FRONTIER WITH THE HOUSE OF GOLDThis chapter reopens that history to see how historical records from
a variety of sources present political and mercantile interactions be-
tween Arabia and India. The formation of an Indian Ocean milieu and
the following discussion of Greek accounts of India in general and Al-
exander the Great's campaigns in particular are necessary for they
constitute the textual milieu for Chachnama's world: Chachnama
makes explicit references to Alexander and styles itself as conquest lit-
erature. Hence, in order to reread Chachnama, I must present the
ways in which pre-Muslim conceptions of Sind are present in·the text
as well as take stock of the historiography of conquest prior to the text,
including the very genre of conquest literature. A most critical example
of pertinent conquest literature is the mid-ninth-century account pro-
vided by the historian Baladhuri in his book Futuh al-Buldan.
With that in mind, I turn first to the outermost frame of the Indian
Ocean and the Greek accounts of India that are quoted in Chachnama.
Next, I map the terms "Hind" and "Sind" in Arab historiography, and
I provide a political history that is articulated in those accounts. My
aim is not to recover earliest accounts of Muslim campaigns but to
demonstrate the inherently connected ways in which those sources
presented the world of medieval Sind.
Sind as an Indian Ocean Region
Geographer Martin Lewis once cautioned that "geographical termi-
nology before the nineteenth century was anything but precise. La-
bels for large expanses of water or land were often deployed in a casual
manner, imperfect synonyms abounded, and the transposition of place-
names was common."^2 Early textual references to the Indian Ocean
are the perfect illustration of Lewis's warning, not only in terms of la-
beling but also in definition. Consider that the Indian Ocean arc, geo-
graphically speaking, can extend from the Red Sea to the South China
Sea, Africa to Australia. It encompasses the East African coastlines
from Somalia down to Mozambique, the southern Arabian coasts of
Yemen, Oman, and the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the western
coasts of India, the Bay of Bengal, and around to the South China Sea.
Even as it connects all of these economies and societies, its "ocean-
ness," until recently, was highly debatable. Like the Mediterranean,
the Indian Ocean is situated at the center of numerous East-West