Between Friend And Enemy

Audrey Truschke’s new book is evidence that scholarship trumps controversy

- Atreyee Majumder

While Audrey Truschke has recently been subjected to grievous trolling, threats, and intimidation by national and international factions of the Hindu right, her latest book, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Muslim Pasts, proves her scholarship is masterful. In it, the historian provides an account of Sanskrit historical texts (ranging in genre between poetry, play, biography, essay) that describe the varied experience of Muslim rule. Truschke offers a cautionary note to the reader to not impose modern historical categories onto these texts and their authors’ historical efforts. She attributes them with a ‘historical energy’ that transcends the genre difference among them, and their varying perception and judgement of the advent of Islamic rule in India, anywhere between the 11th and the 16th centuries. Truschke is particularly arguing against historians and historical theorists who look for, in their search for ‘history’, a copybook European enlightenment-bathed history.

Crucially, in this book, Truschke wrenches the Sanskrit domain of literary production from Brahmin hands and provides a rich archive of Jain and some Buddhist Sanskrit texts. She also offers a complex account of Hindu-Muslim relations across the medieval and early modern period.

A vast array of authors and texts are analysed in the book. There is Jayanaka, a poet/historian in Prithviraj Chauhan’s court, who pens Prithvirajvijaya (1191-1200), aghast at the various cow-eating, horse blood-drinking and other practices of the Ghurid dynasty, who come into battle with the Chauhan king. At this point, the disgust is targeted at turushkas or