152 A CONQUEST OF PASTS
in 712 AD. Colonial officers and historians explicated Muslim ori-
gins as a narrative of conquest, positing a racialized Arab overlord
against a weak Hindu subject-a subject eventually liberated by British
rule. i
In previous chapters, I presented the case for how and why
Chachnama can be read as political theory and as explication of how
to be an ethical subject. I examined the role of women, of advisors, and
of the political and religious elite who populated the text as well as
the social world of thirteenth-century Sind. Chachnama is, in fact, a
prescription for 'just rule and governance in the thirteenth century. I
have thus argued for an unreading of Chachnama from the colonial
and postcolonial lens that casts dark shadows on this text. My reading
of Chachnama foregrounds the worlds, both imagined and realized, of
the thirteenth century. Those worlds were diverse and complex and
built on political alliances and continuities.
Now I trace the afterlife of Chachnama. I present its invocation and
usage in early-modern Persian historiography. I mark a critical turning
point in the reinterpretation of Chachnama in modern colonial histo-
riography, beginning with Alexander Dow and continuing with other
Political Agents involved in the East India Company's conquest of Sind
in 182t-3. This longue duree examination thus reveals how the British
project to constitute radical difference in Indic pasts recast Chachnama
and how its logic of origins determined the framing of all subsequent
understandings of Muslims as foreign to India. At the end, I examine
the histories of anticolonial nationalist writers who responded to this
framework of Muslim origins as conquest from diverse perspectives.
Chachnama as Regional History
The life of Chachnama since the thirteenth century demonstrates
its circulation as a history of the region of Sind and as a source for
stories'about the people of Sind. It is continuously invoked in other
histories written between the four,teenth and eighteenth centuries in
Sind. In Chapter 2, I placed Chachnama within the historiographical
tradition of the regional regnal history, such as Beyhaqi's history of
the Ghaznavid sultans. This model was in contrast to the model of the
universal history of empire, such as Tabari's Tar'ikh, which invoked