A FOUNDATION FOR HISTORYis necessary to unread Chachnama from its perch in the origins
narrative.
Dismantling the origins narrative requires such a critical reading
of Ali Kufi's Chachnama that places it within its textual uni~erse. It
puts the text into conversation with the particular political regimes at
the time of its production. That is, it places Kufi's Chachnama in the
world of the early thirteenth century, as described in Muhammad 'Aw-
fi's Lubabul albab (completed in 1221) and f awami Hikayat wa Lawami
ul-Rivayat (completed in 1231), with Minhaj Suraj Juzjani's Tabaqat-i
Nasiri (completed ca. 1260). 'Awfi, Kufi, and Juzjani were all in Uch in
the early thirteenth century, and they were associated with the court of
Nasiruddin Qabacha (r. 1205-1228). In linking Chachnama with other
texts of the early thirteenth century, I expand also the analysis of how
space (the interconnected regions of Sind and Gujarat) influences these
texts. This allows me to begin the process of seeing Chachnama as an
Indic political theory of governance; it is fully immersed in its political,
spatial, and textual context. Put simply, by displacing Chachnama
from its understood language and genre assemblies, we can re-place it
in a new geography and a new intellectual space.^1
Chachnama claims to be a translation of an Arabic history and it
calls itself a book of conquest (fathnama). This claim was read by co-
lonial historians and archaeologists at face value. They chopped the
text into excerpts and then interpreted them as evidentiary blocks for
history. This chapter shows that, in fact, the claim of translation and
conquest narrative ought to be understood as interlinked claims for au-
thorial significance or the significance of particular literary cultures
within elite publics in Sind. The significance of the claim of transla-
tion lies in the interpretative space this move for historical antiquity
entails-that is, it is tied to questions of audience and prestige. A re-
buttal of Chachnama's claim of translation also opens up an exami-
nation of how Chachnama differs from the early Arabic conquest
literature, as a text of that genre, and why we need to understand (and
interpret) it as a political theory.
A Contested Geography
In any excavation of the Muslim past in India, geography gets to deter-
mine the status: the perpetual conqueror or the perpetual migrant.