!20 A DEMON WITH RUBY EYEStrumpet." Again, Qasim sanctions their cultural practice and orders
them to continue their livelihood as earlier.^31
By invoking the Buddhists, Chachnama provides policies for gov-
erning a class of people (merchants, farmers, artisans), giving them
representation under political rule, and accepting their customary
practices as beneficial for governance. Similar encounters, with other
communities in Sind, occur at numerous junctures such that one can
generalize these edicts to all civilian populations. That non-Muslims
can be brought under Muslim rule without strife and with full accom-
modation under Islamic law.
Soon after Brahmanabad, Qasim lays siege to the fort of Aror, and
the merchants, artisans, and laborers send him a message: "We renege
on our treaty with Brahmin Dahar because he is dead and his son has
also abandoned us, ... so we appeal to your service, that if you treat
us with just and righteous conduct ('adal o insaf), we will accept your
command and trust you with the fort."^32 This is a declaration of po-
litical allegiance based on the mutually comprehensible idea of justice
and loyalty. The merchants, artisans, and laborers insist on the ruler
behaving ethically and accommodating the transfer of alliances. The
ruler is in a dialogic relationship with the subjects. In this political
theory, the ruler must enter the contract and keep its terms.
Chachnama argues that recognizing forms of difference and trans-
lating them into politically viable"6tructures allows for communities to
coexist. Chachnama's theory of making difference commensurable and
citing precedents is remarkable from a text that is understood as a con-
quest narrative. Scholarship continues to approach the medieval Indic
pasts through the lens of converted space-from Hindu to Muslim.
To avoid the risk that my reading of Chachnama might be consid-
ered exceptional in the broader history of northern India, I want to fur-
ther reflect on this question of conversion for Sind. This time I will
approach it through a reading of sacral space in Uch's material land-
scape and a sixteenth-century Sufi text. There we will see modes of
accommodation and equivalence between sacral traditions, as we have
seen in Chachnama.
Active in contemporary cultural memory in Uch is the account
from Chachnama of Qasim digging a well and founding a mosque in