Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India.

Asif's primary contention, woven throughout the monograph, is that we can recover just such a perspective from the seventeenth-century encyclopedic treatise, I Tarikh-i Firishta i , composed by the early seventeenth-century historian Muhammad Qasim Firishta, writing from the Deccan in central India. Asif contends, for instance, that Firishta inverts the customary historiographical focus on royal polity, replacing it with the geography of Hindustan, dealing equitably, as a result, with non-Muslim polities such as the Vijayanagara Empire of south India. With regard to the latter project, Asif successfully makes the case that Firishta's perspective can allow us to begin to provincialize and denaturalize our own assumptions about Indian history and its connection with religious difference. [Extracted from the article]