Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in South Asian Studies
Episode: Manan Ahmed Asif, "The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India" (Harvard UP, 2020)
Description: 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...