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6 - “India” before the Raj: Space and Identity in South Asian History

from Part i - The Politics of Ethnicity, Nationhood, and Belonging in the Settings of Classical Civilizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2023

By
Ananya Chakravarti
Edited by
Cathie Carmichael ,
Matthew D'Auria  and
Aviel Roshwald
Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

The birth of the nation in South Asia is inextricably linked to the sundering of our past and our communities along religious lines, a fracturing rehearsed endlessly in the bloodbaths of repeated partitions, riots, and pogroms, in the banality of daily lynchings. For South Asians today, “India” before the Raj is indeed a foreign country. Let me recount a tale from this faraway land, which cannot be located on modern maps, to show how wondrously strange it is.

On 1 April 1597, Gonçalo Toscano was arrested in Portuguese India.1 The Inquisition classified Toscano by “caste” as being “Muslim [mouro], originating from Balaghat [a range of foothills in present-day Maharashtra], freedman [forro], single,” and about twenty-three years of age. Some nine years before, after being baptized and owing to disagreements he had with “his friend,” a certain Matheus Carvalho, he had left the city of Bassein (Baçaim) to return to his hometown of Kalyan (Galiana, near Thane).

Keywords

IndiaRajSouth AsiaPortuguese IndiaHindu nationalism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism , pp. 115 - 132
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Alam, Muzaffar, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (eds.), The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Asher, Catherine, and Talbot, Cynthia, India before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Hanlon, Rosalind, and Washbrook, David (eds.), Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2011).Google Scholar
Pollock, Sheldon (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramaswamy, Vijaya (ed.), Women and Work in Precolonial India: A Reader (New Delhi: Sage, 2016).Google Scholar
Rawat, Ramnarayan S., and Satyanarayana, K., Dalit Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Tirthankar, An Economic History of Early Modern India (New York: Routledge, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shulman, David (ed.), Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

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