A FOUNDATION FOR HISTORY 55Chachnama was a directly embedded in this cosmopolis with its
fluid political future and its marked relationship to external con-
quest. It answers the tumultuous political and military present of
the early thirteenth century through a theory of politics and an ethics
of statecraft. It makes two claims-one of language and one of genre-
to present its theory. It claims that it is a translation of an earlier Ar-
abic text, and it claims that it is a text in the genre of conquest litera-
ture. In what follows, I take on these central claims of Chachnama
and address them by reading the text alongside a constellation of con-
temporaneous texts and by examining the demands of genre upon
this text.
The Claim of Translation
The leading argument and understanding regarding the role of language
in polities in medieval India remains that of Mughal historian·Mu-
zaffar Alam. He has argued that Persian entered the Indian subconti-
nent's political and poetic domain via cities in Sind (Uch and Multan)
and Punjab (Lahore) from the ninth century onwards. As Ghazna and
Ghur, in central Asia, embraced Persian intellectuals and governors,
so did Lahore and Multan, such that by the eleventh century Persian
was the language of poetry, history, and certain monumental forms of
the political regimes.^12 Significant institutionalization of Persian as a
courtly and political language happened first under the Ghaznavid,
then under the Delhi sultans, and finally under the Mughal regime in
the sixteenth century. Alam demonstrated that the presence of Persian
in northern India as well as the process of Persianization was a force
of assimilation for the elite of a post-Mongol Islamic world, accentu-
ating a more secular ethos over the sacral Arabic.
The political effort to utilize Persian as a language connecting
Turkic elites in the city states of northwest India to Sassanian and
Persian pasts came at one particular cost. It meant that the Indic or
Hindavi coll.text was deemphasized and, as a result, it made these elite
"antitolerant."^13 In Alam's reading, the conquest of city states and the
adoption of Persian were intertwined processes of wrestling an ethics
(and a polity) away from the ethnic Arab or Arab Islam. Translation