168 A CONQUEST OF PASTS
in the midst of the Arabian cavalry."^41 Of the fall of Brahmanabad, El-
phinstone narrated the "masculine spirit of his [Dahar's] widow," who
marshaled the defenses of the city and, when left with no hope of sur-
vival, perished in "flames of their [the women] own kindling.'(^42
Chachnama was for Elphinstone a particularly trenchant example
of the injustices of Muslim pasts in India. While within the greater
narrative of Muslim despots and temple destroyers, Muhammad bin
Qasim did not merit the same attention as the raiders of Somnath, he
importantly represented the earliest fissure in the history of India.
Against the backdrop of this history, Elphinstone could raise signifi-
cant questions about the nature of conquest and resistance. Why, El-
phinstone wondered, did the Arabs fail to take over India as they had
Iran, Syria, and Iraq? His analysis hinged on the resistance to conver-
sion offered by the "complex" priestly classes of India; a lack of such
a structure had doomed the rather simplistic theologies of Zoroas-
trian Iran.
While Elphinstone's text was offering a summary and judgment of
Chachnama, the ancient text was just making its debut in English
through Henry Miers Elliot (1808-1853). Elliot, a Company official in
the Revenue Department (and later Foreign Department) spent the ma- -
jority of his posting in the environs of Delhi.^43 In 1847, he began
working with Aloys Sprenger, the principal of Mohammadan College
in Delhi, to compile a register of-Persian histories of the Muslim past
for administrative as well as research purposes. He first began his com-
pendium as a bibliographic index, published in 1849. The first volume
of excerpted and translated Persian histories into English was Arabs
in Sind, which was published right after his death in 1853. Eventually,
these "raw materials" for a study of India, comprising translated ex-
cerpts from 231 Arabic and Persian histories of India, were published
by John Dowson in 1867-1877. These comprised the eight volumes of
History of India as Told by Its Own Historians. Elliot had fervent hope
that his massive manuscript collection and translation project would
result in a time "when the full light of European truth and discern-
ment begins to shed its beams upon the obscurity of the past, and to
relieve us from the necessity of appealing to the Native Chroniclers
of the time, who are, for the most part dull, prejudiced, ignorant and
superficial."^44 However, Elliot's agenda was not only to bring to