144 THE HALF SMILE
Juzjani also documents an ethics of virtue, righteousness, and jus-
tice in his depiction of deposed Hindu kings. Juzjani was appointed to
Laknauti and was an eyewitness of this transfer of political power. In
his description of the deposed raja of Lukhmina (Laknauti), Juzljani re-
counts the raja's birth and an eighty-year rule that was as just and
generous as the rule of the Muslims in Delhi.^27 Such virtuous readings
of non-Muslim elite are present as well in Amir Khusrau's Duval Rani
va Khizr Khan (commissioned by Prince Khizr Khan in 1314), which
imagines a romance between the Muslim Prince Khizr and the Brahmin
princess Duval Rani as an exemplum of classical Arabic and Persian
romances.^28
Transgressive Subjects
The story of Qasim's death, staged far from the capital of Uch, in the
global capital of Baghdad, is the ethical coda for Chachnama's political
theory. The act and speech of the daughters illuminate the central logic
of Chachnama: an assertion of an ethical and just actor against the po-
litical and moral instability inside the power structure. Chachnama
uses potent symbols of subversion and power, where a deceptively be-
nign half smile reveals the corruption and potential disruption of state
power.
As I have demonstrated, Dahar's daughter is an ethical, politically
astute woman who makes a severe indictment of a corrupt regime. Yet
she enters the subsequent Persianate historiography simply as a trans-
gressive and corrupt woman who threatens the political order.^29 Ibn
Batutta's mid-fourteenth-century works similarly record the political
ascension of Razia1Sultana, whose memory is tied to her transgressions
of dressing in male battle attire and consorting with an African slave.^30
These fourteenth-century accounts focus on the transgression of the
women, erasing the naturalness of political power accorded to them
as theory or practice in Chachnama or in Juzjani's writings.
This story of Qasim's death in Chachnama is the earliest account
in any medieval Persian text. It is in Ayn ul-Mulk Abdullah Mahru's
Insha'i Mahru, a collection of administrative letters written during the
reign of Firuz Shah Tughluq (1351-1388). In his letters, Mahru, a gov-
ernor in Lahore, admonishes a Sindhi noble for his failure to provide