![]() ![]() Jah-o-jalal-i ‘ahd-e visal-e butan nah puchh’ His contemporary, the poet Mirza Ghalib recognized the momentous change in the fate of the subcontinent with this verse: After violently crushing the revolution, Queen Victoria took British India under her direct rule and assumed the title of Empress of India, sending Bahadur Shah Zafar to die in exile in Burma. He was, once again, hailed as the Shahanshah-i Hindustan-clearly there remained an idea of Hindustan. ![]() The rebels and revolutionaries who opposed BEIC rule rallied to the flag of the Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. There was a brief last resurgence of Hindustan in 1857. ![]() The major histories of the subcontinent, written in the early parts of the nineteenth century, were now histories of ‘British India.’ With the British East India Company (BEIC) ascendant, the Maratha or the Sikh polities did not invoke Hindustan in their political claims. “Yet, in the nineteenth century, the word Hindustan begins to fade from the colonial archive. The title we have chosen for this excerpt is the same as the first line of Manan Ahmed Asif’s illuminating book, where it’s from: The Loss of Hindustan – The Invention of India.ĭid South Asia have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? Asif believes it did and: ![]()
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