THE HALF SMILE 139
own commander and "awash in sorrow, he bit the back of his hand."
The caliph is left speechless. Dahar's daughter speaks the last words
of Chachnama:
For the sake of two slave girls, you killed a commander who impris-
oned a hundred thousand like us and defeated seventy kings of Hind
and Sind. He ordered the construction of mosques and minarets
where temples stood. Even if he had misbehaved or done something
to displease you, even then a selfish person would not have killed
Muhammad bin Qasim. The caliph ordered that the two daughters
be immured.^20There is no further gloss in the text, but it concludes with a decla-
ration: "And since that day to this, Islam's banner has flown higher and
prospered." The daughter's rebuke to the caliph that he should have
thought of his own self-interest (and by extension, the interest of the
polity) crystallizes that at the heart of the imperium, there must be a
focus on the entirety of the empire, including all of its inhabitants. The
women show that the caliph was instead ruled by his base desires. If
we read this last declaration in light of the opening of the daughter's
monologue ("Such indignities are not for kings").we have an encapsu-
lation of how this episode demonstrates the moral certitude required,
for statecraft. The caliph has no words; he never speaks again in the
text, but for their lie, he punishes them by having them immured in a
wall.^21
Chachnama thus ends with a scathing critique of a corrupt Muslim
rule. It condemns the center of a Muslim empire as a corrupt and cor-
rupting world. It is a place where political rule does not follow the
guidelines for a just and ethical kingship as exemplified in the account
of the Brahmin Chach. The account's spatial movement from the fron-
tier to the center moves in tandem with the perspective shift from the
conqueror to the conquered. The book ends with an extensive first-
person critique of the Muslim state from the perspective of a female
Hindu slav~.
The ethics in Chachnama are articulated at the end of the text
by the eldest daughter of Dahar as a series of imperatives to the ca-
liph: to think, to reflect, to consult, to listen to one's heart, to be inde-
pendent of undue influence. The caliph, depicted as the corrupt, immoral