In 1768, when the East India Company (military) officer and Orientalist, Alexander Dow, translated Firishta’s text into English, it came to be seen by the English as an authoritative source of historical information. Despite his contested assertion about Yusuf’s Ottoman origin, Firishta’s account continues to be a very popular story widely accepted in Bijapur to this day. Firishta’s accounts are held credible because of his affiliation with the south Indian kingdom of Bijapur. Tarikh-i-Farishta is said to be independent and reliable on the topic of north Indian politics of the period. The conclusion treats the geography and climate of India. The first ten books are each occupied with a history of the kings of one of the provinces the eleventh book gives an account of the Muslims of Malabar and the twelfth a history of the Muslim saints of India. So is an account of the victorious progress of Arabs through the East. In the introduction, a resume of the history of Hindustan prior to the times of the Muslim conquest is given. The work was variously known as the Tarikh-i Firishta and the Gulshan-i Ibrahimi. However, Prince Miran spared the life of his former friend, who then left for Bijapur to enter the service of King Ibrahim Adil II in 1589. At this time, the Sunni Deccani Muslims allegedly committed a general massacre of the foreign population, especially Shias of Iranian origin. In 1587, Firishta was serving as the captain of guards of King Murtaza Nizam Shah I when Prince Miran overthrew his father and claimed the throne of Ahmednagar. Tarikh-i-Firishta is said to be independent and reliable on the topic of north Indian politics of the period… Firishta’s accounts are held credible because of his affiliation with the south Indian kingdom of Bijapur. While Firishta was still a child, his father was summoned away from his native country into Ahmednagar, India, to teach Persian to the young prince Miran Husain Nizam Shah, with whom Firishta studied. He was born in 1560 to Gholam Ali Hindu Shah. Astarabad is the capital city of Golestan province of Iran, famous for carpet manufacturing as well as for some archaeological sites, including Tureng Tepe and Shah Tepe, that hold remains dating from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras. Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah Astarabadi, was a Persian historian, who later settled in India and served the Deccan sultans as their court historian. Whatever is available in the books of historiography is summarised in the lines that follow. Not much is known about the personal history of our protagonist. The autonomy of the orientalist discourse stands challenged by this “path-breaking” assertion.īefore proceeding any further, it would be worthwhile to provide some perspective on Qasim Firishta and his book. The British administrative-historian who later wrote extensively on India had been instructed through the historical lens, provided by the protagonist of this write-up. Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Moreover, it is a way of coming to terms with the Orient (the East) that is based on the Orient’s special place in the European Western culture and experience. Orientalism is a much talked about term, brought to pre-eminence by literary theorist, Edward Said, in his seminal work Orientalism. It offered a lot to contemplate, as well as converse about, to the academics who had congregated on the occasion. This – the construction of the orientalist knowledge about India premised on a book of history written by an Indo-Persian historian, Muhammad Qasim Firishta – is, indeed, a path-breaking assertion. The point that Dr Asif quite persuasively underscores in the book is the seminality of Tarikh-i-Firishta in the construction of the image and impression about the orient among the Western literati. Much of the debate at the launch of the book centred on the under-emphasised importance of Tarikh-i-Firishta. Folio books (Lahore) have brought out a beautifully produced volume that was launched at Idara-i-Taleef-o-Tarjama at the University of the Punjab.Īll credit for the launch of the book goes to Prof Zahid Munir Amir, currently the director of the institute. He is an associate professor of history at the Columbia University, New York. He local edition of Dr Manan Ahmed Asif’s book, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India is out.
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