
They are outsider text removed from the lived realities of the subcontinent.
Before I turn to. Further on my talk to kind of talk specifically about my mother, Wazni.
I want to start off by just gesturing a little bit about this.
And these two frameworks,
these two frameworks that are co-dependent linked from the very inception in the colonial steam and throughout the production of history.
I can test both of these frames,
but I want to make sure that we understand that while I'm not going to tackle the question of the making of a shock and the golden age,
that project is very much co-dependent on the project that I will talk about today, which is talking about.
Now, when we talk about a member of the Rosny, it is important that within the coning imagination,
subcontinent and the subcontinent appears as early as the Portuguese arrival to be linked in this,
in the sense that it's linked in its Islamic history to the history of crusades and the history of Islam in Europe prior to the 15th century.
And that's something that I feel has not been theoretically explored enough.
The linking of the the long history of the Crusades and how the Europe's vision of
Islam within Europe and and in relation to the Abbasid empire and the Hubert's,
how that has impacted the 17th, 16th and 17th century understanding of Muslim rule in the subcontinent.
These days. These these geographies are somehow distinct.
However, the entire history of Muslims in the European imagination is understood generically as one of,
quote unquote, conquest epitomising the motif of the Sword of Islam.
This is a phrase that's introduced most most importantly by Edward Gibbons.
This word, however, predates the 18th century.
It's present in Dontae, the Geary's Inferno and Walter Ķiģelis, The Life and Death of Mohammed, the Conquest of Spain, just 60 37.
And Thomas Carliss, the hero as Prophet 1840. Modern scholarship on early Islam has foregrounded the conquest paradigm.
Examples range from Philip Gaieties Origins of Islamic State 1917 to HRR Gibbs The Arab Conquest of Central Asia nineteen point three.
The paradigm of Muslim conquest creates an originary myth for all Muslim polities that they are direct descendants of the earliest period.
Their home that is in Islam spon based on geography, the desert.
Any Muslim polity can be understood to have this concept.
Europeans used to describe the earliest period of Islam. So just quote unquote, tribe reads nomadism and so on.
So that nomine culture that is reserved for the earliest period.
No need not. I need not remind you or maybe I do need to remind everyone is used even as late as 2003 for Afghanistan and of course,
for histories of conflict that Compson 9/11 this had has had the anachronistic effect of freezing Islam as a,
quote, religion of the desert, even as it as has any other ideological or intellectual tradition mutated,
developed, matured and flourished far from us. Do not have a place of birth.
And here I want to quote a little bit from from Henry Myers Elliott to whose dates are 1888 to 1853,
who was a secretary in the Government of India Foreign Office and also responsible for the most monumental project of acquiring,
excerpting and rendering Muslim what he called the histories of Muhammad in India.
And this is what he would he how he kind of put it, I think succinctly, quote,
Scarcely had the false prophet inspired when his followers and disciples,
disciples issuing from the naked desert where they had hitherto robbed their neighbours and quarrelled amongst themselves,
hastened to convert their head. Ottery feuds into the spirit of unanimity and brotherly love.
The conquest of Persia was a mere prelude to further extension in the east and the West,
more difficult in an inhospitable country as well as internal dissensions cheque their progress or some years afterwards.
Yet it was not in the nature of things to be expected that they should long delay their attacks on the rich.
And I don't trust country of India, which offered so tempting a bit to their cupidity and zeal.
Now, this this this idea of of the zeal of the sward is central to how,
in this idea of the zeal of those of the Muslim conquest is this figure that I wanted to talk a little bit more about today,
which is memoir of personnel. The notion of Mahmud Lesnie as a foreign invader was critical to this idea of the dark age of Muslim despotic rule.
There was, however, an irony in the dual configuration of Shoka as a representative of the golden age of Mahmud Lesnie,
as Harold of the darkish British archaeologist, for example, located three Ashokan edicts in Kandahar and three in Luckman.
Both locations are now in Afghanistan. The inscriptions were in Greek, Aramaic and or bilingual Greek in army archaeology.
Accepted that these marked the territorial reach of Schocken governance, part of Ashoka's imperial rule,
whereas edicts perform the work of publicly proclaiming his vision for poverty, I quote.
And the king abstains from killing living beings and other men and those who are huntsmen fishermen of the king of desisted
from hunting on one of the pillars that is Boma Show Guys Not Mine is about 40 miles from Kabul and 100 miles from Poznan.
It was from Lesnie, however, that the European prototypical representative of the so-called Muslim invader came.
Mahmood, whose reigns are from nine ninety eight to ten thirty and who ruled from Bosnia,
Kabul in Lahore, was two British historiography, the very epitome of the foreign Muslim invader in 1776.
Edward Gibbon introduced him as the first quote to dawn on a holy war quote.
But the principal source of his mahmud's fame and riches was the holy war, which he waged against the Gentoos of India.
In this foreign narrative.
I may not consume a page and a Wallum wouldn't scarcely suffice to be kept recapitulated the battles and sieges of his twelve expeditions.
No, it's twelve. Forgiven. Never was the Muslim on.
He wrote, dismayed by the ink. Clemency of the seasons. The height of the mountains.
The breath of the river. The barrenness of the desert. The multitudes of the enemy or the formidable army of their elephants of war.
I just want to shout out to Edward Gibbon here and say that as a young person in Lahore
with the three three books that I could cheque up three books from the British Library,
I actually learnt English from Gibbons, the very same text that I'm citing today.
So almost 70 years later, Elphinstone Lord rewrote that passage in 1841 History of India.
As to Mamoon, the undiscovered regions of India presented a wider feel for romantic enterprise,
the great extent of that favourite country, the rumours of its accumulated treasures,
the fertility of the soil, and the peculiarity was production raised into a land of fable in which the
surrounding nations might indulge their imaginations without him without control.
Elphinston also reaffirmed that Mahmud's military excursions Lahor language in with for the purpose of plunder the 17 rates,
quote unquote, that I quoted before Motif began its life first as the 12 rates of memory of Lesnie and Gibbon and in Elphinstone,
who cited the authority by telling me that the envelope Alexander Downs to the best of the sasy,
all of whom wrote about the polity that emerged in Bosnia and asserted itself as a successor state to the Abbasid.
It was Eliot I mentioned earlier who corrected the figure of twelve raids to my mood of my mood to the now mythical 17 raids of Memo,
doesn't it be on India? So, Eliot, 17 raids that Mahmood waged in India would become totemic.
That would lead to be hunted, reproduced and in a brief history of the Indian Peoples in 1880.
And Vincent Smith added the number to his The Oxford History of India.
The text used for as a as exam textbook for all graduates from Oxford and or anyone wanted to serve in the Indian civil services.
By 1920, everyone taken the Indian Civil Service Exam would reflect on the 17 rates of Mahmood.
Sroka was the perfect Indian king, Mahmood the perfect Muslim invader.
So I want to take this as as I mentioned, this this figure of of of Mahmud's 17 raids.
And I want to just turn a little bit to how I want to think against it and re reframe it.
And I want to do this by looking at a historian named Farishta,
who was one of the who's writing in the late 60s, early 17th century, and Ibrahim the Shah.
The second, who is a ruler of Beachport in the Declan and he is British, does one of British thus patron first days.
Just to just to quickly summarise some somewhat of a diplomat.
He's a he's a field physician. He's obviously a historian, which is why we're talking about him today.
But he's also someone who is we can broadly understand as the literature and intellectual.
And he's asked by Abraham ideas, rather second to write the first total comprehensive history of Hindustan.
He us first that no such comprehensive account existed, quote, Since the histories of the Kings of Hindustan do not exist in one single volume,
you should grab the pen and you get yourself to write a book with such qualities, a book in plain language without artifice and lies.
It is with this mandate, that first test that had to compile an archive of all the histories that had come before in
all of the accounts of the different parts that would constitute the whole of Hindustan
in the archive available to him was the vast expanse of materials dated from the 9th to
the 17th century that contain a remarkable array of histories about polity and space.
First, I inherited this archive consisting the work of historians have been stored who shared ethical and
philosophical concern just with this same archive that I think we can write a history of in this time.
When we see hours are passed from the vantage point of fresh start from from the 17th century,
what we recognise that there is substantial body of writing that constitutes a living archive for writing history.
And this. We see a coherent into a reference reality.
A clear sense of development of theory and in practise of doing history and
deliberate way in which the logic of history is made apparent to future generations.
You're always writing history for the future. Do you always write history?
As for our tenured colleagues. So that's, again, kind of a shift in the ethics, I guess, of a historian.
The historian and this intellectual geography.
Even the Stein sees himself as an ethical servant of the governing elite, but also beholden to future generations.
While he served the governing ruler, he was not in a subservient position.
The historian sees as his audience a future reader who will judge his work on the ground of truthfulness,
a critical approach to understanding power as first then launches his own project to write a complete history of Hindustan,
rather rather than a history of royal lineages.
These ideas of history writing must have directly influenced his own thinking to approach first through
the lens of the historians who preceded him is already to dismantle the claim of colonialist geography,
where these historic histories are mere repositories of fact that can only be gleaned by the European historian.
What I want to foreground is first I was deliberately participating in a committee of historians whose work
informed first does interpretation of history from within such particular viewpoints of thinking about history.
The aim to produce a new mode of historical thinking is this preface like the preface of works before his gaze drips with humility,
recognising his shortcomings and handicaps while confronting the monumental nature of the task ahead.
I quote, In my youth,
my worthless years would often hear whispers from the sky that if the heavens have this manifest beauty and if the world is so carefully crafted,
if recognising the order of the universe is to praise the creator,
then it is incumbent upon one to write such a book that will contain the doings of kings,
Muslim kings and the conditions of the elders of faith such that the internal and external
conditions of the country of Hindustan are revealed as being sustained by these fundamental groups.
First rule is is here kind of perhaps Ventrella causing a long tradition within Persian and Arabic voices
from above that are prompting the poet or historian to undertake the monumental work that they have to do.
Even if we take this as a paradigmatic story,
I do want to say that it's important for us to understand that he is engaging in it with with respect to his own contemporary audience as well.
And the way he goes about this is that he begins his history with the with a problem lamina.
That's a that's that's that's titled the beliefs quote, the beliefs of the people of Hinden, the accounts of the appearance of Islam in their land.
And he said he starts, quote, amongst them. There is no other book more significant and reliable than the mob.
And he goes on to describe the Texas having more than one hundred thousand verses and talks about the translation of the text.
But in order to see the significance of British does engagement with the mar part,
it's important to understand that Molvar for Freestar is a work of history.
For example, when he concludes his summary account, he proclaims, God be praised.
Such an account of marvels and wonders is not contained in any history of the seven Clines except from this book and the stock.
And then he goes on to say, Call the Assa, the writer, the author.
He credits as the author of my. He calls him a, quote, eyewitness to history and the history of the war.
First, he argues that Viarsa not only witnessed the events, but also made his narrative useful with wise anecdotes,
an aphorism for his readers to ruminate upon, thus providing an ethics for the reader.
And it's this duality of eyewitness saying, reporting, critically engaging, but also providing a necessary, necessary lesson for the reader.
That free stuff is engaged in.
So having said all this, I want to in the last few last part, I want to just conclude my talk by talking about how fresh that reads.
Mahmud shows the the titular subject of the 17 or the 12 raids that began.
And in order to kind of think about my move against me.
Who who who is who was founded in the colonia sources.
We have to kind of dial back.
And what we see is that a lot of Lebanese contemporaries, historians and poet actually have captured much of much of the history that follows.
And Professor Ramita Tupper and others have written a lot about so enough and it wasn't.
So this is not grounds that I want to cover, as if I'm new to them.
But I would do want to highlight how Farishta is thinking about this this history that he reads from there.
Those see photo Keelen City, BERU need to be and then all of these other figures.
It is this tradition that forms, but does intellectual geography.
Looking at the past from Forresters perspective, highlights the availability and circulation of the major text of the previous six hundred years.
So that's another important point that you have the circulation of these histories in narratives of the past,
even to first time seven, six hundred years after the fact.
The awareness that this was a canon of history changes our perception of how to read them.
How did first I deal with the availability of multiple sources of competing pictures of the past?
What interpretive choices did that make?
As a historian, in accordance with or against a then canonical understanding of Mahmud Freestar titles, this section accounts of the Sudans of Lahore,
particularly known as the Navy SEAL Dance, which formally ecologies the geography of the stone to encompass the whole world.
And obviously there are some structures in this chapter in two parts.
First comes the political history of events. And then he narrates anecdotes, dreams, remembrance of the principal actors of the chapter,
the main sources for first of the history of the book again,
and his son Mahmood are the ones that first to understand this contemporary to the earliest histories I mention in passing.
These would be, and then slightly later,
13th and 14th century historians like Johnny Offie and me and all of these in them footage that relies as much as
he can on what he thinks are the ones closest to my mood in time and the ones who can give a eyewitness account.
But what we see in this micro episode and how fresh that's taking this one one but one tiny bit.
This is a monumental work. Contemporary like the critical edition is in four volumes.
And that was the NIS is it is a, you know, very short five, six page episode in it.
And so I wanted to kind of focus on on this episode. But what we see operating is this does method and how first that takes in and recast
his predecessor's history is to shift both the meaning and the agency of past actors,
as in his privileging of the mob out of the priest that plays out the themes of his contrapuntal history by interpolating actors,
victors and Concord into a sustained understanding of man after narrating the family and political history.
It's a book, The Ghent,
that recounts the book The Guinn's decision to advance his army against the polytheists of Hindustan as he started this is first as noise,
avoidance and saturnine. Seven of nine seven seven use the book to concoct a few forts where, quote,
where Islam had made no Packwood's constructed, quote, mosques and places code and collected vast riches.
Returning victories too, wasn't it? So the book gains actions.
First strikes alarmed Jay Paul, son of Paul, who was called a Brahmin by birth and whose politics then did certain to move on to Kashmir,
unquote, and who worried that his heritage tree poverty would be taken, quote, by those outsiders, unquote.
So looked again and Jay Paul clashed near Mool done.
The water raged for days and Freestar calls attention to the bribe, bravery and scale of the young men killed in combat.
The battle was so evenly balanced that writes that, quote, One could not differentiate between the victorious and the unquote.
In that balance, an unspecified group approached the young man and told him that near Jay Paul's camp was
a natural spring with the miraculous power that should any impurity be thrown into it.
The gods will be angered, the skies will darken and snow and thunderstorm will appear.
Mahmud ordered that manure or other impurities be immediately thrown into the spring.
Last foretold an immediate darkness, engulfed the battleground and, quote, a bright day became like the darkest night, unquote.
And such a cold wind blew that mules and horses perished from.
Frightened by the calamitous shift in weather, Jay Paul's warriors lost their courage and appeal to him to surrender.
Surrender to this heaven. For J.
Paul with us forced to appeal for peace, which some of the gang accepted to get at first does method here we have to first look at.
But first, the sources were telling and then considered his own addition to this account of the past.
The earliest version of the clash between the book again and Jay Paul is it would be study for Yemeni, which describes the conflict.
However, it would be. Narration.
It was the young Mahmood himself who already held the knowledge that polluting the spring would bring about darkness over the land.
The later historian Just Janni in the 14th century in the 13th century only mentions that's the book again defeated J.
Paul and gives no details about the pitched battle, nor of any heavenly intervention ofthe another contemporary of Johnny Joe Army guy.
It also describes his battle in an anecdote with interesting differences in OFFIE.
The information that there is a sacred spring in the vicinity of the battleground is conveyed to the young men mood by an old woman.
When my mood pollutes the spring, it brings about the snow storm and the victory forces looked again.
The earliest account form would be the easiest to interpret. It is an odd march to the young Mamool to demonstrate the sacred reach of a young man
moon who can turn even the natural world of into stone against the polytheists in OFFIE.
The story invites reflection. My mood is not the holder of knowledge.
Rather, the knowledge is held by an old woman of the stone, often placed as his anecdote in the section titled, quote,
on the chemical properties of natural objects, unquote,
thereby drawing attention not to Mahmud's several power but to the natural world and its mysteries.
In just Janani, whose emphasis on tracing the descent of power from the Woori sultans of Lahor in which the enemy stages of little direct importance,
Zarni simply states the outcome of the event, the victory and moves up in first, thus recounting of this history.
Some critical changes were made to the narrative. The motif of cooperation often a means to invoke divine intervention shapes which does narrative.
Thus, what does account of this first battle is a unique reconfiguration of this historical event.
The Muslim army and the Hindu army are portrayed as equals. The landscape has sacred elements that cause divine intervention,
and those inhabitants who lived around the battlegrounds, an unspecified group, have a stake in halting wars on them.
While the markers of religious difference foreground this particular incident spoke, the Gayton intends to build mosque from place to.
First, that does not spell out which sacred power was offended by the pollution of the spring.
Unlike would be first, that takes the glory and agency away from Mamou and gives it to the people of the Star.
They are the ones you knew about the spring and their intervention that stops the bloodshed.
Just Johnny and his accountant in doubt. Mahmud's birth with divine significance at the occasion of his birth.
An idol in why Hinde fell over and smashed into bits.
Just down, he writes, quote, converted thousands of temples into mosques and conquered many cities if it was done and defeated many Rogers, unquote.
However, just Johnny writing two hundred years after Mahmud's time does not delve much into Muhammad's history.
The only battle of Mahmud that Jonny describes is the one that some not in Woodroffe and Jasni.
He writes that Mahmood brought back Mignot, the idol from some not, and divided into four parts.
One part was placed in the central mosque and was not one in the palace and two were sent to Mecca and Medina.
For Chinese, portrait of Mahmud undergoes a marked shift in Firster, unlike just Gianni's, a conference that describes the battle to die.
Tiny and Dona Haasan Converge Matura Ryan the horror both long history of clashes before Mahmud gets to.
So not even in these events. Mahmud is presented as focussed on building alliances where possible and destroying temples.
Only when necessary. Often miraculin are the most cited historians in this section.
But first, that changes the meaning and import of many of the events narrated in the section changes that
amount to a recalibration of the ways in which Mahmood can be seen as a person and a warrior.
An example just to highlight this after his taking power in the heart.
Mahmud. This is again quoting from first up. After taking power in the hall, Mahmud heads towards Rajan Lunda Volleyer after a short siege by Mahmood,
Nunda asked for peace with an offering of thirty five elephants. Mahmud counters and asks for three hundred elephants, not by Greece, but four.
Is that right? As a test, he Nunda released the three hundred elephants without any riders.
But Mahmud's troops are able to corral the elephants, impressing no.
None then writes in the language of him. Again, according to, according to Forrester, a couplet from him.
Mahmud shows this couplet to the literati of Hindi, Arabic and Persian at his court, and they unanimously praised it for this literary value.
Duly impressed by Nunda, Mahmood consulted the adviser and grants the governorship of 15 forts, including Colin Jar to London.
This is not simple. Certainly not a simplistic portrayal of an idle smasher who conquers an despotic rules,
which was to become the dominant understanding of men and leaders. Europeanist geography first time.
In fact, highlight's Mahmood as responding as much to a literary exchange as to a stalemate in warfare.
When we turn to first does account of so not,
we again see that it does not simply hew to what previous historians had reported in first thought Mahmud decides to campaign to.
So not only after you heard reports that all of the other duties have been done subservient to the one in so.
And when the story of Mahmud's arrival to solve not and then the breaking of the Eidos may be familiar to everyone and the pieces that were taken of,
some not back to the back to Kabul become an important part of European imagination,
including the proclamation of Elphinstone when he brought there some gates of some not back to back to India in 1840, 1942.
But I want to actually say how Farishta treats that little episode of of of icon of picking up the icon.
First, the rights that the caretakers of the temple plead the mood to spared the
destruction of the idol and to instead take from them at substantial annual tax.
Mahmood consults with his adviser. They agree with the caretakers.
CLEET Freestar writes that Mahmud's adviser told him he should leave the idol alone and accept the tax or by destroying the Idol cook.
Neither will the practise of idol worship end here, nor will it benefit us.
Instead, this sum of money will benefit many poor Mahmood.
However, he responds with a stunning articulation of his paradoxical approach to power.
According to first the quote, What if what you say is correct?
But if I follow your advice, I will be known to posterity as Idol seller and not an idol smasher.
First, the documents. This difference of opinion registered six hundred years prior.
Between Mahmud's advisors who are making a mutually beneficial case and Mahmud's personal convictions.
As an iconoclast, first, I certainly cleared that Mahmood makes a choice not based on what is good for either the people of some not,
nor for the people it wasn't. But one, what do you imagine the judgement of posterity would be on him?
And it's the judgement of posterity that I think first is able to render onto.
And that's where I want to finish.
Just Danny ends the life with Mahmud by proclaiming his rule extended east across all of Jim footstone them to Burraston Iraq.
Nimruz Fighter School took what is done and took its thumb.
And then he died after visiting Baghdad and getting a title from the caliph.
So it's a very, you know, rags to riches story or minor riches to major riches story.
Just Johnny celebrates Mahmud as a conqueror, ties into the caliphate. My first thought again differs when it comes to the close the chapter.
My first thought is that after Mahmud's campaign against Juk and Turkmenistan, he grew ill from either anaemia or tuberculosis.
Two days before his death, a priest actually spends a lot of time trying to diagnose the illness.
And this is part of this kind of physician work.
Two days before his death, he commanded that all of the treasures he had collected over his life be gathered in the compounds that resembled a garden.
This is fresh stuff.
Mahmood said, quote, Looking at them with covetous eyes and with audible gasps, cried and cried, and then ordered them to be put back in the Treasury.
But he a reckoning of my mood continues across several anecdotes where my mood is shown to be covetous, hasty, often of two minds.
He's no paragon of virtue and certainly not an ideal of kingship.
Instead, much of the time, he's described before stuff as harming his own ability.
Unlike Judge Darney, there's no attempt by Farishta to connect Mahmud's rain to that.
That nor do Gwalior glorify his memory any way. Mohammed's history.
Mahmud's history allows for a that to highlight the theme to which he repeatedly
circles back the necessity of listening to advisers showing kindness to civilians,
a resolution through PAP's instead of wars. First, the highlights.
Mahmud's flaws as an individual as well as the king move to Freestar is brave, capricious, attentive to the judgement of history.
First, that leads into that judgement to show that Mahmud's iconoclasm is no longer a point to celebrate.
If it was rather a zeal and personal drive as a story of caution, according to freestyle,
what is lacking from a mood is a sense of promoting the greater good of those in governance.
So what we learn from examining first there's treatment of my mood is that the life
of Mahmud's serves as an illustration to the implicated history for sketching,
where piety does not lie with Muslim rulers alone. The past to Farishta is a repository for much.
New ethical registers can be opened up. His history always has agents and protagonists who act according to their
personal foibles and predeliction and not due to forces of ideology or religion.
First, that mandate was to write the first comprehensive history of the time.
He does so by assembling an archive of histories that could span the whole geography
of Hindustan Ripperton and Persian and Arabic from the 9th to the 17th century,
to which he adds histories of the places and peoples of the stunt from epics like Mad About It and Shahnameh.
This history was not simply an amalgamation of facts, as argued by Springer, Iliad and other European historians.
Instead, first, US history was a novel interpretation of the histories that had come before him.
It reflected a long genealogy of historians interested in the practise and ethics of history writing.
Their accounts provide an intellectual geography that reaches across the many places.
Thank you very much. I'll stop here. Nic, thank you so much, money that was fascinating.
I can see that, but what did he got? Tons of questions, actually.
So, Danica, can you hear me now?
That's my speaker turned off so I can hear you.
So I'm saying that you've got lots of questions for you already, and I can see them all popping into the Q&A box.
Would you like to just stick them in the order in which to be good? If that's OK.
Guess that's fine. So, yeah. So I'm wondering, can everyone read the questions that are published in the Q&A box?
Do we need to read them out again for those, OK?
I think people can read them. So the first one is from someone who anonymous.
Oh, sure, I can take that. I think so.
Now, mothers are asking community India contributor. This conquest paradigm in the subcontinent is a grant to argue those rostral refugees in India.
Separate from the later translation. Thank you.
I think that the the question of shall nominate as it text long predates the 19th century.
It's one of the most circulated, cited, illuminated, illustrated copy texts that we have.
So I think even though it's only much later that this idea that shall astronomy, it represents a type of Iran or the idea of Iran that predates Islam,
the circulation of Shahnameh certainly predates those kinds of interventions, historical interventions.
And is it used by the European thought in order to create this paradigm?
I think I mean, obviously for Gibbon, Gibbon cites Shahnameh when he talks about talks about my mood.
So I think it's definitely a part and parcel of the kind of sources, the earliest sources that are used.
Thank you. What do you think about the next question is, what do you think about the distinction between Hindustan pirates,
especially when you think about today's India? Thank you. So one of the things that I argue in the book, and I'm not able to.
I didn't go into it, is that this done as a as a political idea?
And the conceptual conceptual terrain begins to undergo a shift over it over the 18th and 19th centuries.
So what we understand is understand the first stop Hindustan extended from, like I mentioned, Kabul to beanball from the Himalayas to the NUNCA.
And that understanding of the sun as the subcontinent begins to shift in their European rule, European imagination, largely because it's.
It begins to be titled the the.
Of the mobile. So the mobile polity and its its contraction and expansion becomes Hindustan.
And then from Mobile, it becomes Mohammedan India and becomes more north India.
And from Muhammad in India, Hindustan after the arrival of British India official British India after 1857.
You have in this done largely as a as a ideia nominally associated with a type of either cultural or linguistic or musical paradigms.
And the debate in the for example,
the Constituent Assembly of India is precisely whether India and pottage should be the only two words mentioned in the Constitution,
and not this time because Hindustan was by then by and by.
By the mid 20th century, understood simply as an idea that belonged only to the Muslims of the North Indian corridor, largely between Bihar and Dabiq.
Many. So the next day, as many historians generally criticise, going to periodisation for being community lives and no less insidious.
But honestly, do you have any alternative methodology as such regional ethnic Class-Based?
We've been so Balton Donora to feel to give us a substantive alternative paradigm.
At the most they prefer partial searchlight's. Is this the colonial stuff proving to be sheer hot air?
I feel that the question the declining approach produces.
It's not so much to argue for another dominant hegemonic periodisation paradigm that we can finally say is the truth to history.
I think what it needs to but it offers us is a way to understand and contextualise
the colonial efforts to novated the period through a particular dominant framework.
So they the the interlocking between disciplinary history writing for whom this
periodisation is of primary importance because this is a modern South Asia seminar.
I am a mediaeval historian. And yet here we are.
Is precisely the ways in which discipline forms it itself.
Are there other ways of thinking about the past possible? Absolutely.
And they are not just devolving devolving time into smaller segments or region or space into smaller, smaller geographies,
but rather how we actually incorporate memory and history and thinking about the past as leered or as
having multiple temporality and multiple spaces and overlapping historiography that are not contentious.
But at the other contrapuntal. As I tried to it's tried to demonstrate for free stuff.
That's I think that the colonial approach, whether or not it's hot.
You're I mean, you know, is the colonial epic a steam hot air?
I don't think it's hot air.
Anything that was used actively as an agent for enslavement and destruction of human beings and resources and histories and past is not hot here.
I don't take the colonial at the steam to be simply a matter of historians inventing categories.
Jerry, you know, James Mill's history of British India is not simply a text that exists in a library and has no consequences.
It has immediate consequences. For those of you who read any of the utilitarian step follow, even including Marx and Marx's understanding.
So it's not hot here. I don't mean to kind of, but it is important for us to understand the violence that this happens.
I've been told this five minutes, LEPs. Sorry.
How can we distinguish between Hindustani destroyed graphical construction within the Persian traditions and understand as a place of belonging?
I ask because you mainly look at do Arabic. Persian. Thank you.
That's a great question actually in the book, not in the excerpt you heard today.
I do. I do. Do try my best to cast a wide net using some script above ramshaw Persian and such and Arabic and or do sources.
So there are there's there's evidence throughout the text of the Sun's presence through different literary registers.
But again, you know, one of the things that we that that is the invention is the idea that Sanskrit belongs to
a particular religious tradition or Persian belongs to a particular religious tradition.
And thus we can get that traditions, thoughts or belongings from that particular linguistic register.
Again, that's not something that we imagine for any other space or any other community in the entire world.
But we definitely imagined that Sanskrit. If something is in Sanskrit, it tells us about something called Hindu.
And if something is in Persian or hoodoo, it tells us about something called Muslim.
That dichotomy is not internal. Has that have any internal logic?
It's certainly has a logic, according to the theme.
What role, if any, did the 20th history lecture the nuts car and apartment them played in the creation of Muslim and in the history of India?
Thank you, Doctor. That's a great question. And actually part of my introduction and conclusion deals with both Jetconnect Sarkar and Father
McConnell did not sacar very much in his in his in his understanding building on Earvin's work,
understood this paradigm of Muslim outsider and an Indian native and reproduced that shubha them of Hohn,
on the other hand, who presided over the first Indian modern Indian history, Congress in nineteen thirty five,
whose presidential address I, I, I quote in the last chapter or in the afterword in the book,
actually made a, I think, a remarkable and prescient claim to the past, to the present,
to the future that he was confronting where he said that the ways in which the colonial history,
graphic tradition has organised the past up into Storen will lead to the violence and partition of the subcontinent.
And this is, again, previous to any formal formal claim of partition that happens in the 20th century.
Sestra, Father McCone certainly is one of the stories that I, I, I, I raise my attention to that.
Who had the clarity and ethics of thinking of the future that was coming towards them.
But I think that you must under house most question and we have time.
Don't worry. Oh yeah, I. Because that's the sort of thing that and I think Sondra's is broken into too.
And you can take more time and we could take more questions if I need. Thank you, Sandra.
Thank you. So thank you.
Struck by how many of the tropes to narrate conquest, nomadism, the sword are also tropes that contemporary defenders have been this done use.
Would you how would you help us theorise this kind of counterpoint and tribulation?
Thank you. So I think as I as I briefly indicated in my in my remarks, that the trope of the conquest that, you know,
within which there is a Muslim is the sort of Islam and the Muslim conquest actually is
remarkably remarkably coherent as a trope through the mediaeval European rendition.
And then obviously, as it enters disciplinary scholarship and politics in the 19th,
18th and 19th century and the idea of sward as a marker of this history.
Formally becomes part of textbook. So I mentioned once Winston Smith's work.
But all of these other textbooks that these other exams that are conscript contributed.
And you know, that that that idea,
that imaginary of the sward and then the temple and the camel and all these these ideas that are that stand outside any formal change as in indeed,
they appear to be iconic no matter what period you're looking at,
what time you're looking at are taken up by contemporary politics, very much from the colonial history orthography,
very much using the same translations, the same renditions of of earlier histories, the same.
In fact, the same texts. So Richard Burton, for example, just to cite one person who plays a oversized role in this in this in this historiography,
his his accounts of not only of Mecca and Medina,
but sin and also his so-called renditions of texts like Kamasutra in which the Muslim hair and the Muslim woman and the
Haram or NYSUT visit the song plays such an incredible role are widely translated or republished and cited to this day.
People who are curious about that should cheque out Divine Mithras Indian sex life.
But I think, again, the the the the availability of all of these narratives,
the comprehensive way in which they claim to represent the past is not a there's no anecdote antidote to that.
And we just basically faced this monumental framing, the colonial framing that has not gone away.
And so that's why I I very much hesitating with the word post-colonial.
And I very much appreciate colonial and because these forms of thinking and knowing
the past are not something that were shrugged off in any moment of independence.
One last question. Thank you for presenting to us. I wonder how this idea and this idea is in the sand in Arabic sources.
Thank you. Thank you very much for for attending. I really appreciate your question.
Yeah, absolutely. We think about how the earlier Arabic sources basically thought about Hindu sin or Lindero of sin.
If we use the Arabic, the Hindustan appears as a conceptual geography in those early sources.
So I cite them, I think, to them in my chapter, thinking about the Indian Ocean world from which they merge.
And what what is distinctive is that within those sources,
where would are conceptual framework is very much limited to the ports that they are these these accounts are mainly about.
So they're about sin, but then they have some understanding of Kashmir there about what we now call good dropped and a little bit Internet
and and the the kind of proper formulation of Hindustan as they as the entire entire subcontinent happens.
Actually, in histories like that, I say like Masood, the etc.,
who are thinking of Hindu or Hindustan as a as a as the broader at the broadest subcontinental expanse.
So it's not so much that Arab, Arabic and Persian has hinted send or Hindustan, but rather different genres of history,
writing or travel, writing or narratives have different understandings of authenticity.
Plastic. Well, I think. Thank you so much, mint on that was most brilliant talk.
And thank you so much for so efficiently and engaged in this engagement and dealing with the questions.
I don't see any more. So I think we're going to end this sort of the segment of the seminar now.
Thank you all for being here. And apologies again for the slight technical issues of the delayed starting.
But thank you for your questions and thank you for being part of the seminar. Thank.
Thank you. From my end to all the participants, I can't see you.
I don't know where you are, but thank you so much for giving some time to my my words.
I really, really appreciate it. Great. Thank you.
And there's going to be a recording of this if you want to listen to what Professor Smith was saying.