The End of Hindustan

In 1768, Alexander Dow published the first "History of Hindostan" and followed it up with an expanded version in 1772 CE. Dow became the documentary source on the history of subcontinent for Edward Gibbon, for a philosophy of history for Voltaire, Hume, and later Kant, Herder and Hegel. Yet, when, in 1817, James Mill published his "The History of British India" there was a clear shift. "British India" replaced Hindustan. Historians have done much to investigate the political history of the British loss of their colonies in northern America, in 1776, and their gain of colonies in the subcontinent, by 1803. However, little attention has been paid to the history of the political concept of "Hindustan" which organized political and social thought in the subcontinent since the eleventh century. The polity the British displaced and later triumphed over, the Mughals, were after all "shahahshah-i Hindustan" (king of kings of Hindustan). This paper is attuned to investigating precisely what is lost in the seemingly transparent rendition of Hindustan as British India (and later, India). It argues that this rendition is, in effect, an erasure of a durable concept with deep textual, material, and social understanding of what it meant to belong to, and be part of, the subcontinent. The paper traces the ways in which Hindustan was first introduced in the colony through renditions of Persian histories, and how those histories were moved from knowledge itself to raw materials for a European philosophy of history. It brings into relief the work of Hindustani historian such as Muhammad Qasim Firishta (active ca. 1570-1620) who relied on the works of historians from Herat, from Kabul, from Yemen, from Delhi in writing his history. This paper thus performs an archeology on the concept of Hindustan, in order to put Europe in its sedimentary place.