Book Review: Historians of Medieval India: Studies in Indo-Muslim Historical Writings by Peter Hardy
Publisher: Luzac, Reprinted by Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers
Originally Published: 1960
Book Blurb: The writings of medieval Indo-Muslim Historians have been often interpreted, anachronistically, as providing, in retrospect, justification of the British Raj or the positions of twentieth-century nationalist and anti-nationalist movements.
Introduction: Historians of Medieval India, written in the 1950s, analyzed some of the medieval historians’ motives and presuppositions. This book recognizes the need to make space for developments in the linguistic motivations of political writing, notably the contentions that language does not merely explains a matter but rather also creates a narrative.
Recommended For: Students pursuing masters in early medieval and medieval history. For those who wish to read more on the contemporary sources of the history of the Delhi Sultanate.
The book is divided into eight chapters from which the initial chapters discuss the contemporary historians of the Delhi Sultanate. Peter Hardy begins the first chapter by discussing the history writing trends popular in late colonial and newly independent India by both British and Indian Historians.
The author has very carefully analyzed how modern historians of medieval India have interpreted the historiography of the period. He reflects on important primary sources and how they have been written and contextualised.
He then observes how these primary sources of the Delhi Sultanate have been read by modern scholars of history. This works essentially attempts to understand and highlight the shortcomings of modern historians and the writing of history.
He has discussed Zia al-Din Barani (1285-1358 CE), a political thinker and historian during the Tughlaq Dynasty, Shams al-Din Siraj Afif (b. 1342 CE), Yahya ibn Ahmad Sirhindi, a historian of the Sayyid Dynasty. They were court historians and documented the political history of the Delhi Sultanate in chronological order.
He then discusses the works of Amir Khusrau Dihlawi (1253-1325 CE), and Isami (b. 1311 CE) to understand their treatment of history. Together these five personalities and their work are considered indispensable sources that have helped scholars reconstruct a crucial period.
Book Review: A History of Assam by Edward A. Gait
This book assumes that the reader has some prior interaction with the history of early medieval India and the contact of the early Muslims in South Asia. Peter Hardy skips the long introductions of writers and other profiles and immediately jumps into the primary source and its construction.
“Perhaps the display, in an Indian edition, of the author’s assumptions in Historians of Medieval India may provide a measure of the freedom that Indian historians have achieved, fifty years after political independence, from Westerner’s constructions of India’s past.”
Peter Hardy was a historian of Medieval India and an important scholar of Indo-Persian Historiography. He wrote extensively on the need for new interventions in the styles of history writing that move away from the imperialist lens that puts the West in the centre. This book is the result of his lifelong scholarship and is considered one of his most important works.
If you want to dive into the early centuries of Indian History and how it has been remembered by the scholars of their time, this book could be your next read. Happy Reading!
