204 NOTES TO PAGES 7 3-80
Masalik wa-1-mamalik," in Philip F. Kennedy, ed. On Fiction and Adab
Medieval Arabic Literature (Weisbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag, 2005), pp.
177-233.
- Abu'l Qasim 'Ubayd Allah bin 'Abd Allah Ibn Khurradadhbih. Kitiib al-
Masiilik wa-1-Mamiilik ed. M. J. de Goeje. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967),'p. 64
- Ibid., p. 67.
- Ibid.
- Consider Inden's reading of Balhara and Rashtrakuta polity as an argument
against colonial depictions of medieval India as a dark and desolate political
space. In Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1990), pp. 253-63.
- Abu Hasan Ali bin Husayn Mas'iidi, Muru; Dhahab wa-Ma'iidin fawiihir
(Beirut: Dar Kutub 'Ilmiyya, 1985), vol. r, p. 99
- Ibid., p. 99.
- See Z. A. Desai, "Arabic Inscriptions of the Rajput period from Gujarat,"
Epigraphica Indica: Arabic and Persian Supplement, 1961, pp. 1-24; and D. C.
Sircar, "Riishtrakiita Charters from Chinchani," Epigraphia Indica, vol. 32,
pp. 56-57.
- Sadiduddin Muhammad 'Awfi, f awami Hikayat wa Lawami Ravayat, ed.
Muhammad Muin, vol. 2 (Tehran: Ibn Sina Press, 1961), p. 9.
- Ibid., p. IO.
- Zakariyii ibn MuJ.:i_ammad Qazwini, Asar al-Biliid wa-Akhbiir al- 'Ibiid
(Tehran: Mu'assasah-i 'Ilmi Andishah-i Javiin, 1987), p. 85.
- Peter Hardy, "Is the Chach Nama Intelligible to the Historian as Politic;al
Theory?" in Sind through the Centuries, ed. Hamida Khuhro (Karachi: Ox-
ford University Press, 1981), pp. III-II?,
- See Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Iden-
tity in Medieval Andhra (New York, Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 43;
and Yasmin Saikia, In the Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos
at the Crossroads of Assam (Guwahati: Spectrum Publications, 1997), p. 173.
3: DEAR SON, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?
r. Personal communication, author notes, March 2011. As I listened to Murad
Sahib, I immediately thought that 'Awfi's biographical dictionary of Persian
poets, Lubabul Albab, mentions immortality for a writer whose pen can find
the Ab-e Hayat.
- It is not enough for me to understand that Murad Sahib is an individual based
in a marketplace whose services are crucial to the functioning of the com-
munity in Uch. His ability,to draft petitions, letters, wills, and testimo-
nies and his social standing are intricately linked in a political economy.
However, when I step away from that framework and wish to understand
the relationship between Murad Sahib and his community in the context of
the history of Uch, I must turn toward this dialogue between texts and
space. The question of "understanding" in the sense evoked by Gadamer is
crucial to my approach here-the material, the textual, the translated tex-
tual, and the oral. In Gadamer's view, understanding requires a return to
the text for "what [the author] would have wanted to say to me if I had been
