Sindh before the conquest
The Rais ruled the lower Indus from Alor, near modern Sukkur, over a territory that the Arab sources describe as reaching to Kashmir in the north, Makran in the west and the Gujarat coast in the south — an extent that is probably a claim of tributary reach rather than of administration.
They were Buddhist, and Xuanzang, who passed through Sindh, in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), in the seventh century, describes hundreds of monasteries and many thousands of monks in the country. Sindh at this period was one of the more strongly Buddhist regions of the subcontinent.
The change of dynasty
The last Rai ruler, Rai Sahasi II, was succeeded not by his heir but by his brahmin chamberlain Chach, who married the widowed queen and took the throne around 632 CE. The account comes from the Chachnama, a Persian work of the thirteenth century that claims to translate an earlier Arabic history of the conquest.
The Chachnama is the principal narrative source for Sindh in this period and must be used carefully: it is late, it is a literary composition with its own political purposes, and its account of the pre-conquest dynasties may serve to explain and justify what followed. It is nonetheless nearly all there is.
Further reading
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Harvard University Press, 2015
- Samuel, Geoffrey. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra. Cambridge University Press, 2008
- Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
- Wink, Andre. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Brill, 1990
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.