In its connectedness to Indian Islam, the Tuhfat is strategically situated in two senses. First, it represents a moment when colonial discourse is not yet fully established (in Raymond Williams’ sense) – an interregnum, somewhere between thesis and antithesis but still short of synthesis, when the discursive elements of the colonial regime are still emergent.^[109] By identifying such moments, we can more clearly see what colonial discourse is structured to screen out. Second, it marks a space beyond the penumbra of colonial influence in which (proto-) nationalist discourse could be thought. In both respects, the case of the Tuhfat raises the question of the mechanisms whereby indigenous alternatives to European models became occluded.

In its various divisions – pre-nationalist period, early benign phase, etc. – the historiography touched on above has sought to quarantine an era in which Hindu and European discourses confronted each other as antithetical monoliths. The desire to graft the imported onto the local, both conceived as pristine, reflects an essentialist preoccupation with origins. Yet when it comes to origins, a Europe so riddled with transnational supplements is itself constitutionally derivative. Islamic Neoplatonism presents Europe with a formative derivation anxiety. In confronting Muslim India, Europe was also returning to its own repressed. By inscribing this return, we can begin to provincialise Europe.