Historians of Medieval India: Study in Indo-Muslim historical writing

The writings of Medieval Indo-Muslim historians have been often interpreted, anachronistically, as providing, in retrospect, justification of the British raj or of the positions of twentieth-century nationalist and anti-nationalist movements. Historians of Medieval India, written in the 1950s, analysed some of the medieval historians’ own motives and presuppositions. A new preface to this republication recognizes the need to embrace developments in the ‘philosophy of language’, notably the contentions that language does not simply express or reflect meaning but actually produces it. The validity of some early criticisms by other modern historians of medieval India is also acknowledged. 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, 50 years after political independence, from Westerner’s constructions of India’s past.