CONCLUSION 181In this book, I focused on the origins narrative that has governed,
implicitly and explicitly, the composition of the idea of "Muslim" in
India since the nineteenth century. The colonial study of the origins
of Islam in India was meant to demonstrate the violence of that origi-
nary moment in 712 AD when Muhammad bin Qasim campaigned in
Sind. What the idea developed into, however, was a framework for
asking any and all questions about Muslim pasts in India. The Arab
conquerors became the Turkish ones, who became the Afghan ones,
who became the Timurid ones, and so on. Each new wave of conquerors
renewed the sense of foreignness of Muslims. In the scholarly world,
the names, titles, writings, poetry, architectural styles, and s,acial and
cultural ways of such Muslims were explained through their connec-
tion to their lands of origin: Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia.
Figures such as Akbar and Dara Shikoh were understood as exceptions
to the rule of despotic Muslim conquerors, for they had translated from
Sanskrit to Persian or entered into dialogue with religious others.
Scholarship has overwhelmingly sought to explain the political theory
of any Muslim polity in terms of Iranian and Central Asian ideals. In
the study of Muslim pasts in South Asia, scholars reach for texts from
perceived places of origin of these rulers-places necessarily outside
of India. It is considered natural to think of the relationship between
Arabic and Persian texts of different times and political regimes and
not to think of the relationship between contemporaneous Persian and
Sanskrit texts, even when they come from the same locale.
Against that idea, I treated Ghachnama as an Indic text written
in Persian. I placed it within a rich local political landscape. I demon-
strated that it contained a theory of just rule, governance, accommoda-
tion, and alliance building for a thirteenth-century Muslim polity. I
demonstrated that it took as its subject the dialogic relationship be-
tween elite structures of power of Brahmin Hindus and of Muslims.
I then showed how this text was discovered by British colonial agents,
misread, misinterpreted, and used to cement a theory of despotic
Muslim ruie in India.
Within the field of the history of Islam in South Asia, scholars focus
largely on histories of concepts or political histories, either ignoring
studies considering Persian texts as a whole or tracing the history and