Audrey Truschke’s new book to analyse Sanskrit texts of Indo-Muslim history

Historian-author Audrey Truschke’s new book will analyse a hitherto overlooked group of histories on Indo-Muslim or Indo-Persian political events through a few dozen Sanskrit texts that date from the 1190s until 1721. Published by Penguin India, the book, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Muslim Pasts, seeks to collect, analyse, and theorize Sanskrit histories of Muslim-led and, later, as Muslims became an integral part of Indian cultural and political worlds, Indo-Muslim rule as a body of historical materials. “Writing ‘The Language of History’ was an opportunity for me to return to my first love in the study of premodern Indian history: Sanskrit literature. In the book I survey about 3 dozen Sanskrit histories, most of them versified poetry, that discuss Indo-Muslim political figures,” Truschke told.