20 INTRODUCTIONthe same frame. Elliot relied on translated excerpts from Chachnama
as key evidence for the violence and depravity in the very origins of
Muslim political history in India.
I approach the construction of this narrative by arguing that the
text at the heart of Chachnama is misread, mischaracterized, and
misplaced. It is misread as a translation of an earlier Arabic text; in
fact it is an original Persian text from the early thirteenth century. It
is mischaracterized as a conquest narrative; in reality it is a work of
political theory. It is misplaced as a source of Muslim origins; indeed
it represents a politically heterogeneous world of thirteenth-century
Sind.
I aim to give a genealogical reading of Chachn4ma that provides a
"history of morals, ideals and metaphysical concepts ... as they stand
for emergence of different interpretations ... as events on the stage of
historical process."^40 The book then reads the entirety of Chachnama
to reconstruct its historical identity and to locate how it made "con-
tributions to particular discourses, and thereby recognize the ways in
which [it] followed or challenged or subverted the conventional terms
of those discourses themselves."^41 My book begins by situating the po-
litical and social history of tl;te region of Sind in the Indian Ocean ec-
umene. It then situates Chachnama·in a thirteenth-century political
and social world. The next three chapters constitute a close reading of
the text in relation to particular historiographic traditions. In the last
chapter, I trace of the afterlife of Chachnama and demonstrate how it
becomes the origins narrative for Islam's arrival in India.
In Chapter r, "Frontier with the House of Gold," I present the po-
litical and social history of translocal networks stretching across
the Indian Ocean. I trace a connected history for India and Arabia be-
fore the eighth century, a history of Muslim campaigns in India from
the earliest Arabic sources, and a political history of Muslim polities
in Sind from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries.
In Chapter 2, "A Foundation for History," I demonstrate that
Chachnama is not a translated history from Arabic into Persian. Rather
it is a work created in thirteenth-century Uch and reflects the political
and social concerns of Qabacha's court in Sind. I do so by situating
Chachnama in Persian historiography and textual productions of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. I then show that Chachnama does