130 THE HALF SMILEframework, the narrative is driven by the logic of expansion, and the
story moves forward as the conquest moves forward: spatially and po-
litically. Reframing Chachnama as political theory reveals that women
are chief drivers of the narrative. Their actions propel the nJrrative,
their gaze slows time in the text, their monologues summarize and
explain how to be a just ruler and a just subject. They are, in effect,
ethical subjects par excellence. My contention is that Chachnama en-
acts its ethics through the speech and gaze of the women protagonists
in the text. Their gaze, their conduct, their speech demonstrate how
an ethical person can inhabit the political world of Sind in the early
thirteenth century.
Throughout this book I have argued that reading Chachnama as po-
litical theory reveals a solution to ontological and political difference
via accommodation and alliance. What emerges in this chapter is that
ethics for Chachnama are defined by the conduct and speech of women.
That is, the women characters present an ethos that dictates how one
ought to behave in social and political relationships, how one listens
to the other, and how a ruler acts justly toward his subjects. When we
dislocate the text from its perch as a narrative of conquest, the struc-
ture of protagonists in the text also shifts remarkably. It is the female
gaze that allows us to enter the text and "see" the masculinity of
Chach, Qasim, and Dahar elaborated through depictions of their
valor in battle, their asceticism, and their capacity tb listen and take
advice. It is crucial to follow the woman's gaze in Chachnama, for it
orients us toward possible audiences of the text in early-thirteenth-
century Uch.
The accounts of women in Chachnama have always been deemed
romantic and thus ignored. This was the verdict of colonial histo-
rians, and postcolonial readers have maintained this view of the
text.^2 The women in Chachnama were seen as marginal to its his-
tory, reduced to their transgressive sexuality. Indeed, this depiction
parallels that of women in Persianate historiography more broadly.
There, women are read through moralist claims about the nature of
womanhood. Given that in the historical record women often appear
as dynamic and powerful, it is reductive when women are ignored
simply for their sexual transgression or capacity to lie, etc. By and large,
women are not read as ethical subjects, let alone politically signifi-