Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Medieval and Early Modern South Asia, Indian Ocean world, Connections between Gujarat and the Red Sea region

About Me: I am a historian of medieval and early modern South Asia (c. 1200-1800) and the Indian Ocean world. My research focuses on social and cultural histories of Muslim communities in Gujarat and the western Indian Ocean. My first book reconstructs the literary, social and historical world of Sufi preceptors, disciples and descendants who shaped the textual articulations of the Muslim past and of the region of Gujarat from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Employing new and rarely used literary material in Persian and Arabic, Narrative Pasts departs from the narrow state-centered visions of the Muslim past and integrates Gujarat’s sultanate and Mughal past to the larger socio-cultural histories of Islamic South Asia.

I am currently working on a history of Muslim scholarly networks in the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean using a variety of Arabic narrative texts produced in Gujarat and the Hejaz.

Recent Publications: “Counterpoint: Re-assessing Ulughkhani’s History of Gujarat”, Asiatische Studien – Études Asiatiques, 74:1, 2020, pp.137–161. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/asia-2020-0014

Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650 (Oxford University Press, Spring 2020) – Featured in XQs-XXV on chapatimystery.com, here.

“Ḥājjī al-Dabīr” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. Edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Leiden: Brill, 2016, pp. 77-8.

“Exploring the elite world in the Siyar al-Awliyā’: Urban elites, their lineages and social networks”, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 52:3, September 2015, pp. 241-270.

“Malik Ayāz and his letter to Ottoman Sultan Selim I about the Christians controlling the coasts of India,” in Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, Volume VII: Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and the New World (1500-1600), D. Thomas and J. Chesworth (eds), Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 768-773.