describe the importance of chanchnama as a source of history
Answers
It was a source of colonial understanding of the origins of Islam in the Indian subcontinent through the Sindh region. The text has been one of the sources of historiography and religious antagonism during the South Asian people's struggles to gain independence from the colonial British Empire.
Chach Nama (Sindhi: چچ نامو; Urdu: چچ نامہ; "Story of the Chach"), also known as the Fateh nama Sindh (Sindhi: فتح نامه سنڌ; "Story of the conquest of Sindh"), and as Tareekh al-Hind wa a's-Sind (Arabic: تاريخ الهند والسند; "History of India and Sindh"), is one of the main historical sources for the history of Sindh in the seventh to eighth centuries CE, written in Persian.
The text, with the stories of early 8th-century conquests of Muhammad bin Qasim, has been long considered to be a 13th-century translation into Persian by `Ali Kufi of an undated, original but unavailable Arabic text.[1][2][3] According to Manan Ahmed Asif, the text is significant because it was a source of colonial understanding of the origins of Islam in the Indian subcontinent through Sindh region and influenced the debate on the partition of British India. Its story has been a part of state-sanctioned history textbooks of Pakistan, but the text in reality is original and "not a work of translation".[4] Islamic scholars and modern historians question the credibility of some of the Chach Nama's reports.[5]