A CONQUEST OF PASTS I7lventures" of Mohammad Qasim as "one of the romances of history."^54
Like Lane-Poole's book, Smith's The Oxford Student's History of India
(1908) was designed for Calcutta University and Oxford University. To
answer the questions about "Hindu civilization on the eve of the Mo-
hamedan conquest," Smith offers the story of the Arab conquerors
who "invaded Sind, slew the reigning king, Dahir, son of Chach, and
established a Muslim state which endured for centuries."^55 These
histories were foundational to a vast educational enterprise, lasting
for dozen of editions throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In critical
ways, their frameworks remains dominant.
Two-Nation History
Where Elliot's translation project fractured Persian histories into
chunks suitable for historical inquiry into one sectarian past alone, the
"connected" history projects of Smith and Lane-Poole reknit them.into
an overwhelmingly powerful narrative. The Muslims, pegged as out-
siders and conquerors in the Indian past, were the fanatic outsiders of
the British colonial present as well. Chachnaib.a and the designation
of 712 AD as the year of the conquest.cemented the content and the
temporality of British history for India. In this historiography, two cen-
tral assumptions were made about the text: first, that its primary
value was as a source for Islam's eighth-century origins in India because
it was a translation of an earlier Arabic history, and second, that em-
pirical facts and dates were to be recovered from the romantic gibberish
clotting the text. Any and all colonial productions about the Muslim
past in India naturalized this hegemonic framework.
From the early twentieth century, Indian historians trained at
Calcutta University, at Aligarh University, at Baroda University, and at
Osmania University struggled to come to terms with this narrative.
Their effort to narrate a nationalist, anticolonial history was also the
struggle to engage with the narrative of Muslim despotism, temple
destructio~ and the question of foreigners in India. In the records of
history journals like Calcutta Review, Muslim Review, Islamic Cul-
ture, and Indian Historical Review, they investigated the question of
the origins of Islam and its fate in India. R. C. Majumdar (1888-
1980), U. M. Daudpota (1897-1958), Muhammad Habib (1895-1971),