In The Loss of Hindustan, Manan Ahmed Asif conducts meticulous research into the idea of Hindustan and its supplantation by the idea of India through the work of history writing. The result is more than 300 pages of absorbing scholarship for readers interested in the history, culture, society, and politics of the region that is now popularly known in the West as South Asia. Tarikh-i Firishta, written by Muhammad Qasim Firishta in the early seventeenth century, forms the basis for Asif's exploration: “This Persian history, and its own intellectual genealogy, constitutes the bedrock—a sedimentation—for this book” (p. 6). The book advances four concomitant arguments: (1) the unmaking of “Hindustan” and the making of “India” are parallel processes; (2) the erasure of the idea of Hindustan and the construction of the idea of India are essentially acts of political forgetting through the writing of history; (3) reading Firishta and his colonial commentators holds the key to understanding the transition from Hindustan to India; and (4) colonial historiography should be reevaluated by turning to the work of native historians. The Loss of Hindustan also foregrounds the ethics of writing history.

Asif searches for the concept of Hindustan in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Urdu sources produced between the tenth and nineteenth centuries and finds its most eloquent exposition in Firishta's history. In the narratives recorded in these sources, Hindustan emerges as a political and spatial concept inhabited by peoples of different faiths and ways of living. This idea of Hindustan is supplanted in colonial works of history that give birth to the idea of British India. Colonial historiography also marks the genesis of Indological studies with its focus on Sanskrit texts and Vedic cosmologies. Asif contends that the framing of the subcontinent's history in terms of five thousand years of unchanging Hindu society and of the medieval Muslim invaders and despots is a product of colonial historiography that needs to be debunked. He suggests a return to the historical writing of indigenous authors: “At the heart of this book is a call to reassess and relearn Hindustani historical writings from the eleventh century to the twentieth” (p. 30).

Besides the introduction and afterword, there are five chapters. Each chapter is structurally organized into three sections: (1) foregrounding of the colonial project of history writing in British India; (2) examination of native intellectual traditions of writing history that preceded Firishta; and (3) Firishta's history as the final word on the discussion. Asif justifies making Tarikh the basis for his exploration: “Firishta's Tarikh is the most comprehensive and substantive rendering of the concept of Hindustan . . . Here, I argue both for Firishta's originality and his comprehensiveness in thinking about Hindustan” (p. 24).

In the introduction, Asif successfully dispels the popular myth that associates the concept of Hindustan with the Mughals and argues instead that the idea of Hindustan as “a place of territorial integrity that encompassed the entire subcontinent” inhabited by “diverse communities of believers” already existed there (p. 3). Chapter 2 discusses the works of history done by colonial British authors, most prominently by William Jones, resulting in “the loss of Hindustan” and “the invention of India.” This chapter also discusses the history of the subcontinent found in Arabic and Persian sources. Here, Asif argues that one has to look for the “world of Hindustan” in “Arabic and Persian histories” (p. 30). This chapter lays the groundwork for the remaining chapters of the book.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with specific themes that reevaluate the historical contexts for the designation Hindustan. In chapter 3, Asif is “concerned with the articulation of the work of history expressed by historians in Firishta's archive” (p. 64). Chapter 4 discusses Hindustan as a political and historical entity that lasted for several centuries. In chapter 5, Asif discusses the representation of the peoples of Hindustan and their social and political practices in colonial historiography and Hindustani histories. The last chapter focuses on Firishta's influence in history writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Firishta's Tarikh, Asif argues, provided a model for synthetic histories of Hindustan written in Persian and Urdu during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Loss of Hindustan is immensely relevant at a time when majoritarian narratives hold sway over a subcontinent that looks headed for faith-based polarization. Asif rightly argues that the majoritarian politics with its “interest in locating the Muslim-or-Hindu-ness in the deep past” is “predicated on finding historical roots for imagined trauma” (p. 61); this involves political forgetting. Asif's thesis that “political forgetting is an act of writing history” (p. 5) also explains the current regime's preoccupation with rewriting history in India. Asif ends the book with a call for historians “to take collective action in the face of majoritarian claims on the past” (p. 225) by basing their intellectual work on ethical principles. Asif's study also holds significance for theorizations on Indian society and politics. It is a reminder that any genuine attempt at constructing Indian social and political theory has to move beyond colonial episteme and duly factor in the medieval.

The Loss of Hindustan is a timely masterpiece of historical research. Asif's main contributions lie in re-enlivening the concept of Hindustan, demolishing colonial historiography, making a case for a reassessment of histories of Hindustan by Hindustanis, and calling for ethical underpinnings of history writing. Detailed and extensive scholarly endnotes are helpful and do not hinder the smooth reading of the text. The Loss of Hindustan is invaluable for the students and scholars of South Asia or any general reader interested in the subcontinent's history.