NOTES TO PAGE>S 123-131 211- See the two seminal papers by Digby on such encounters. The papers locate
the question of narration, tropes, and prestige in these anecdotes. Simon
Digby, "Encounters with Jogis in Indian Sufi Hagiography" (lecture at the
Seminar on Aspects of Religion in South Asia, University of London, Jan.
1970); and "To Ride a Tiger or a Wall? Strategies of Prestige in Indian Sufi
Legend," in According to Tradition: Hagiographical Writing in India, Wi-
nand Callewaert and Rupert Snell, eds. (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrasowitz
Verlag, 1994), pp. 99-129. - Baladhuri: provides a genealogy of Jat or Zut, who are considered rebellious.
Baladhuri reports that they are a people captured in the conquest of Sind
and Khurusan and relocated to Iraq (along with their water buffa~o), where
they establish themselves as highway robbers and brigands. - Fathnama, p. 41.
39. The marriage is only alluded to in letters between Dahar and his brother,
where the case for Dahar's marriage is made. "Even though Bai is our father's
daughter, she is, in fact, the daughter of Jats, and they are a rebellious and
criminal people (mukhalif o mu;ram), especially their women. If you study
reality, you will see that they cannot be trusted, and they are far from being
honest and devout. Consider the saying about the Jats: 'Whoever catches the
foot of a goat can milk her, and whoever catches the arm of a Jat woman can
mount her.' Hence, due to her foreignness by birth (mizai a;nabi), this mar-
riage would be valid. Still, I swear to you that I will not let any pollution
come between us, and I will do all matters to your liking," (Fathnama:
p. 44). - Ibid., p. 163.
5. THE HALF SMILE
r. There are no female saints in more than twenty biographies in Masood Hasan
Shahab's study Khita Pak-e Uch (Bahawalpur: Urdu Academy, 1968). - An example of such a dismissal is in N. A. Baloch, "End of Imad-ud-din Mu-
hammad ibn Qasim, the Arab Conqueror of Sind," Islamic Culture vol.
19 no. 1 (1945), pp. 54-66. - Such readings are not restricted to historians observing primary texts in the
tari'kh genre. They exist even in the adab genre, where the severest reading
was by Fedwa Malti-Douglas in Womens' Body, Woman's Word: Gender and
Discourse in Arabo-lslamic Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991), which posited an exclusively male writer who used women as
marginal characters, highlighting their sexual licentiousness and cunning
in the social and political realm. This reading was challenged by Julie Mei-
sami and later Marle Hammond, who both pointed toward a plethora of fe-
male authors as well as nuances in the depiction of women in literature that
complic.tl:ed Mahi-Douglas's reading. See Julie Meisami, "Writing Medieval
Women," in Julia Brey (ed.), Writing and Representation in MedievaUslam
(London: Routledge, 2006),-pp. 47-87; Marle Hammond, Beyond Elegy: Clas-
sical Arabic Women's Poetry in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010). I should make clear that I am not making the claim that Chachnama
presents a woman's voice. Nor am I making a claim toward any "voice."