A CONQUEST OF PASTS 157
Arabia, to histories of campaigns from Persia. Firishta advances a claim
of the prehistory of India and links the history of Islam to that of Persia
rather than of Arabia. The early conquests are not described in any
great detail but are simply noted as traditions of the past. For Firishta,
there is little reason to look closely at the history of Sind except to
mark the campaign of Qasim. Islam had, for him, multiple venues of
arrival in India, whether through conversions during the life of the
Prophet or through later campaigns from Iran and Afghanistan.
Firishta's history of the regions of India and of Muslim rule entered
Europe in the late eighteenth century. From it, Europeans excavated a
list of primary sources on Muslim political history, most significantly
Chachnama. Firishta's history of regions of India, in its translations
and transcreations, became the locus .of nineteenth-century colonial
knowledge about Muslim history in India. The story of the movement
of Firishta from the Deccan to London, and the subsequent rearrange-
ment of its contents, is the story of the making of the Muslim origins
narrative.
Alexander Dow (1735-1779), an employee of the East India Com-
pany, took Firishta's history to England and produced a summary as a
translation in 1768. In Dow's preface to his text, he states that a his-
tory of the entire Indian subcontinent and of the "Mahommedan em-
pire in India" had been up to that moment "concealed in the obscurity
of the Persian.^1112 Dow's translation was thus an unveiling of a history
that was necessary for the East India Company's project of imperial and
colonial domination in India. In making his selections or summaries
of Firishta's text, Dow categorically asserts that Muslim rule in India
was predicated on a politics of making Hindu subjects invisible. In his
preface, he dismisses Firishta's introduction with a summary from the
Mahabharata as "a performance of fancy": "The prejudices of the Ma-
hommedans against the followers of the Brahmin religion, seldom
permit them to speak with common candour of the Hindoos. It swayed
very much with Ferishta when he affirmed, that there is no history
among the PHndoos of better authority than the Mahabarit. That work..
is a poem and not a history."^13 Put more clearly, Dow argued that if
the Muslim author had included a Hindu text, it was only to demon-
strate its weakness as history. This assertion of categorical difference