A CONQUEST OF PASTSforeign Muslims. This knowledge-making imperial project relied on the
discovery and utilization of Chachnama. Though Dow had indicated
Firishta's dependence on Chachnama, generation of Company officials
did the work of locating, translating, and annotating the text. The ear-
liest comment on Chachnama by a Company official is from Captain
James McMurdo, who traveled the Indus River in 1812. Later, Lieutenant
Thomas Postans and his colleague Richard F. Burton translated parts
of Chachnama in their respective travelogues and histories. This ma-
terial was then used by Company historian Mountstuart Elphinstone
in his 1841 History of India: The Hindu and Mohametan Periods.
Then Henry Miers Elliot, in his The History of India, as Told by Its
Own Historians, translated major portions of the text, which were
used by subsequent historians such as Vincent A. Smith and Stanley
Lane-Poole to compose universal histories of India by the early twen-
tieth century. In the colonial historiography, Chachnama appears
markedly different than the regional history that was interpreted by
Masum and Qani' in early-modern Sind. Chachnama goes from a text
about a political theory of rule or social coexistence to one selectively
interpreted to represent Muslim tyranny, temple destruction, and
forced conversions.
Captain James McMurdo (1785-1820), a political agent for the Com-
pany, surveyed Sind and Uch in the 1810s and wrote the earliest history
of the region, utilizing the beginning of Qani's Tuhfat ul-Kiram. Mc-
Murdo argued that the Sindhi rulers had "treachery as a national vice"
and that the Talpurs had no zeal greater than "propagating the faith."^29
The sketch of regional history that he provided his audience was
harsh, marking each period of Muslim rule (starting with QasimJ as
yet another dark age for Hindu subjects. He wrote of a natural schism
between Hindus and Muslims, hoping that the vanquished Hindus
would act as natural allies for the British. He portrayed the Muslims
as "the most bigoted, the most self-sufficient, and the most ignorant
people on record." These bigoted Muslims, McMurdo asserted, had so
long domin'ated the Hindus as to change their very character:
How different is the picture which Sindh presents! In the course of a
thousand years there is not an instance of a Hindu having attempted
to rescue himself or fellow-countrymen from a state of vilest slavery;
nor, since the fall of the Hindu dynasty, has any aboriginal native of