CONCLUSIONconquerors, and the British cannonball was mere evidence-just an-
other artifact. The logic of his narrative did not require the presence
of the cannonball.
I had tried to correct him. I had told him that Uch had indeeH been
conquered, not just by the British but also by Genghis Khan, by Iltut-
mish, by Firuz Shah Tughluq, by Humayun, and by Akbar. Uch was a
center to which most political powers of North India had gravitated.
So I had quickly asserted that he was telling the wrong story about Uch
to himself and to others.
I later became unsure of my own understanding of this place. These
many military "conquests" of Uch did not change the history which
he was remarking upon: the spiritual and cultural significance of Uch.
Indeed, from the perspective of the imperial and political centers of
Baghdad, Delhi, or London, many figures had overcome Uch and had
ravaged the landscape. However, from the perspective of Uch, one could
see the resilience of the structures and frames that connected medieval
shrines to practices, practices to texts, texts to markets, and markets
to networks that reached far and wide. This was the landscape that
gave birth to the Indic Chachnama and then preserved it and nurtured
it since the thirteenth century. The story of an always-conquered Uch
could not explain how this text came to be written in the first place
and why it survived.
What I have tried to do in this'book is to give an answer to these
qne:Ations in a way that makes sense to the historian in Uch. I have tried
to take away the supremacy that the question of conquest held for me,
for the field of South Asian history, and for the political entities of
contemporary South Asia. I have taken away the cornerstone of the
origins narrative through a rereading of Chachnama. My hope is that
other anti-foundational histories that re-examine the origins narra-
tive would force a paradigmatic shift in how we conceive of Muslim
pasts in India. My hope is that the narrative I have presented-one in
which a political theory of rule is constituted across traditions and
placed in a landscape that mirrors the intertwined history-can prompt
us to open up our archives and ask new questions.
The stories we tell have consequences.