16 INTRODUCTIONactors in the text-no matter their textual or historical specificity-
became the heroes and villains of the present. However, I argue that
Chachnama is not a conquest narrative about Islam's origins on the
Indian subcontinent. Rather, it is a prescriptive text advocating!for a di-
alogical present for its thirteenth-century world and a political system
that encompasses diversity in that present. It does so by drawing upon
rich textual traditions from Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian that were
available to the learned audiences of the time.
To situate Chachnama means to read the text from the historical
site of production and to look at the landscape from the text's perspec-
tive. I advance an argument in the book that the study of the medieval
past of India ought to incorporate the perspective of the post-colonized
and post-partitioned subjects of contemporary South Asia. Tlie histo-
rian of modern India, modern Pakistan, modern Bangladesh, and
modern Afghanistan keenly considers the ways in which the 1947 or
1971 partitions affect their work-the splitting of languages, archives,
monuments, communities. The medieval historian, in contrast, has re-
mained sanguine in the face of these critical divisions of documen-
tary and lived evidence of the past.
The central concern animating the book is, how do we read a text
through space and read a space through a text. By space, I mean the
physical geography (landscape, town, routes, region) as well as the con-
ceptual space-such as dar (region), bilad (stat"e), desh (country), mulk
(nation). By te:1<:t, I mean the manuscript, the printed paper as well as
the cultural memory, and the material· remains of the past. Why did
the Chachnama persist in cultural and political memory through the
last eight centuries? I answer that question by treating the Chachnama
as a living text-embedding it in the material and cultural history of
contemporary Uch and engaging with its cultural memory. This work
is spatial and textual, but it is augmented throu'gh my engagement with
the ethnographic and the archeo-topographic (the built environment,
the living remains of the past, and the habitation of people). Over three
years (2009-2012), I spent months walking in Uch. My aim was to
reimagine the thirteenth century site of production of Chachnama---"--a
world in which the sites of power were neither Delhi nor Lahore, nei-
ther London nor Islamabad. To think with Uch as a political center of
a world in transition is to reimagine the conceptual geography of north