<p>In Kitab al-Hind, Al-Biruni (973-1050) describes his project as an effort to ‘penetrate to the essential nature of any Indian subject.’ Since his subject is a subjectivity, I take the opportunity this ambiguity in translation provides to use his project as a case study for exploring the essential nature of such a subject. Starting from the hypothesis that the essential nature of subjectivity per se is self-representation, I show that Al-Biruni’s representation of India both reveals and is shaped by his own specific Muslim-peripatetic subjectivity. I then compare some features of his representation to later colonial representations of the colonized Muslim Indian. Next I examine the Islamic-peripatetic ‘meta-narrative’ through which Al-Biruni assumes a position of epistemic privilege allowing him to analyze and evaluate not only Hindu but Greek civilizations on his own terms, classifying Hindu civilization as essentially monotheist, and its distinctive polytheism as an accidental manifestation of a decadent tendency universal to all cultures. Last, I will briefly analyze Biruni’s approach to India from a broadly ‘post-modern’ perspective, and explore the suggestion that it represents a kind of medieval Muslim modernity, with characteristic aspirations to intellectual hegemony in the name of universality.</p>