With the aid of the state machinery actively distorting and belittling the land’s own indigenous past, many an old Arab conquest continues to entrench itself deeper to this day. The flag bearers of local culture meanwhile get nudged towards marginalization, like the few losing pieces left in an increasingly one-sided endgame of Chess.
One such case pertains to the Brahmin dynasty of ancient Sind. Its reign was no golden age, but was still remarkable enough to deserve a little more on the pages of mainstream history. For as long as it could, it had held out against the potent mix of the Arab caliphate’s mercantile ambitions and religious fanaticism seeking to spread Islam by the sword rather than on the genuine merits of the grand faith.
This book is the story of that dynasty; it looks afresh at the verdicts meted out to it, traces the unrecognized intertwining of its destiny with the emergence of the Sikh faith nearly a thousand years later, and reveals how some of its other legacies continue to exist even today. As a result, it is also the authentic story of one of India’s most remarkable but perhaps least known clans, an attempt to share its history on a wider scale in a bid to prevent the complete drowning out of its remaining faint echoes.
