142 THE HALF SMILEThe people from his party, frightened, ran back to the queen and
informed her that Dahar was fighting a lion. She was pregnant at the
time. When she heard the report, she was overwhelmed by her love
and concern for his safety and she fainted. When Dahar returned, she
had died, but he saw that the child was kicking in her stomach. He
ordered her stomach to be opened. A living son was produced. Dahar
gave his son to the wet nurse and called him Jaisinha, meaning al-
Muzafar ba al-Asad (Victorious Lion)-in Persian, Sher-e Firuz.^22
This archetypal prince is given a name in three languages to sig-
nify the story of his birth. The story, in turn, explains his bravery, mod-
esty, and piety. The presentation of the prince as an ethical subject
builds alongside this translation of his persona within the linguistic
and ethnic registers. When Jaisinha arrives at the palace of the raja of
Kiraj, he is offered a seat in the inner palace. He averts his eyes from
the women, prompting the raja to exclaim, "These women are like your
mothers and sisters; do not be shy in front of them." Jaisinha responds,
"We are a family of ascetics and therefore cannot gaze upon marriage-
able (namahram) women. The raja then excused him from raising his
eyes and praised his piety and restraint."^23
Though Jaisinha keeps his gaze averted, he is seen by the raja's
sister, who falls in love with him. She is smitten with his "complete
beauty, tall like a juniper tree ('ar'ar), moon faced, with a divine char-
acter."24 This description of a man's physical beauty parallels the de-
scriptions of Chach and Qasim earlier in the text. All of these are the
perspectives of a woman. In this case, as in others, the inner beauty of
their character matches their outer beauty; thus, Jaisinha rebuffs the
advances of the sister.
Like Jaisinha's name, his ethics transcend those of an ascetic
Brahmin to incorporate values shared by Muslims. Chachnama insists
that virtue and beauty qre linked, and the ethics governing them are
not explicitly Islamic. Hence the Brahmin prince exhibits all virtue
and moral uprightness that ought to be present in a Muslim warrior
such as Qasim. One is able to see this prince as an ethical subject when
one looks past the insistence that the text has only two protagonists:
Chach and Qasim. When these two are read as conquerors, their
personalities and actions dominate the text, but when they are read as