Search

Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400–1650. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020, 248 pp.

In this essay, I reflect on the position of a postcolonized historian traversing space and time, thinking and linking to histories of European arrivals to Mexico and India. The essay is concerned with early seventeenth-century histories by Chimalpahin and Firishta, who documented their worlds before and after the arrival of Europeans. I argue for a transregional decolonial approach to thinking about historical violence and the formation of disciplinary histories.

This chapter makes two broad claims. The first is to incorporate a longer history of statecraft in north India into our examination of Mughal regime. The second is to take medieval 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 encounters 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 exchange in order to provide a longer history of understanding pivotal concerns of the Mughal regime in the sixteenth century.

An essay on the process of Islamophobic response to COVID-19 in India. I draw upon a longer history of minoritizations, such as in Europe and in US to draw parallels to how Hindutva structures Muslim presences in 2020 India

Shahid Amin, Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan, Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2015, 348 pp.

This essay is an attempt to bring together two seemingly divergent trends in the American university of the recent past: first is the disciplinary presence of ‘area studies’ in the US academy since 1958, and the second is the rise of ‘data science institutes’ on US campuses since 2008.

Citation frequencies represent the most significant contributions in any respective field. This bibliometric analysis aimed to identify and analyze the 100 most-cited publications in the field of antibiotics and to highlight the trends of research in this field. “All databases” of Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science was used to identify and analyze the 100 publications. The articles were then cross-matched with Scopus and Google Scholar. The frequency of citation ranged from 940 to 11051 for the Web of Science, 1053 to 10740 for Scopus, and 1162 to 20041 for Google Scholar. Five hundred thirteen authors made contributions to the ranked list, and Robert E.W. Hancock contributed in six articles, which made it to the ranked list. Sixty-six scientific contributions originated from the United States of America. In contrast, five publications were linked to the University of Manitoba, Canada, that was identified as the educational organization, which made the most contributions (n=5). According to the methodological design, 26 of the most cited works were review-type closely followed by 23 expert opinions/perspectives. Eight articles were published in Nature journal, making it the journal with the most scientific contribution in this field. Correlation analysis between the publication age and citation frequency was found statistically significant (P = .012).

Review of Christian Lee Novetzke. The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India., in The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, 1 February 2018, Pages 201–202.

A Short History of the Mughal Empire. By Michael Fisher. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. 256 pp. ISBN: 9781848858725 (cloth, also available in paper).

This essay examines histories of colonial British India and the annexation of Sindh in 1843 from two perspective. The first is the colonial historiographic project that frames the history of Islam in India, creates an archive for its study, and produces the political and military dominance of Sindh. Fundamentally, it argues that Muslims in India cannot produce their own histories for they lack the language and archives for scientific objectivity. In response, a set of Indian intellectuals take on the project of writing histories of Sindh from the 1890s to 1950s. These histories are written in direct dialogue with the colonial archive and insist on their engagement with social scientific methodologies and tools. In re-thinking this past, the essay argues that vernacular historiography was itself deemed un-scientific by modern South Asian historians and abandoned as not “proper history.” This essay thus reflects on the after-effects of a truncated conversation on history for both anti-colonial thought and histories of anti-colonialism.

Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an archive?Let me begin at the beginning.My left eyebrow has a scar. It is jagged, and usually the droop of the eyebrow hides it from view. I see it sometimes when I look in the mirror. When I see it, I am reminded instantly of my father. He was sitting, reading a newspaper, on the lawn of our Lahore house. It was near to 6:00 p.m.—late evening to dusk. I had recently conquered the art of biking and I was eager to show him how well I rode. I kept going past him on the bike, but he was engrossed in the paper. Finally I decided that to really get his attention, I would need to go really, really fast. I went a ways, and began to pedal furiously. Right as I gathered full speed and came up to him, I looked at him to see if he was watching me. He wasn't. That split second, however, was enough for me to lose control of the bike, which swerved radically to the left, and I went face-first into a column of bricks. He looked up as I stumbled up, my eye covered in blood. I have no memory of this, except for when I “see” my scar.

RONIT RICCI, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Delhi: Permanent Black), 2011, pp. 336.

This essay takes a longitudinal look at how different communities dealt with political and theological difference in the same space. It examines accounts of Uch Sharif, in contemporary Pakistan, from the thirteenth century to the present. It specifically traces a motif of ‘ruby eyes’ in Arabic and Persian historiography in an effort to delineate how difference was represented and assimilated. It argues that until the late colonial period, religious difference was mutually comprehensible, even if incommensurate. The rupture of meaning in recognising difference continued in different ways in the post-colonial state of Pakistan. The study provides a methodological argument for reshaping the ways in which we look at landscape, built environment and community, in contemporary South Asia. By situating the textual production of the past alongside the material remnants of the past, this essay reads simultaneously ethnographic and textual understandings of difference in Uch Sharif.

The question of how Islam arrived in India remains markedly contentious in South Asian politics. Standard accounts center on the Umayyad Caliphate’s incursions into Sind and littoral western India in the eighth century CE. In this telling, Muslims were a foreign presence among native Hindus, sowing the seeds of a mutual animosity that presaged the subcontinent’s partition into Pakistan and India many centuries later. But in a compelling reexamination of the history of Islam in India, Manan Ahmed Asif directs attention to a thirteenth-century text that tells the story of Chach, the Brahmin ruler of Sind, and his kingdom’s later conquest by the Muslim general Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 CE. The Chachnama has long been a touchstone of Indian history, yet it is seldom studied in its entirety. Asif offers a close and complete analysis of this important text, untangling its various registers and genres in order to reconstruct the political vision at its heart.

Review of Ronit Ricci "Islam Translated" (2011) appearing in IESHR

Review of Vasudha Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui (ed) Religious Interactions in Mughal India (Oxford University Press, 2014) in The Book Review (February, 2015)

Introduction to special journal issue "ANIMALS and ENCHANTMENT in SOUTH ASIA" for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

This essay examines histories of colonial British India and the annexation of Sindh in 1843 from two perspectives. The first is the colonial historiographic project that frames the history of Islam in India, creates an archive for its study and produces the political and military dominance of Sindh. Fundamentally, it argues that Muslims in India cannot produce their own histories for they lack the language and archives for scientific objectivity. In response, a set of Indian intellectuals take on the project of writing histories of Sindh from 1890 to 1950s. These histories are written in direct dialogue with the colonial archive and insist on their engagement with social scientific methodologies and tools. In rethinking this past, the essay argues that that Urdu historiography was itself deemed unscientific by modern South Asian historians and abandoned as not “proper history.” This essay thus asks that we incorporate such histories in our genealogies of anticolonial past.

Now, in the near-aftermath of the fourth Anglo-Afghan War, William Dalrymple takes the frame of Last Remnants of an Army and the intrigue of the Great Game and fills in all that Butler had elided and Kipling implied. Dalrymple’s Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (1839-42) is the 3-D, IMAX,48-frames-per-second Hollywood version—featuring Kabul, Jalalabad, Qandahar, Peshawar, Lahore, Ludhiana, London and Moscow. Brydon is joined by a wide cast of characters, native and colonial, elite and subaltern, male and female.

The multi-genre Persian text Chachnama, written in Uch in 1226, represents a unique formulation of a possible future for a Muslim polity at the frontier and under immense duress. In its explicit linkage of a Muslim with a local pre-Islamic past within the site and milieu of its production, the Chachnama presents the beginnings of a new political theology. Long understood as a translation of an earlier text, it is instead a specifically imagined text that found political and romantic resonance in the histories of Uch and Sindh through the centuries. This article provides a close reading of the text to elucidate the ways in which it participates in varied genres and the socio-political claims it makes on historiography. It further traces the historiography surrounding the text and highlights the ways in which classificatory schema (such as genre) operate on analytical understandings of narratives.

Finbarr Flood’s Objects of Translation is then a breathtakingly refreshing work of synthesis and analysis. Flood offers us a ‘highly contoured landscape’ of pre-modern (his focus is roughly 800–1250 CE) central-south regions of Asia (from the river Amū Daryā to the Indus valley, from the Iranian region of Khurasan to the Ganges River). In his introduction, Flood makes two central points on the historiography—that the contemporary scholarly accounts of eighth to fourteenth century India are bifurcated, reductive and obscurest, treating this period as little more than background material for the Mughal ecumene; and that contemporary understandings of religious ideations are anachronistically projected onto earlier pasts. To reframe this discourse, Flood focuses on the framework of translation and transculturation where distinct modes of living and knowing are formed as a result of contact with prior forms and are reshaped to create newly intelligible ones. Methodologically, Flood re-opens vistas that modern South Asian studies has diligently avoided: the study of texts as objects, objects as texts and the environments within which both are placed and displaced.

American spy technologies gather intelligence in vast quantities, yet US foreign policy is rife with unqualified pseudo-experts. To know or not to know? This is the great conundrum of empire, writes Manan Ahmed.

In his latest book, Robert D Kaplan seeks to map the shifting contours of contemporary geopolitics. Instead, writes Manan Ahmed, its author ends up lost in cultural stereotype and misdirected scholarship