A CONQUEST OF PASTSNapier, who did not know a speck of Persian or Sindhi or Hindu-
stani, continuously cast aspersions on the truthfulness of treaties signed
by the Sindhi rulers, finding ways of dismissing them from official rec-
ords. 23 He had already concluded that the Talpur were the "greatest ruf-
fians," "imbeciles," possessing "zenanas filled with young girls torn
from their friends, and treated when in the hareem with revolting bar-
barity," and even prone to enjoying the occasional "human sacrifice."
Honoring agreements with the Talpur was highly unnecessary.^24
On ry February 1843, Napier defeated the assembled troops of the
Talpur at Miani and annexed Sind to the Company. Initially, the con-
quest was hailed as a heroic return of an East India Company long
floundering in bureaucratic miasma. Some even claimed that "since
Clive's glorious victory at Plassey there has been nothing achieved by
native or European troops in India at all to compare to it."^25 But soon
the annexation sparked intense debate in India and in England as re-
ports surfaced that Napier had behaved ignobly against the Talpur and
that Ellenborough had exaggerated the contribution of opium revenue
from its travel down the Indus.^26 The political agents stationed in
Sind-Outram, Eastwick and Pottinger-publicly derided the unilat-
eral actions of Napier, arguing that his actions were against the best
interests of the Company. Inquiries were set in motion against Ellen-
borough and Napier. Parliament called upon the General Court of
Directors of the East India Company to resolve the "uncalled-for, im-
politic,and unjust" invasion of Sind. Ellenborough was recalled, and
while Napier remained as ruler of Sind for a short while, he had to fight
for his reputation in India and at home.^27 Governed through the Bombay
Presidency, Sind remained an administrative challenge for the British
after the annexation.
Origins of Islam in India
The British conquest of Sind was not simply a political act. It was an
epistemological project based on the efforts of collection and transla-
tion by a group of young Orientalists, philologists, archeologists, and
ethnographers who followed Dow. They excavated Chachnama as tes-
tament to originary "Mohamedan conquest."^28 The Company's own
conquest of Sind was cast as a corrective to the Muslim conquest-a
move to proclaim the emancipation of Hindus from the clutches of the