188 NOTES TO PAGES 4-5
quite incapable of losing. That subtraction and that addition are the two op-
erations that allow the moderns and the antimoderns to frighten each other
by agreeing on the essential point: we are absolutely different from the others,
and we have broken radically with our own past." Here, the two understand-
ings are similarly in agreement about their radical break from the past, while '
relying on the myth of origins. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been
Modem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 130.- V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (London: Penguin Books, 1977),
p. 172. - Romila Thapar's Somanatha: the many voices of a history (New Delhi: Pen-
guin Press, 2004), Ramya Sreenivasan's The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen:
Heroic Pasts in India c. 1500-1900 (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2007), Shahid Amin's Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of
Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2015), and Cyn-
thia Talbot's The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian
Past, 1200-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) approach
binary categories of Hindu/Muslim by fracturing the historical certainty.
These excellent studies introduce multiple voices, provide ranges of histor-
ical depiction, and point out usages of historical past outside of dominant
historiography. - For example, A. Azfar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and
Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) recapitu-
lates the earlier scholarship of John F. Richards to argue Mughal under-
standing of kingship to be entirely derived from Central Asian or Safavid
theories of kingship-without any connection to either earlier Muslim poli-
ties or contemporary Rajput or Vijayanagar polities. This prohibitively narrow
analytical lens makes sense only if one consistently argues that Mughal
polity is sui generis "outside" of a history of India. Another illustration of
this comes via Sudipta Kaviraj's 1995 influential essay "Religion, Politics and
Modernity," where he notes, repeatedly, "actual historical record" to assert
this difference back to the premodern world where Hindu and Muslim
communities understood better the "'inside' and 'outside' realms" of interac-
tions. For Kaviraj, even though he is critiquing both the nationalist and com-
munalist understanding of premodern India, the historicity of Muslims as
"outsiders" governs the ways in which "assimilation" failed. (He marks two
sets of "indigenous" in his essay-indigenous society and indigenous con-
verts-the first of which is insider and the second outsider.) See, Sudipta
Kaviraj, "Religion, Politics and Modernity," in Crisis and Change in Con-
temporary India, Upendra Bax and Bhikhu Parekh, eds. (New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1995), p. 170. - These broad statements are meant to highlight the uniqueness of the extraor-
dinarily important work of scholars like Phillip Waggoner and Richard Eaton
on Vijayanagar-Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India's
Deccan Plateau, 130Q-1600 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014-and
Finbarr Flood on Ghaznavi north India-Objects of Translation: Material
Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009)-who directly inform the work I am doing here.