Narratives of Earliest Hindu–Muslim Encounters

and Keywords This chapter makes two broad claims. The first is to incorporate a longer history of state­ craft in north India into our examination of Mughal regime. The second is to take me­ dieval Indian Ocean texts as critical source material for understanding forms of state-making, negotiation of difference, and encounters between social actors. Toward these claims, the chapter reads a set of ninth- and tenth-century narratives linking Sindh and Gujarat to Aden and Cairo. Within these texts are representations of various forms of en­ counters between those understood as Arabs and Muslims and those labeled Hindi or Sindhi. The chapter explicates accounts of embeddedness of Islam in India, of crime and punishment as modes of statecraft, of everyday gendered lives, and of networks of ex­ change in order to provide a longer history of understanding pivotal concerns of the Mughal regime in the sixteenth century.

In the Akbarnama of Abu'l Fazl is a story about Humayun in a section written around 1596. Abu'l Fazl, the courtier and narrator of Jalaluddin Akbar's reign, describes Hu mayun (Akbar's father) trying his best to create allied relations in Sindh, near Uch, in 1542. Having been rebuffed by the local Muslim ruler, Humayun grows despondent. Ak barnama recounts: Since, by the mysterious working of divine wisdom, the causes for success lie within the folds of some unpleasantness, success was not achieved in Sind, and the true colors of his unmanly men were revealed, as were the disloyalty of the army, the unsupportiveness of his brothers, his relatives' lack of wisdom and the unfavorability of fortune. The emperor then wanted either to clothe himself in the garb of solitude and, traveling the path of God, set out for Kaaba, or to retire into a corner of freedom from sight of people and avoid contact with the torturous world and its deceptive inhabitants. 1 This is the lowest point of Akbarnama's narrative-the despondent prince deciding to give up, before the protagonist of the text (Akbar) has even entered this world. At this nadir, Akbarnama narrates a series of advisors who ask that Humayun attempt an alignment with Raja Maldev of nearby Marwar-a place Humayun had never visited before and where he had no political concerns. Listening to their advice, Humayun writes to the Raja and, in anticipation, sets off to his fort. En route to Bikaner, Humayun sends "an outstand ingly intelligent man," Mir Samandar, to ascertain the loyalty of Raja Maldev. 2 Samandar reports back that the Raja is certainly not trustworthy. Humayun stays on course. At a resting stop, Akbarnama describes an event where the Raja sends a courtier disguised as a merchant for the purpose of purchasing a valuable diamond from Humayun: a picking clean, as if by a vulture, of a prematurely dead polity. Humayun is yet keen enough to read through the subterfuge and declares: "Remind this purchaser that the likes of this valuable jewel cannot be bought. Either it will fall into [Raja Maldev's] hands by means of a glittering sword coupled with a sovereign mind, or it will come about through the favor of exalted kings." 3 Humayun, despondent and without an army or a hope, still articulates the paths to power that lay before Maldev-by brute force or by grant from a higher claim. Such articulation of rightful possession of glory-sovereign will-would be familiar to the readers of the Akbarnama, and Humayun's rebuff of a usurper underscores his po litical superiority to Maldev even when bereft of throne or army.
Despite this, Humayun continues, as does the narration of the journey. To further gauge the intent of Raja Maldev, Humayun dispatches another emissary to the Raja's camp as they near it-a Rai Mal Sauni. This noble-a Rai, rather than a Mir-is instructed to speak to the Raja and then non-verbally communicate his assessment. Rai is asked to grasp the five fingers of his left hand with his right should he find the Raja trustworthy, and only one finger if the opposite. Rai Mal Sauni, upon reaching the camp, reports back with a one-finger clasp. Akbarnama records: "By this signal the truth was known, and finally it was revealed that wretch [Raja Maldev] was contemplating treachery, and having as signed a large troop to go in greeting, had evil thoughts in head." 4 Having received this caution, Humayun turns away from Raja Maldev and the Akbarnama follows him back in to Sindh's deserts.
What is embedded in this imbricated set of exchanges-political, mercantile, cultural, sacral? Is this a sixteenth-century topography of intimacies? Can it be read as the en counter of a known unknown (the destitute king with an uncertain future) and an un known known (a regional polity of uncertain alliance) that confirm the categorization of a foreign Muslim conquest in the making of Mughal polity? More intriguingly, how to read the co-presence of the "extremely intelligent" Mir Samandar and the bodily deft Rai Mal Sauni? After all, these two figures perform key tasks of interpretations seeing and advis ing Humayun but from different subject-positions. How do we read their acumen? While Akbarnama, the text, and Humayun, the character, also perform interpretative tasks, it is this last set of hermeneutical actors that hint at a longer history of reading and being in the region. PRINTED  We begin with the idea that this very small event embedded in the massive Akbarnama is both a history of a specific space (Sindh) and a history of a specific encounter (between two political powers). At play here are both the imminent birth of Akbar-and thus the foundation of the Mughal polity-and a geography that itself has a history where Muslim and non-Muslim polities have negotiated co-presence. In what follows is an argument for thinking about Mughal encounters from a different, and novel, perspective-that of the longer history of the region of Sindh and the deeper meaning-making produced by the Hindu-Muslim encounter in the region.

A Series of Encounters
At the outset, a set of questions and assumptions need to be made explicit. There are three categories-Arab, India, Hindu-Muslim-that are historically contingent yet concep tually unstable. The historical "Arab" emerges as a subject and an author at different mo ments in the first millennium and it is only near its end-roughly in the eighth century CE -that a political regime creates the framework for the Arabic language and ethnic fami lies from the Arabian Peninsula as markers for an Arab identity. 5 Similarly, "India" emerges via Greek, Arabic, and Sasanian sources from late antiquity onward, with the Arabic "al-Hind" dominating until the Persian "Hindustan" becomes the primary geo graphical index for the northern Indian subcontinent in the tenth century CE. 6 It follows easily from these evolving terrains of nomenclature that we must proceed with caution in thinking about the "earliest encounters" between "Hindus" as "Indians" and "Muslims" as "Arabs." 7 When we turn to the matter of "encounters," further caveats demand attention. It was not too long ago that historical sciences focused on "discovery" rather than "encounter." The former fell out of favor once its peculiar constellation of power and violence became ap parent and the bodies that had for centuries been "discovered" wrote back against the "discoverers." 8 The language of encounters moved us away from civilizational erasures and from spaces deemed terra incognita, and using encounters allowed a glimpse at his torical agents and actors creating meanings. More important for our historical under standing, the concept of the encounter is embedded in particular spaces: the frontier, the borderlands, the port, the market, the sacral site, the court. These sites, with their mater ial and object histories, help illuminate the cultural or social contexts of encounters with in which we can understand the formation of the political or the sacral. The recent schol arship of Finbarr Flood and Sanjay Subrahmanyam has focused attention on encounter as an analytical category-visible as transcultural movement of artifacts (for Flood) and transactional contact between individuals (for Subrahmanyam). 9 Yet, particular chal lenges remain for understanding narratives from the last centuries of the first millennium as "encounters" between disparate identities. There is a paucity of textual source materi al dealing with the first millennium, and this means that the few sources have to both illu minate and extrapolate-making scale of the inquiry difficult. Further, the inability to con duct and coordinate archaeological or material culture research in Yemen, Oman, Iran, Pakistan, and India means that the space of encounter-the sites-also remain materially PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 October 2020 silent. Finally, the scholars face the admittedly difficult task of incorporating Sanskrit and Arabic sources into the more widely produced Persianate sources. Each of these presents unique challenges and much of the reason the field of early medieval or medieval India remains cordoned off with Sanskrit/Arabic/Persian scholars is based on these source limi tations. The impact of these limitations becomes pronounced as we move to the early modern period where the admittedly sound language of encounter appears seemingly for the first time.
Then, there is the burden of British colonial historiography, which framed the earliest en counter between Islam and India as one of conquest alone: Scarcely had the false prophet expired, when his followers and disciples, issuing from their naked desserts, where they had hitherto robbed their neighbours and quarrelled amongst themselves, hastened to convert their hereditary feuds into the spirit of unanimity and brotherly love. … The conquest of Persia was a mere prelude to further extension in the east; and though a more difficult and inhos pitable country, as well as internal dissensions, checked their progress for some years afterwards, yet it was not in the nature of things to be expected, that they should long delay their attacks upon the rich and idolatrous country of India, which offered so tempting a bait to their cupidity and zeal. 10 These are the words of Henry Miers Elliot (1808-1853), who was a colonial jurist and How then do we embark upon re-thinking the first-millennium encounters between Arabs and India? A. K. Ramanujan, while discussing three hundred Rāmāyaṇas, had this insight: "In India and in Southeast Asia, no one ever reads the Rāmāyaṇa or the Mahābhārata for the first time. The stories are there, 'always already.'" 12 What if the Arabs and Indians were there, always already? If we think of physical geography outside of post-Partitioned geographies, we can imagine an "India" that begins somewhere along the coasts of con temporary Baluchistan and sailing communities which move unabashedly between the coastlines of Gujarat and Oman. What does a history of encounter look like if we think of a history of both land-and sea-based routes connecting Aden, Muscat, Bahrain, Damman, and Siraf, to Sind and Gujarat ports like Daybul, Diu, and Thane? What is the point of origins and when did each discover the other? If the shortest dis tance between such ports-from Ras al-Khaimah to Hormuz-is fifty nautical miles and the farthest distance-from Aden to Diu-is eighteen hundred miles, then where along those miles did the discovery take place? To take an example of this route via land, we can turn to Ibn Khurdādhbih (d. 912 CE)'s Kitāb al-Masālik wa'l-Mamālik, written around 885 CE. It lists the following cities or stations in the journey to the port city of Manusra The everyday encounters are captured in a series of Arabic and Persian texts. These texts -travelogues, histories, geographies, or catalogues-describe the multiple ways of being Muslim, Hindu, Arab, Persian, Gujarati, or Sindhi. It is to these texts that the titular ques tions are addressed: what are the earliest narratives of encounters? What does an en counter look like? Where does this encounter take place? The questions, once asked, force us to make radical choices about spatiality-the relationship between city, port, and sea to movement within and across these spaces. In what follows are some archetypical and historical reactions that embody Arab encounters in India in the ninth and tenth cen turies. 15 In a series of Arabic texts from roughly the mid-ninth century to the mid-eleventh century are some of the earliest textual sources discussing pre-Mughal Muslim India. Though well known and well studied, these sources have not been examined as particular precursors to the history of Mughal Hindustan. They are the mid-ninth-century chronicle document ing the conquest of various political spaces by al-Balādhurī, From this textual archive, we focus on three reactions that address accounts of embed dedness of Islam in India, of everyday gendered lives, and on networks of exchange. By taking a series of anecdotes, exempla, or fragments as a collective reaction, we unmoor them from the text and resituate them in lived and imagined landscapes. This world of In dian Ocean termed "Afrasian Ocean," connecting the port cities of Siraf, Aden, Diu, Mansura, and Thana to Oman, Yemen, and the northwestern shores of India around the Arabian Sea stretches across the shores and sites of seafaring and desert-dwelling people in the first millennium CE. 17

Origins and Institutions
Defying the colonial attempts to situate conquest as the genesis for Islam's presence in India, a large number of accounts present in the sources make a different case. They make a case for political and communal conversion of physical space outside of the para meters of military conquest. 'Ajāʼib al-Hind contains a number of accounts tied to various geographies and the ways in which they responded to Muslims. In a section detailing a history of asceticism in Hind, the text focuses on Sarandip (now Sri Lanka) to detail the history of the "al-Bikarjī," who are inhabitants of the island and who "love Muslims and meet with them with pleasure." 18 They are described as wearing little or small patched clothing; with cremated ash rubbed on their bodies; with shaved heads and faces; and carrying a skull or bones around their necks or in their hands. For these ascetics, it re ports that when the wise of Sarandip learned of the emergence of Prophet Muhammad, they sent someone to Medina to learn about his teaching. However, the man reached Medina only after the Prophet had passed away and during the caliphate of 'Umar bin al-Khattāb. He perished in Makrān on the way back but with him was his Hindi slave boy.
That boy reached back to Sarandip and reported all he had seen and heard including the ascetic ways in which 'Umar lived ("he wears patched up clothes and spends his nights in the mosque"). It was from this report that the ascetics of Sarandip gained their custom of wearing patched clothes and their love of Muslims.
From a community to a polity, such intimations of good conduct leading to conversion run throughout these sources. In Futūh al-Buldān, there is Raja Jai Singh-in Sindh-who re ceived a letter from the Umayyad caliph 'Umar ibn Abdūl Azīz. Upon gaining the caliphate in Damascus in 717 CE, he sent these letters to the various nobles in Sindh "inviting them to Islam," and since they had already received notices about his asceticism, piety, and ser vice, they readily accepted and converted and changed their names to Muslim names. 19 'Ajāʼib al-Hind opens with an account of the king of Hind-up in Kashmir-who wrote to the governor of Mansura asking for the "laws of Islam in Hindi" (shariāt-al Islam). 20 The governor called upon a man of Iraqi descent who had grown up in Hind and spoke various languages of the land. Upon the governor's request, he wrote an ode (qasidā) that set out the necessary rules and histories. The poem was dispatched to the Raja who was very pleased with it, and asked that the poet himself be sent to his court. The poet lived in that court for three years and when he returned he was asked to describe all that had oc PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 October 2020 curred to him. He explained that when he left, the king had already converted to Islam but had not declared it such for fear of losing his country. The account continues: He further reported that the king had requested an exegesis on the Qur'an in Hin di (hindiyā) which he was in the process of providing-when he reached the chap ter of Ya-Sīn and quoted Allah: 'Say: He will give life to them Who brought them in to existence at first, and He is cognizant of all creation'. As he was explaining the verse, the King who was sitting on a throne of immense wealth and beauty, rose up and walked on plain ground-ground that was wet from having been sprinkled -and he put his cheek on that earth and wept, such that his face was covered in mud. He said to me: He is truly the One to be Worshipped, the First, the Ancient, the one Alone. After that, he had a room built, which he explained was for the pur pose of contemplation in matters of polity. Instead he prayed there in secret. The poet reported that the King granted him six hundred mann of gold. 21 This opening account establishes a long set of precedents that we can think with. The ac count is situated around 880 CE in the city of Mansura, which was itself only established around 760 CE or thereafter. It begins with a notion of movement of ideas and people across polities; a recognition of political sovereignty of the much more powerful Indic King; a desire to create meaningful relationships between the Arab Muslim city-state and the King; the transformative power of the Word of God, which leads to that singular mo ment of conversion; and finally, the recognition that the political act of conversion is sepa rate and distinct from the spiritual act of conversion. There is an intimacy in the account that comes from lived experience and an attention to the nuances of political subjectivity here that demonstrates the long histories of co-existence. The king had built a secure and permanent home for this idol. Once his son fell ill, and he called upon the caretakers at the temple and said: "Pray to the idol that my son attains his health." They heard him, and later returned and said: we have prayed to the idol and our prayer has been accepted. Yet, the boy died after a short while. The king destroyed the temple, broke the idol and killed the caretak ers. Then he called upon a group of Muslim traders, who presented to him the doctrine of Oneness and Islam. He accepted it and this was during the time of Emīr-al mu'minīn al-Muʿtaṣim bi'llāh. 22 Placed during the mid-ninth-century reign of al-Mu'taṣim, it is likely that our contempo rary attention goes immediately to the narration of the temple-destruction and the con Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 October 2020 denunciation by the bereaved king. Significantly, it comes at the hands of merchants, who are marked as the people particularly embedded in the Indian milieu.
Taken together, these three accounts-and there are many more such accounts scattered in the sources-invite us to think about the intersection of polity and faith in the ninthand tenth-century Indian Ocean world. A personal conversion, a political conversion, and a disposition toward friendliness all emanate from contacts between everyday Muslims and their counterparts in this liminal world. It is within this constellation that the much more prevalent accounts of Indic kings who are well-disposed to Muslim merchants, intel lectuals, and travelers ought to be located.
The key figure is Balhāra, a strong wise king based in Gujarat or Deccan region, who ap pears in many forms in these sources. Perhaps the quintessential account is in Abū Zayd al-Sīrafī's Akhbār al-Sīn wa'l Hind: Balharā is the noblest of the Indians, all of whom acknowledge his nobility. Al though each one of the kings in India rules independently, they all acknowledge his superior rank, and when his envoys arrive at the courts of any of the other kings, they make obeisance to them as a mark of honor to Balharā. He is a king who distributes payments to his troops as the Arabs do, and he owns many horses and elephants and possesses great wealth. … The people of Balharā's kingdom as sert that their ruler's lengthy reigns and long lives on the throne are due entirely to their fondness for the Arabs. None of the other rulers show the Arabs such af fection as does Balharā, and his people share his fondness for them. 23 As a totemic figure in these sources, Balharā's support for Arab merchants and his status among the other kings are indicative of the attention paid to political climates in the lit toral regions. 24 There are numerous descriptions of other kings in India and their quali ties: they do not drink alcohol or have sexual relationships outside of their sanctioned marriages; they have excellent law and order in their lands such that no merchant is robbed; they organize debates and dialogues between Muslims and non-Muslims in which matters of theological importance are considered; they allow for the constructions of mosques and colonies of homes for Muslims; they provide employment and stipends to Muslims who live in their lands; their daughters are allowed to become rulers on their own accord and they are supported by the armies; and they honor and protect treaties and pacts with other rulers, including the Muslim Caliph. 25 The political landscape of this Indian Ocean economic and cultural zone thus resembles the diversity of its participants. There is little room for dogmatic intransigence among the political elite, and where the order breaks down-where the social and political contract is shattered-there are concomitant discussions of punishments and condemnations of the culprits. PRINTED

Ordered and Gendered Lives
A sailor arrives in a port and seeks debauched pleasure. He sees a beautifully carved idol in the shape of a woman, which he mistakes for a real woman. He lays with it and de spoils it. A caretaker at the temple catches him and takes him to the governor of the city. The man confesses his crime. The king asks his advisors what the punishment ought to be for this crime. One says to have him trampled by elephants. Another says to have him cut to pieces. The king rejects them and says that since the sailor is an Arab, and they have treaties with the Arabs, they have to consult Abbas bin Mahan, who is the one in charge of the affairs of these Muslims. "Go ask him what is the penalty for one who has commit ted such desecration in their mosque?" Abbas bin Mahan responds quickly that the pun ishment should be death. The king then had the sailor put to death. Shortly thereafter, Abbas bin Mahan leaves the port fearing that the king will punish him as well for the transgression. 26 This account from 'Ajāib al-Hind reveals two central facets of the everyday lives in the lit toral region. There were agreements, treaties, and managers for communities, and that there was a steady pressure to keep and maintain order in the ports and the cities. The king would have been within his rights to condemn the sailor for desecrating the idol but he does not listen to his advisor and instead has the Muslim governor respond. It is no table that the king makes an explicit equivalence between the sanctity of the temple with that of the mosque-and it is this equivalence that allows the Muslim governor to immedi ately offer the death sentence for the sailor. When we think of maintaining order as part of the public good that allows for communities who transact to co-exist, then the pres ence of a large number of accounts of crimes and their punishments in these sources makes perfect sense. The accounts capture the many ways in which both individuals and communities break the social and political contract and are justly condemned.
Another account in 'Ajāib al-Hind focuses on Thana (Gujarat, near Bombay), where some men entered the home of the son of a wealthy Hindu merchant and took him hostage. The kidnappers asked for 10,000 dinars in ransom. The merchant spoke to the kidnappers and asked that the ransom be set at 1,000 dinars, but they refused. The merchant went to the king and told him: "It is unbearable. If these people are not punished, no one will be able to live here." The king replied that he can easily kill the kidnappers but they may kill his only son before he can be rescued. The merchant responded: "They are asking for a large sum such that it may impoverish me. Let us surround the home with wood, block the door, and set it on fire." "But that would kill your son and his family." "Let them burn," replied the merchant. Thus, the king sent his men to secure the door and set the house on fire and the son and his family perished in the fire. 27 Is this account a demonstration of the lack of filial emotions among the Hindi merchants, or a demonstration of the need for maintaining civil order? After all, the first thing the merchant reports to the king is his fear of lawlessness writ large. Is the text concerned with the victims or the perpetrators of the crime? The "criminal" has a particular presence in these accounts. One highly charged example are the people of Mīd-who are seafaring/desert community around the Rann of Kutch. The Mīd emerge as pirates, as instigators, as destroyers of trade routes, and ones who re quire a constant military answer. In the 'Ajāib al-Hind, an account given by an Omani sea captain Isma'īlawayh confirms the threat and power that pirates held. Isma'īlawayh re counts that when he sailed from Kala (Malay coast) to Oman, he was attacked by sixty-six pirate vessels and upon reaching Oman-the journey took forty-one days-he was levied a tax on his merchandise without taking into account his losses from the pirates. 28 In Futūḥ al-Buldān, Baladhuri describes the constant campaigns by the Muslim governors of Multān or Mansurā across the desert to take out their access to the ports. Let us examine one specific event from the text: During the governance of Muhammad bin Harūn ibn al-Numrī, the king of the Is land of Rubies (Sri Lanka) sent some Muslim women who had been born on the is land, and whose forefathers had lived and died there, to Iraq. However, the ship they were in was attacked and captured by the Mīd people from Daybul (Sindh) on their own ships. One of the women from the family of Yarbā' cried, "Ya Hajjaj." When Hajjaj (the governor of Iraq) was informed of this, he said, "I come." He sent a letter to Dahar (King of Daybul) to rescue the women. He replied: those who have captured them are outside of my control. To fight Daybul, Hajjaj dispatched 'Ubaidullah bin Nibhān but he was killed. Upon receiving the orders, Budaīl bin Tūhfāt, who was in Oman, set off toward Daybul. His horse jumped during battle and he was surrounded and killed. Some report that the Zūt of Budd were respon sible for Budaīl's death. The Island is called the "Island of Rubies" because of the beautiful faces of their women. 29 In later colonial histories-such as those of H. M Elliot or Richard F. Burton-this account emerged as the casus belli for the Muslim campaign to conquer India. Here, in its primary transcription in the mid-ninth century, it appears very differently. In this rendering, there is the awareness of a political order wherein the king of the island is sending gifts to the Umayyad caliphate's powerful governor as well as the control various Indic polities must exert on the "criminal" elements. Most important for our purpose, we have something akin to a declaration of limits of political power by Dahar of Daybul-"outside my con trol," as referring to the Mīd.
The response to this attack of piracy from Hajjāj bin Yūsuf (d. 714 CE), who was then the governor of Iraq under 'Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705 CE), was not to send a mission to rescue the women from their captors-the women in fact do not reappear in Futūḥ al-Buldānbut to punish Daybul for lack of control over the piratical Mīd. One can surmise that a for mal legal structure must already have been in place between Dahar and the Umayyads to make his declaration of powerlessness over the Mīd be read as a breach of contract and a threat to the greater movement of goods and people across the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea channels. This does not resolve the matter of this account. We still have to account for the plaintive cry uttered by the captured woman-Ya Hajjāj-which is our only trace of a such a dispos sessed subject. It can be surmised that women were among the passengers and travelers across these landscapes and seascapes. The sources are thick with fantastic accounts of islands where women rule, or the strictures against sexual liaisons with indigenous women. There are also the various references to women rulers and advisors. Yet, the everyday lives of women as participants is largely obscured, unless they appear as, in this case, subjects demonstrating the collapse of political or social order. The sailor's trans gression against the idol was, taken from his perspective, a violation of a woman. The case itself demonstrated the breaking of a law and the due punishment necessary to maintain order, but the transgression's unique nature cannot be ignored.
Also in 'Ajāib al-Hind is an account concerning another silent woman. She was on a jour ney from Oman to Basra but she was coming from Mansura in Sindh. The text records nothing more than the fact that she was beautiful and that she was traveling alone. At sea, there is a sudden storm of such ferocity that everyone has to wrap themselves with ropes so as to prevent being swept away. During this upheaval, a soldier, also from Mansura, attacks the woman. She kicks him such that he leaves her alone for the night.
However, as the waves buffet them up and down, she grows tired and is unable to defend herself against the soldier. He attacks her and rapes her. "I saw her but I could not move from my place and could not talk to the soldier or stop him," says the reporter. 30 When morning comes, she is no longer on the ship nor are a number of those who had secured themselves.
This is a difficult account to contextualize even within the text itself. Many of the ac counts of transgressions-criminal, social, mercantile-in these textual sources concern themselves with those crossing boundaries-of legal status, of communities of faith, of po litical regimes-along with morality or law. In this particular case, I choose to read the placing of this account as immediately before the previously discussed account of the sol dier violating the idol he mistakes for a woman, as an interpretative link of both accounts as depictions of sexual. In this case, the helplessness avowed by the reporter of the event is curious to read-there is no mention of God protecting those who are at sea-as in oth er cases in the text. The women in such accounts are meant to be representations of pro priety and ordered lives, but the event itself displays the dangers they face.
Take as a final piece of evidence this account of two elephants in the army of Mansura's governor-named Munfarqalis and Haidarāh. Al-Mas'ūdī in his Murūj al-dhahab wama'ādin al-Jawhar narrates: One day they emerged from the Elephant House with Munfarqalis ahead and then Haidarāh and then the rest of the elephants. As they were going down a narrow pathway in Mansura, suddenly a woman (who had not seen them) entered the street. When she glanced at the elephants, she was terror-stricken and fell uncon scious on the street. Her garment became unwrapped and uncovered her body. Upon seeing this, Munfarqalis turned such that his body blocked the width of the alley and with his trunk adjusted the woman's clothing such that she was modest once again. Once she recovered and cleared out of the pathway, only then did Munfarqalis and the other elephants continued their journey. 31 The elephant's grace, and the wonder of the account, rests in his recognition of the public humiliation of a woman and his actions-to protect her body from other eyes and to cover it up again-are the actions necessary to maintain the civic accord. All of the women are voiceless in one way or another, but their presence in these accounts speaks to marking out of the sanctity of their physical bodies in the text.
In thinking about the encounters in these sources as those between contiguous communi ties, it is important that we think of the significance of contiguous gendered lives as well. The many fantastic perils of sexual relations with mermaids dotting the literal landscape of these tales have long been read for their romantic and imaginative affect. However, looking at accounts of crime and order provides a different perspective into these varied sources-one that helps us witness what the limits of subjecthood were under civic or le gal codes.

Letters of Exchange
The translation of Kalilā wa Dimnā by al-Muqaffā in early eighth century from Sanskrit to Pahlavi to Arabic is perhaps the most avidly read example of the networks of translation that spawned the early Abbasid imperium. 32 Ibn al-Nadīm in his Fihrist mentions a num ber of people who lived in Baghdad and who knew Hindi languages and translated books into Arabic: Mankah al-Hindi, Ibn Dahn al-Hindi, Jūdar al-Hindi, Ṣanjahil al-Hindi. 33 They translated books in astronomy and medicine by the following Hindi authors: "Bakihur, Rā ja, Ṣakah, Dāhir, Ankū, Zinkal, Araykal, Jabhar, Indā, Jabārā." 34 While some of these names are clearly totemic, the list of books are plausible, including "ten sections of the Book of Sasard" (perhaps sāstra) and a "book on the treatment of Women" (perhaps preg nancy) by a woman named Rūsā. 35 Alongside these names of individuals and books that traveled from al-Hind to Baghdad, Ibn al-Nadīm provides histories of various temples and idols in India as well as those idols present in Baghdad-he recounts his visit to a golden statue in the Caliph's palace in Baghdad sent as a gift. 36 Much of the information recorded in Fihrist comes via dignitaries, diplomats, and travel ers who had frequented India. These late tenth-century lists demonstrate the network of exchange that flowed between India and the Abbasid royal court in Baghdad. In Qādī ibn al-Zubayr's Kitāb al-Hadāyā wa al-Tuḥaf are both lists of gifts exchanged between the courts in Iraq and India as well as letters written between the polities. Among the gifts mentioned are a diamond-encrusted mechanical she-camel that could move on its own and in whose belly were pearls of great value, a stick made of emerald, vast quantities of 'ud, sandal and ambergris, elephants, idols of silver or gold, and buffalos. One wondrous object exchanged was the gift from the king of Qiqān to the Umayyad caliph Mu'āwiya bin Abi Sufiyān (d. 680): "a fragment of mirror, that the learned say was given to Adam by God when Adam's lineage had spread across the world. The power of the mirror was such PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 October 2020 that whenever he wished to see the condition, good or bad, of anyone on earth, he could see the entire life in the mirror." 37 The letters show the ways in which the littoral Indian Ocean world were connected in an economy of exchange at the courtly level. 38 The first letter is from Dahmī, king of India, to 'Abdullāh al-Ma'mūn Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 833) and is reproduced in full by al-Zubayr. The letter-written in gold ink on the bark of a fragrant tree-was delivered by a slave woman from Sindh who was over ten feet tall, "with hair so long that it touched the ground when she walked, of great beauty; with four braids on her head arranged like a crown; with eyelashes as long as an index finger, such that when she blinked they touched her cheeks; with teeth so white that they seemed like lightning between her lips; with firm breasts and eight bellyfolds." 39 The gifts that accompanied her were just as larger than life: a goblet of ruby filled with large pearls, a carpet made from the skin of a snake so large that it could swallow an elephant, small rugs made from the feathers of the mythic samandal that can live in fire, large quantities of aloeswood, and camphor.
The letter is, however, much closer to everyday life. Dahmī begins by praising Allah and then recounts the excellence of his rule and land but then pivots back to the question of God's praise: It has not escaped us that when we made mention of the grandeur of our ances tors and our current greatness, all that will vanish. Indeed, we should have begun this letter by mentioning God. Yet we think his name as too exalted to begin a let ter with-his name should only be used in places of worship and prayers. We re ceived word of your erudition and we have not seen any other ruler with such qualities. We are with you for friendship and love of knowledge. Therefore we open this correspondence with a search for useful knowledge by sending you the translation of a book "The Cream of Intellect." When you read it, you will discover that this is an appropriate title for it. We are also sending you some gifts but we know that they are much too inferior to one you offered. Yet we request that you ignore our shortcomings and accept them (if God wills). 40 The king engages with the Muslim Caliph on precisely the terms of exchange within an affinity of knowledge, while affirming that his relationship to the Muslim God is one of a stranger. Ma'mūn replies with his own gifts accompanied by a horseman mounted on a decorated horse with carnelian-and stones and clothes, such as ambergris, onyx, and other fabric from Yemen and Egypt. Ma'mūn's reply focuses on accepting Dahmī as wor thy of a Muslim greeting even though he was a non-Muslim and affirming his religiosity without challenging him. He then continues on the theme of growing relationships through the exchange of knowledge: We offer you a gift of our love which is the best gift to exchange between friends. We are sending you a book "Collection of Cores of Intellect and Garden of Rare Minds" translated from Arabic. After reading this translation you will realize the virtue of this grant, and also realize that the name is apt. We accompany this gift with other gifts which do not rise to your excellence. It is indeed true that if Kings exchange gifts according to their standings, their treasuries would soon exhaust itself. Yet, this exchange happens as a token of goodwill and mutual relationships. 41 In the annals of gift exchange, these two books are perhaps not significant enough to merit greater study, but the networks revealed in this letter exchanges surely are. We see that at both ends of the relationship there is awareness and recognition of the other's polity and customs, as also is the recognition of difference among them-such as the ways in which they invoke their gods. The letters are also indicative of the infrastructures of exchange: the capacity to create translations, to send and receive messages and goods. Elsewhere in al-Zubayr's account are captured specific memories, attached to these ob jects, held by the various rulers and nobility. All of this leads us to think about the ways in which Arab and Indian practices of knowing and being were intimately tied by the ninth century.

Populating the Past
What emerges from these scant sets of reactions contained in some of these Arabic sources is a traversed seascape that organized ways of thinking about encounters: as al ready understood, as recognized with difference, as newness or more. Our emphasis in recapitulating them is primarily to indicate their illustrative qualities. For sketched here are modes of seeing outside of the conquest or the arrival frameworks for Islam in India.
Firstly, there was traffic in knowledge, in people as slaves, in crime and punishment. Se condly, there are aspects of political thought-for example, consultation, dialogue, semi nars-that have deeper roots in India. Thirdly, there are expansive geographies-such as the seascapes-that are made invisible from the vantage point of Delhi-centered imperial histories from the thirteenth century onward.
The established models of historiography continue to look at the movement of Islam, of Arabs, and of Arabic from one geographic location (Arabia, Middle East) to another geo graphic location (India, Southeast Asia) as if these sites were not always already in con versation. Further they seek a particular teleology (a rise and a fall and a rise again) premised on a history of perpetual arrivals rather than of being part of India. This notion of nationalist geographies and foreign intruders centers on assumed identities as if the Arabs and Muslims were not there. I am proposing to thicken these movements with sto ries, to disrupt nationalist geographies, and to think through the processes that formed categories of self-identification. Let us take as a given the presence of Muslim Arabs as merchants, governors, kings, subjects, and believers, who organize histories of Sindh, Gu jarat, and Tamil Nadu such that we can animate them not with discordant identitarian categories but with rich, grounded lives. To do so, we must broaden the scope of source materials in terms of language, area, and genre. There are biographies, grammars, poet ry collections, and histories located in archives in Sindh, Gujarat, Yemen, and Iran that will undoubtedly provide rich venues for such thinking. 42 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date:  There are consequences for the study of Mughal pasts in re-accounting for this longer past. For one, the various "inventions" of Mughal rulers, nobilities, and governance can be read within a larger historical and discursive terrain. The debates on Akbar's Sulh-i Kul would greatly benefit from thinking about the history of political negotiation between Muslim and non-Muslim polities prior to Babur's progeny in India. Similarly, the concep tion of Mughal kingship as it draws upon Timurid pasts can also be examined within the histories of the Muslim polities of Sindh.
The second is that landscapes of these early encounters-Sindh, Gujarat, Kerala-appear marginal to the histories written by and about the Mughal experiences. I argue that such a "center-periphery" model detracts from the richness of the historical experience and occludes ways of being and belonging as Mughal in India. For example, Akbar's cam paigns in Sindh in the early seventeenth century have to be reassessed from the perspec tive of Humayun in Sindh and Muslims in Sindh before that. Finally, this is an argument to populate both the pre-Mughal and Mughal past with lives of those deemed insignificant or ancillary to the claims of grand polities and politics. The lives of men and woman re cast even in genre texts-such as that of 'Ajāib-open up new horizons for the study of