70 A FOUNDATION FOR HISTORYto the British mission after the annexation of Sind by the East India
Company in 1843. Almost every archaeological text, and nearly every
British colonial work dealing with Muslims or Sind, quotes the
Chachnama.
Why does Chachnama become the central evidence explaining the
origins of Islam in India? Cousens clearly articulates what he under-
stands Chachnama to be: a history of the early eighth-century Arab
conquest, written at the time of the events, that survived with the de-
scendants of the Arab commander Muhammad bin Qasim until it
was translated into Persian in 1226 CE by 'Ali Kufi and then circulated
until the present. It is, Cousens believes, a text closest to the histor-
ical events of 712 CE, with t 7 stimony from direct participants. Further,
it is a narrative of the conquest of an indigenous population by outsider
forces that shows the prejudices of the conqueror and the destruction
of the conquered. In Chapter 6, I detail how the East India Company's
colonial conquest of the princely state of Sind dovetailed with the
anointing of Chachnama as the central conquest narrative, and how
Chachnama was selectively excerpted to represent "Muslim despo-
tism" in colonial historical writings.
Identifying the text as an eighth-century document of the Arab con-
quest allowed Cousens and other colonial archaeologists, historians,
and agents to claim that "with regard to the Arab dominion in Sind, it
is impossible for,. the travel'er to wander through the land, without
being struck with the absence of all record of their occupation."^52 The
physical or territorial "absence" that Cousens noted is linked again
to Chachnama, which ended its narrative in 714 CE. The history
"missing" in the Chachnama became the corroboration of the seeming
absence of the Arabs in Sind. The text is displaced from the thirteenth
century, obscuring the lived histories of 500 years of Muslim political
and social life in Sind. For Cousens, the text's significance is in its
movement from one language to another (Arabic into Persian) and he
can excavate the geography which is described in that text to confirm
its facts. Yet, due to the material absence of any indicator of Arab con-
quest in Sind, Cousens concludes that the textual source, Chachnama,
is the only source for the eighth century. Cousens reports Sind as a land
empty of rem~ins of Arab settlements and as one where Muslim fanat-
icism had destroyed all traces of pre-eighth-century Hindu past.