A FOUNDATION FOR HISTORYOn my life, this is the land where when rain falls, milk, pearls and
rubies grow
Musk, amber, 'ud, and all the perfumes flourish
The parrots are big as mountains
such that elephants, tigers, and lions appear as child before it
What fool can deny the richness of this land?7°The invocation of trade goods, of travel lodges, and of vibrant cities in
Sind and Hind during the time of Chachnama is a forceful corrective
to both the later British imagination of Sind and contemporary schol-
arship's focus on conquest and devastation (whether of Mongols or of
Delhi's sultans) as the primary lens for seeing the thirteenth century.
What happens now in the task of unreading Chachnamat How
do we read it? In an early essay on Chachnama, Peter Hardy confronted
the question of thinking about this strange and influential text. He
asked,
Finally, one might at least put on the agenda for further inquiry the
possibility that the text of the Chach Nama was regarded by Kufi as
containing lessons for Muslim rulers of his own day .... Is the Chach
Nama then, in the text we have before us, one of the outward and
visible signs of a domestication of those new and Muslim rulers who,
successors to the Ghurids, were establishing their authority in the
northern part of the subcontinent at the beginning of the seventh/
thirteenth century [AH/CE)?^71Hardy's suggestive reading from 1981 left no imprint in historiog-
raphy. Though cast in functional language of political power, I find
Hardy's agenda to be fully congruent, to mine: Chachnama is a text
containing advice, it is a text that creates a moral genealogy for rule,
it is a text that argues for a framework for understanding difference
(most critically, religious difference), and it is a text that demonstrates
five hundred years of interconnected lives in the Sind-Gujarat-Oman-
Yemen world.
In this chapter, I unmoored Chachnama from its traditional perch
as a translation and a conquest narrative, and asked that we situate it
instead as a text written in and speaking to a particular locality and a
particular political concern. In this reading, Chachnama emerges as
an Indic political theory. It is a text that imagines the creation of capi-