THE ARCHITECTURE OF A DECCAN SULTANATE

Recognition of truth’s complicity with power is the default mode of political debate today. Nobody disregards the fact that the paramount role of public discourses is to buttress the ideology of the state (or to challenge it). It has also been long recognized that Mission and Empire, colonialism and ‘civilizing mission’, or indeed the pairing of din with dawlah, in our own tradition, represent two sides of a single historical reality. Regime changes, we are also fully aware, result in epistemic paradigm shifts. Thus, when a contemporary scholar laments the ‘Loss of Hindustan’ (Manan Ahmed Asif, London, 2020.), he unapologetically admits that ‘the colonized face a diminished capacity to represent their past in categories other than those given to them in a European language, or provided to them by the imperial archive. This rupture, brought about by the colonial episteme, erases the full memory or awareness of the precolonial.’