Re-reading A Thirteenth Century Text
Sayed Areesh Ahmad
A Book Of Conquest: The Chachnama And Muslim Origins In South Asia by Manan Ahmed Asif Harvard University Press, 2018, 272 pp., 599
September 2018, volume 42, No 9

Manan Ahmed Asif has written aprovocative, though eminently readable, book challenging settled historiographies on Muslim origins in South Asia. ‘Beginnings are a seductive necessity… for the modern nation, the romance of origins and the gravitas of a unique genealogy are imperative,’ Asif declares unambiguously in the opening pages of the book. However, the rest of the book is an engaging argument against the dominant narrative, illumined by colonial histories, that Muslim pasts are intelligible only within a singular template of conquests—starting with Muhammad bin Qasim’s victory in Sind, but since then perpetually reproduced at successive moments of arrival. Asif problematizes the imagining of a particular story of beginnings, that of Muslims in India, constructed primarily from the Chachnama—a Persian text written by Ali Kufi in the thirteenth century, which narrates the story of the righteous Brahmin King of Sind, Chach, and the subsequent coming of the Arab army under Qasim in 712 ad. The Chachnama, in a manner of speaking, was in the eye of the storm, as it was made central to the colonialist project of manufacturing an ever-present ‘difference’ between Hindus and Muslims. This was consciously done—to justify the British conquest of Sind in 1843 and portray the English as liberators—by East India Company historians like Alexander Dow, Richard F Burton, Elphinstone and Henry Miers Elliot. Asif argues that by rendering Muslims as perpetual ‘foreigners’ and ‘conquerors’ and Hindus as ‘indigenous’ and ‘vanquished’ in the numerous nineteenth century retellings of the Chachnama, colonial historiography forged an epistemological mould which has held our consciousness of the past in a virtual stranglehold. The two nation theory, espoused with deadly effect in the twentieth century by Jinnah and Savarkar, is the poisoned fruit of the recast-rearranged-refurbished Chachnama. Asif crafts a careful narrative, contestable as it may be, suggesting that Ali Kufi’s Chachnama has been fallaciously interpreted as a book of conquest by evacuating the text of its richness and multivocality, by smothering its political and ethical theory of accommodation, and by locating it in a universal terrain and ridding it of its particularity as a commentary on the reconciliatory mode of thirteenth century politics in Sind.

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