I8 INTRODUCTIONof cities in the Levant.^33 Or we can imagine Edward Gibbon walking
in Roman ruins in Italy and framing the question of "decline." Or we
can imagine Arnaldo Momigliano later walking among those same
ruins and launching a critique of historiography and the politics of
empire.^34
Yet Uch is not a ruin and should not be understood as such.^35 It is
certainly the case that topography-the slow rise and sharp jut of its
mounds, interspersed with pathways-is dotted with medieval and
early modern structures which attract a traffic of believers a'nd sup-
plicants. It is certainly also true that large portions of its landscape act
as sarcophagi, with graveyards shaded by living trees and traversed by
the footpaths. Yet this is not the topography of ruins, frozen in time,
asking to be interpreted through the prism of presentist concerns. The
mounds of Uch break up the flat plains of southern rural Punjab and
offer striking views of distant horizons. The graves amassed next to
doorsteps make one feel closer to the earth. The shrines are social hubs
of great import that maintain lively traffic. The analytical gaze then
has to respond to this liveliness, this lived-in~ness, and this particular
presence of active pasts.
The analytical gaze needs to be structured differently than the gaze
offered by Gibbon or Momigliano.^36 It was through my engagement
with Walter Benjamin-specifically the ideas of Benjamin in his writ-
ings oh Paris and Berlin in the nineteenth. century-that I formed a
methodological framework that would not reduce Uch to a picturesque
background for a study of Chachnama or see it as site of nostalgic re-
cuperation. 37 In the two small texts on Paris and Berlin, Benjamin asks
us to think about the creation of social spaces as interpellations of sto-
ries, interior and observed, as informing the reading of the text.^38 In
my encounters with the landscape of Uch, the presence of the past-
never the same past-impressed upon me the need to begin thinking
about Chachnama as a text produced with a distinct idea of a center
and to think about the spatial understanding of the past it encompasses
through its depictions of material and natural landscape. Hence, I came
to observe Uch as the political and spiritual center it was at the time
of the production of Chachnama. This allowed me to locate interpre-
tative footholds in the text itself.