A Book of Conquest The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia

r66 A CONQUEST OF PASTS

being pointed out to him, he drew his sabre to strike it, when one of

the priests cried, 'it is an idol and not a living being!' Then advancing

towards the statue, the Moslem removed his mailed gauntlet, and

placing it upon the hand of the image, said to the by-standers, rsee,

this idol hath but one glove, ask him what he hath done with the

other?' They replied, 'What should a stone know of these things?'

Whereupon Mahommed bin Kasim, rebuking them, rejoined,

'verily, yours is a curious object of worship, who knows nothing, even

about himself'. He then directed that the Brahmans, to distinguish

them from other Hindoos, should carry in their hands a small vessel

of grain, as mendicants, and should beg from door to door every

morning; after which he established a governor at Dewal, and, having

satisfactorily arranged affairs in that quarter, embarked his machines

of war in boats, sent them up the river to Nirup.kot, and proceeded

with his army by land in the same direction.^35

Muhammad bin Qasim in Burton's narrative does not inhabit a his-
tory separate from the long histories of Muslim invaders. He is, if any-
thing, a distillation of the very essence of Muslim oppression. Burton
links Muhammad bin Qasim to the long line of Arab Muslim con-
querors in order to bring into sharp focus their outsider status and the
rupture they caused with Sind's native past. In this mode of transla-
tion, the most significant theme of the history of Qasim is the disrup-
tion of the distinct, proud, and-independent nation of Sindhis. Pegged
against the violence of the fall of Daybul ("for three days there was a
general massacre of the inhabitants"), is the curious episode of flesh
meeting stone. In Burton's rendering, Muhammad bin Qasim's en-
cou~ter with the idol has no equivalent; there is no understanding,
and the result is a particular policy of discrimination. Burton is thus
able to assert a long history of difference in Sind, illustrating the need
for colonial intervention. This is the most important turn in the his-
tory of these narratives. i;bese reframings of Chachnama by the colo-
nial agents McMurdo, Postans, and Burton were put to political use by
the East India Company.
There can be no doubt that there is an explicit and immediate link
between the narratives of Sind's past in Postans and Burton, and Charles
Napier's casting of himself as the liberator of Sindhi people. Napier re-
peatedly used the argument of Muslim brutality in the pasts of Sind