A CONQUEST OF PASTS I73
Naumani focused on the biography of the Prophet Muhammad and key
figures in early Islam. Between 1882 and 1898, he produced a wide va-
riety of historical essays on science, medicine, arts, and the Muslim
state in early-modern India. These essays were a sharp rebuke to both
British and Hindu historians, presenting a history of Muslims in India
not as foreigners and conquerors but as belonging to India. However, it
was Naumani's student Sulaiman Nadvi who turned his attention on
Sind and on Chachnama.
Alongside Naumani, Nadvi founded the Society to Correct Errors
in Histories (Anjuman Islah Aghlat Tar'ikhi) at Aligarh in 19ro. He
published a number of essays on the early history of Muslims in India-
most importantly Inda-Arab Relations (1929), which focused on mar-
itime and migratory contacts between Arab Muslims and India. In (^19471)
his two-volume study Tarikh-i Sind was published. The work detailed
a social and political history of Muslims in Sind from the early eighth
century to the fourteenth. ~advi consulted numismatic, epigraphic,
and textual evidence to present Sind as a landscape teeming with life
and culture. His preface addressed the British historians directly:
Rare are the histories of India written by the English which are free of
political bias. Their purpose is to spread distrust between the Hindus
and Muslims; to cause the Muslims to degrade their feelings about
their own past in this country; and to valorize the British state. In
these English histories, there is much confusion for Muslim readers,
and small details are made into paradigms of hate. These histories
have entered the school curriculum and shape the minds of children
such that even Indian historians are reproducing these biases and
mistakes. It is true that no state is free from fault, nor any history free
from bias, but we still require a careful study of the Muslim past re-
veals the strengths and the weaknesses of Muslims in India.^59
Nadvi also employed Chachnama as a narrative of the eighth
century. He placed it within a constellation of numerous other bio-
graphical ahd travel narratives from Arabic and Persian sources. Nad-
vi's efforts were to locate Arab settlers in India and to research the his-
tories of migrations. He, like other historians of his generation and
those that preceded him, wrestled with a historiography that saw Islam
solely through the lens of Muslim arrival to South Asia.