A CONQUEST OF PASTS 159
A History of the Conquest of 'Sind
In 1843, the East India Company conquered Sind. The decisive battle
was fought in Uch. The campaign for the mapping of the Indus River
and for control over Sind took Dow's framework and excavated
Chachnama as the central text of Muslim conquest to understand Sind.
The Company's military and political conquest was first a conquest of
the history of Sind. It was built upon production of layers of colonial
narratives of difference and arguing for fundamental conflict between
Muslims and non-Muslims in Sind. Ultimately, this history was pack-
aged with an emancipatory message in which the British were puta-
tive liberators of the,long-suffering Hindus of Sind. It is this moment
of the British conquest of Sind-politically and historiographically-
Chachnama becomes a conquest narrative. That is, it becomes a justi-
fication for the nineteenth-century British conquest.
The annexation of Sind, in itself, is a remarkable account of the
varied teleologies of colonialism in India. As one of the last military
acquisitions of the Company, the annexation preserves a documentary
history of the power and knowledge complex at the heart of the colo-
nialist project. Sind had a long gestation in the Company's imagina-
tion; some of the Company's earliest concerns were with competition
from Sindhi as well as Portuguese and Dutch merchants. .The Com-
pany had established a factory in Thatta in 1758 that was abandoned
in 1775. However, the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the
posting of a French emissary in Persia in 1806, as well as the fear of
Russian aggression, forced the Company to turn its attention to Sind.17
As Company officials awoke to the political importance of Sind, they
began to compile historical, anthropological, cartographic, and geolog-
ical data on the "people of Scinde."
Now let me narrate the political history of how Sind entered British
control and how the British colonial authorities created narratives
about Hindu enslavement and Muslim despotism to both justify and
explain thei} particular conquest. In 1800, Nathan Crow was sent from
Bombay to the court of the Talpur Mirs-rulers of Sind-to sign a
treaty that would exclude all Europeans and Americans from Sind.^18 In
his correspondence, he notes that Sind would serve as an excellent bul-
wark not only against France and Russia but also against Afghanistan,