I70 A CONQUEST OF PASTS
question that was quoted almost verbatim by Cousens forty years later:
"It is impossible for the traveler to wander through [Sind] without being
struck with the absence of all record of [Arab] occupation. In language,
architecture, arts, traditions, customs, and manners, they hav~ left but
little impress upon the country or the people. We trace them, like the
savage Sikhs, only in the ruins of their predecessors."^49 The answer, for
Elliot, was that Arab memory and Arab material traces were destroyed
by their own internecine fighting; they "showed themselves as utterly
incapable as the shifting sands of their own desert, of coalescing into a
system of concord and subordination."^50 The masses of Sindhi Hindus
were left to fend for themselves, for there never was any "sympathy be-
tween the conquerors and the conquered." Elliot's hope was that "the
inhabitants of modern India, as well as our clamorous demagogues at
horn~" remember "the very depth of degradation from which the great
mass of the people have been raised, under the protection of British
supremacy."^51
Elliot was widely successful in positing the conquest origins of
Islam in India and placing the fanatic Muslims and tpe feminized
Hindus as the two protagonists at the forefroqt of colonial and nation-
alist scholarship on the Indian past. The result of the translation project
was the incorporation of Chachnama as the epitome of Muslim for-
eignness into newer grand histories of India. It also tμrned the project
into a pedagogic one. Vincent A~ Smith (1848-1920) and Stanley Lane-
Poole (1854-1931) wrote two major histories of India which were incor-
porated into curriculum in both India and Britain. These histories
were the foundation of civil service exams, providing the framework
for the nationalist critique of colonial historiography. In these histories,
712 AD became a totemic date £qr the rupture. of the Indian past and
the framework of the foreign origins hegemony.^52 Lane-Poole's Medi-
eval India under Muhammadan Rule, 7I2-I764 (1903) defined the me-
dieval period under his study thus: "It begins when the immemorial
systems, rule, and customs of Ancient India were invaded, subdued,
and modified by a succession of foreign conquerors who imposed a
new rule and introduced an exotic creed, strange languages and a for-
eign art."^53 Lane-Poole recommends that the readers of his popular
history consult Elliot's transl~tions of key texts, such as Chachnama,
to grow their own knowledge. Then he goes on to describe the "ad-