INTRODUCTION 17
India. After all, it was from Uch that Qabacha sent governors to Diu
in Gujarat; and it was to Uch that trade and traffic came from Kabul,
Makran, and Muscat.
It was from reading very different texts written in medieval Uch-
sacral, poetic, historical-that I was able to see the world of Chachnama
as an Indian Ocean world constitutive of Muscat and of Gujarat. The
circulation of people, of ideas, and of artifacts in this region of the In-
dian Ocean ecumene shaped the stories contained in Chachnama and
shaped the questions that I am asking of the text.^32 The presence of
sacral sites in Uch are indicative of a long history of arrivals-of reli-
gious, political, and trading communities. That their material and ar-
chaeological remains are still inhabited and cared for demonstrates
that this is a space where the past has remained a significant part of
self-identity. Yet the cultural memory of Uch and its current economic
and political life are at great odds. How do the material remains of a
forgotten capital shape the contours of research on medieval India? Our
presentist historiography occludes new modes of questioning the past
and creates spatial and temporal divisions that seem natural but actu-
ally hide past realities. The textual materials historians use to study
medieval pasts are distended from their sites of production. The ar-
chives now exist in London, Berlin, or Cambridge and manuscripts
are often studied without due attention to their spatial and textual his-
tory. Such inquiries create a false geography of the past. My field of
inquiry thus encompassed the text, the afterlife of the text, and the
method of the historian. I saw that an examination of Chachnama and
its afterlife puts into stark relief the limits of how we conceive of the
past. Understanding how an unreading of the origins narrative, and a
reading of its political purpose, opens up historical questions is the
main work of this book.
A methodology of medievalists walking in landscapes of ruins-and
extracting lessons for the present or future-is part and parcel of
the post-Rankian historical enterprise. Precisely when it comes to
re-creating'past imperial hubris, we can recall the French encounter
with the Egyptian ruins, such as case of Constantin-Fran~ois Volney's
Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (1787) followed by his influential Les Ru-
ines, ou Meditations sur Jes Revolutions des Empires (1791), which pos-
ited decline from the material ruins of his contemporary observances