172 A CONQUEST OF PASTS
Shibli Naumani (1857-1914), Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958), Sulaiman
Nadvi (1884-1953), S. M. Ikram (1908-1973), and Nabi Baksh Khan
Baloch (1917-2orrJ were key figures in the nationalist responses to this
colonial historiography.
The framework of Chachnama as a conquest narrative and history
of the eighth century dominated their efforts, though their response
to the framework varied substantially. For people like Majumdar and
Sarkar, the colonial judgment of the despotic Muslim conqueror was
reinforced; for Habib and Ikram, Chachnama had to be carefully read
to potentially recuperate this earliest conquest from the colonial ver-
dict of Muslim vilification; for Daudpota and Baloch, the entirety of
the text needed to be recovered, retranslated, and then situated as a re-
gional history of the origins of Islam in Sind; for Naumani and Nadvi,
Muslims in Sind had to be placed nearer to the time of the Prophet to
make the question of origins a social one, not one based on conquest.
In the scholarship of nationalist historians such as Jadunath Sarkar
and R. C. Majumdar,the figure of the outsider Muslim loomed large.
Sarkar's lectures on Indian pasts-as well as his histories of Mughal
India-took their cue from colonial historians and argued that the "for-
eign immigrant" Muslim conquest of India differed fundamentally
from all preceding invasions" because of'Islam's "fiercely monotheistic
nature."^56 Sarkar's study of the Muslim past incorporated Elliot's
framework, where the communities were historically, conceptually, so-
cially, and religiously separated. Similarly, R. C. Majumdar's treat-
ment "Arab Conquest of Sind" presented Muslims as conquering Spain
and Hindus as resisting Europeans. Majumdar depicted Muslims as
natural conquerors who "inevitab[ly]" cast their covetous eyes on
India."^57 Chachnama contained "a kernel of historical facts," which
Majumdar could augment via archaeological and textual sources to
present the account of the eighth-century invasion.^58
In contrast was a set of Muslim intellectuals who looked at the ori-
gins of Indian Muslims. This generation of scholars emphasized Islam's
history in Arabia and the connections among Arabia and India and Sufi
genealogies of Indic thought. The Muslim historian and educationist
Shibli Naumani studied under T. W. Arnold at Aligarh Muslim Uni-
versity. He began to work on the history of early Islam as a response to
Orientalist historians such as David Samuel Margoliouth at Oxford.