u6 A DEMON WITH RUBY EYES
Purported graves of Arab soldiers who came to Sind with Muhammad
bin Qasim. (Photo courtesy of Ahsan Shah, 2015.)number of the tombs belong to prominent women from the region's
Baluchi political elite. Their funerary inscriptions point to their en-
slaved beginnings: "Bibi slave-girl was set free from this bondage so as
to benefit on the day of judgment," and "Baggo son of Sulyman Kal-
mati appeared on the day before the grave of Bafat Naghmah, the slave-
girl and other slaves, freed for the sake of Allah and the Prophet of
Allah."^21 These inscriptions, orient us toward an circulation of con-
verted slaves who inhabited this landscape. Inscribed in stone are no-
tions of servitude (bandagi) intertwined with a historical memory of
prominent women.^22
As a political theory. of governance over a diverse polity in
thirteenth-century Uch, Chachnama can be read as a source for under-
standing the politics governing conversion to Islam in medieval
South Asia. It is important to examine the question of conversion
because the colonial origins narrative casts Islam's arrival as a mo-
ment of erasure of the prior political and sacral practices. In later
scholarship that understood Chachnama as an eighth-century text,