The Loss of Hindustan by Manan Ahmed Asif

Author:Manan Ahmed Asif [Asif, Manan Ahmed]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780674987906
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2020-11-24T08:00:00+00:00

COMMONERS AND KINGS

The narratives of merchants and traders in the Indian Ocean world illuminate histories of Hindustan that do not fit within paradigmatic categories established by the European historians and philosophers of the early modern period. Let me begin with the earliest depictions of the peoples of Hindustan in Arabic merchant narratives from the ninth and tenth centuries. The ninth-century ʿAjaʾib al-Hind and Akhbar al-Sin waʾl Hind, composed and compiled by merchants of the Indian Ocean, are meant to invoke the lives of communities along the western port cities. These accounts reveal shared cosmologies making the explicit claim that Muslims are native to Hindustan. They also reveal the central facets of everyday lives in the littoral region—that these are regulated communities with agreements, treaties, and governance across all communities.

The ʿAjaʾib gives a history of asceticism in Hindustan by beginning in Sarandip (now Sri Lanka), where live the “Bikarji,” who “love Muslims and meet with them with pleasure.”67 They are described as wearing small-patched clothing, having cremated ash rubbed on their bodies, having shaved heads and faces, and carrying a skull or bones around their necks or in their hands. The ʿAjaʾib reports that when the wise of Sarandip learned of the emergence of the Prophet Muhammad, they sent someone to Medina to learn about his teaching. The traveler reached Medina only after the Prophet had passed away, during the caliphate of ʿUmar Khattab. They turned back. The man perished in Makran on the way back, but his servant continued to Sarandip and reported all he had seen and heard, including the ascetic ways in which ʿUmar lived—“he wears patched-up clothes and spends his nights in the mosque.” The ascetics of Sarandip are so impressed by the stories of this just king that they begin to emulate his practices of wearing and living. This is a moment of recognition in the text. The Arab merchant account does not describe an encounter with an unknown, alien ritual practice. Rather, the story signifies the recognition by the Arab merchants of a commonality between a practice of asceticism of the people of Hindustan and their ruler in Arabia, who is himself an ascetic.

These very early Indian Ocean accounts see separate polities in Hindustan, with their own particular histories, and laws. While these accounts also highlight the wild abundance of wealth or the wondrous asceticism of yogis, they are nonetheless approaching Hindustan from a position of commensurability and not alterity. The Akhbar’s section “Accounts of the Countries of Hind and China, and Their Rulers” begins:

The people of Hind and China are united in their opinion that there are four greatest of kings in the world. They consider the first of these four to be the king of Arabs: it is a unanimous opinion among them, about which there is no disagreement, that of the four kings he is the mightiest, the richest in possessions, and the most resplendently fine in appearance, and that he is the king of the great religion to which nothing is superior.

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