6 INTRODUCTION
ways in which this thirteenth-century Persian text became, in colo-
nial understanding, a history of Muslim origins. I aim to locate in his-
torical time this history of thought about the origins of Islam in India.
However, I turn to the text, and the thirteenth century, to showi other
modes of understanding difference that lie outside of this origins
narrative. This then is the crux of the book at hand. If modern politics
created India and Pakistan and Bangladesh out of political difference
enacted by colonialism, then modern historiography continues to take
these differences to be just as natural, as normative, and as entrenched.
My examination of a specific medieval past shows how the origins
narrative came to determine the limits of historical inquiry and the
paths it has foreclosed.
Chachnama as Origins
In 1981, V. S. Naipaul visited Karachi to report on postcolonial Muslim
states. There, he read Chachnama "in a paperback reprint of the En-
glish translation first published in 1900 in Karachi.',rn
The Chachnama is in many ways like The Conquest of New Spain
by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, the Spanish soldier who in his old age
wrote of his campaigns in Mexico with Cort~s in 1519 and after. The
theme of both works is the same: the destruction, by an imperialist
power with a strong sense of a mission and .a wide knowledge of the
world, of a remote culture that knows only itself and doesn't begin
to understand what it is fighting.^11Naipaul read Chachnama as "an account of the Islamic beginning
of the state [of Pakistan]." This beginnirrg, Naipaul argued in his book,
was the primary way in which the hegemonic Muslims of Pakistan
itnagined their seJ:>aration from India-as conquerors-and Chachnama
was the text that provided the history of their conquest. In Naipaul's
reading, there was a belligerence of colonial gaze in Pakistan's con-
ception of its historic past. Naipaul read violence in the figure of
Qasim, the young conqueror described in Chachnama as the leader of
the Arab'army that conquered Sind. He narrated the atrocities com-
mitted by the Arab army-their destruction of temples or their killing