2 INTRODUCTION
A Question of OriginsThe question of origins was significant for the European inquiry into
the pasts of the world in general and colonized people in particular.
In Enlightenment thought-from Descartes to Vico to Kant-the
study of Europe's own origins necessitated equally an inquiry into
the origins of the New World or of India or China. These "scientific"
inquiries into origins of language (philology) and origins of human
society (history) created, by the later eighteenth century, a vast body
of philosophical and ethnographic material about the colonized
and Orientalized world. It is in this set of inquiries that my project
begins.
I am concerned here with a particular story of beginnings-that of
Muslims in India-and the ways in which it structures the reading of
Muslim pasts in South Asia. At its barest this narrative asserts that
Islam is fundamentally Arabian and hence, geographically foreign to
India. This outsider origin of the faith makes its adherents outsiders
as well. Muslims thus come &om the outside to India: either as for-
eign conquerors or foreign traders or foreign proselytizers, all distinct
from the "indigenous."'In this beginning, there are a number of points
of origins-one is in the early-eighth-century campaigns from Arabia
to Sind under Muhammad bin Qasim; another is in the eleventh-
century campaigns from Ghazni to Gujarat under Mahmud of Ghazni;
another, in the sixteenth-century campaign from Kabul to Delhi by
Zahiruddin Bahar. These multiple points of origins act as constant
renewals of foreignness in this beginning story, and, paradoxically,
these diverse renewals feed a monolithic, ahistorical, atemporal Islam
in India. Critically, the history of political states in India (tagged
Muslim) encompasses the social and cultural lives of all who claim any
variety of Islam as their faith.
In this book, I take aim at a particular origins narrative of a Muslim
political state in India-the 712 expedition of Muhammad bin Qasim
to Sind-to expose its historical specificity and the way it was em-
ployed in later reconstructions. What is at stake when we question this
origin and revisit the history that is outside of it? I submit that certain
"infallible" social and political frameworks fall apart and newness
emerges.