Chasing India in Mexico City

This paper works with a paradox that animates the writing of Mexican and Indian history. In Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (2006), Camilla Townsend writes that Mexico was conquered, and yet, Mexico could never be conquered because indigenous ways of being in the world survived, adapted, and continued. Similarly, in A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (2016), Manan Ahmed writes that Sindh was conquered by British armies but cities such as Uch, in which shrines and trees remain imbued with the sacred, point to what is impossible to conquer. If change itself has unchanging essence embedded within it—we must know what “Sindh” or “Mexico” is in order to recognize that it has changed—then what would it mean for post-colonized historians to think more deeply about what historical narrative cannot conquer, tame, or control? How might we think about ways of doing history that we have internalized despite these being a product of European conquest themselves? To reflect on this question, I will draw on my forays as a Mughal historian into Mexican history, and on how pre-modern and modern encounters between the Muslim world and the Americas might open windows into yet unexplored ways of inhabiting the past and present.