92 DEAR SON, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?theory, reveals that cohabitation and cooperation have high strategic
value. The making of alliances requires a broader strategy than that of
domination. Chachnama provides examples and legal sanction for such
a political theory.
A Genealogy for Advice
Chachnama places its advice in letters and in pronouncements. Therein
the characters debate, resist, or adapt advice for their particular po-
litical context. What texts, intellectual traditions, or ethical frame-
works did Chachnama draw upon to present its political theory? The
arguments for building alliaμces, negotiating difference, and engaging
in dialogue is explicit in Chachnama, but no direct citations orient the
reader to sources that may have informed the nature of the advice that
appears in the text. One can recognize some Qur'anic quotes, but there
are other sources of traditions indicated in the text. Chachnama as a
text of policy or advice is eminently locatable within Persian advice
literature. In this last section, I show the ways in which Greek, Arabic,
and Persian advice literature informs it-from the Letter of Alexander
to Shahnama. To demonstrate the influence of a wider range of advice
literature on Chachnama, I also review other Indic texts: the Ar-
thasastra and Pancatantra.
Inserting Chachnama within such genealogical traces on advice lit-
erature helps us understand the production and consumption of this
text. In that sense, the question of advice literature must be opened up
more fully to articulate three temporally specific but overlapping ge-
nealogies for advice literature in India. These genealogies overlap in
language, in form, in relationship to power, and in impact of their
thoughts. In this discourse of advice, conceptual figures such as king,
minister, and philosopher travel in various texts and in languages as
diverse as Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. These figures enact and en-
trench political regimes.
I begin with Alexand~r of Macedon (d. 323 BCE), who was known
in Persian as Iskander or Sikander. Alexander casts a long shadow over
Uch and, consequently, over Chachnama. The story of that young con-
queror who overcame odds is often tied to the story of the young Mu-
hammad bin Qasim, both within Chachnama and in stories outside