I2 INTRODUCTIONbook which contains the detailed Arab tradition regarding the con-
quest of Sind.^22
From within·this framework, the historian sifts through the ro-
!
mantic for the historical and builds a cohesive argument for what hap-
pened in India's Muslim past. The best of such scholarship, such as
Derryl N. Maclean's Religion and Society in Arab Sind, goes beyond
Chachnama to add markedly important insights into the eighth-
century world, but the ill effects of unmooring Chachnama from the
Uch of the early thirteenth century remains. Irfan Habib, for example,
mined it for linguistic traces of Indic concepts-a method that requires
the understanding that it is indeed a carrier text.^23
I will not detail here every postcolonial work that utiliz~d the
historicity of Chachnama, but a recent, popular introductory history
textbook calls it the "the principal source of our information on the
Muslim conquest of Sind" and summarizes the consensus thus:
The Chachnama, the principal source of our information on the
Muslim conquest of Sind, elaborates a royal code which demands
sensitivity to the fluidity and shifting nature of the real world of
politics. This is in contrast to Kautilya's "classical" and largely the-
oretical text Arthashastra which advises princes on ways to avoid
the dilution of absolute and centralized power.^24
To sum up the verdict oh Chachnama then: it is a political history
of the eighth century that allows us to trace some empirical or lin-
guistic or legal understanding of the eighth century. It is not a text of
political theory and not one to be read within its own site of produc-
tion as a particular act of agentive politics, with its own political and
social goals.
What Is (::hachnama?Chachnama is a Persian prose work. It was written by 'Ali Kufi in 1226
CE in the political capital of the region of Sind, the city of Uch.^25 It
describes the history of the regions of Sind [in north India) from roughly
680 CE to 716 CE. It tells the story of the Hindu Brahmin King Chach
(hence, Chach+ nama, or The Book of Chach) who ruled in Sind. It also