Sarah Waheed

University of South Carolina Columbia, History, Faculty Member

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Sarah Waheed is a specialist of South Asian history, and teaches about medieval, early modern, and modern South Asia. She is a cultural historian who specializes on South Asian Islam in global and local contexts across the India-Pakistan divide. Her approach to the past is transregional and comparative and her scholarship broadly speaks to issues of religion and secularism, colonialism and nationalism, and gender and memory.

Sarah Waheed received her PhD from Tufts University in 2011, and has been the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship by the Council in Library and Information Resources and most recently a Fulbright Scholar. Her first book, Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secularism in Late Colonial India was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. The book offers a timely examination about the cultural politics of the left in the Pakistan movement. It shows how left-leaning intellectuals drew from long-standing literary traditions of Islam in a period of great duress and upheaval in the mid-twentieth century, complicating our understanding of the relationship between religion and secularism. Rather than seeing 'religion' and 'the secular' as distinct and oppositional phenomena, this book demonstrates how these concepts themselves were historically produced in South Asia. Through a detailed analysis of trials for blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition, and feminist writers, the book argues that Muslim intellectuals engaged with socialism and communism through their distinctive ethical and cultural past. In so doing, she provides a fresh perspective on the creation of Pakistan and South Asian modernity.

She is currently working on her second book, In Search of Chand Bibi: Muslim Warrior Queen of India.
Address: Gambrell Hall, Room 245 USC
817 Henderson Street
Columbia, SC 29208
USA

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Whatever Happened to Chand Bibi Sultan Narratives of a Deccan Warrior Queen

Journal of South Asian Studies, 2024

Drawing from Persian, Urdu, Dakkhani and Marathi sources, this article examines narratives about ... more Drawing from Persian, Urdu, Dakkhani and Marathi sources, this article examines narratives about the sixteenth centuryQueen-Regent of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, Chand Bibi (1550–1600), who was also widely regarded as ‘Queen of the Deccan’.Powerful Muslim women of the Deccan Sultanates have received scant, if any, attention. This article challenges the north-centric perspective of Mughal imperial development that has long dominated histories of Persianate India. Like the Deccan, Chand Bibi resists categorisation. This article delves into Chand Bibi’s afterlives by grappling with the multiple accounts of the queen’s demise in1600—by murder, suicide and escape. The mythology of an immobile harem or ‘zenana’ is belied by the context of mobility within sixteenth century Deccan. It focuses upon on when narratives of Chand Bibi’s murder, suicide and legendary escape first emerged and how they were circulated. I argue that the existence of three distinct narratives about Chand Bibi’s demise reveals various perceptions about the queen, which characterise the multi-ethnic and multi-religious pluralism of the Deccan region to which she belonged.

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Women of ‘Ill Repute’: Ethics and Urdu literature in colonial India

Modern Asian Studies, 2014

The courtesan, the embodiment of both threat and allure, was a central figure in the moral discou... more The courtesan, the embodiment of both threat and allure, was a central figure in the moral discourses of the Muslim ‘respectable’ classes of colonial North India. Since women are seen as the bearers of culture, tradition, the honour of the family, community, and nation, control over women's sexuality becomes a central feature in the process of forming identity and community. As a public woman, the courtesan became the target of severe moral regulation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The way in which the courtesan was invoked within aesthetic, ethical, and legal domains shifted over time, and by the third decade of the twentieth century, there appeared a new way of speaking and writing about the ‘fallen woman’ within the Urdu public sphere. A social critique emerged which heralded the prostitute-courtesan as an ethical figure struggling against an unjust social order. Since the courtesan symbolized both elite Mughal court culture as well as its decay, she was a convenien...

After Hyderabad’s 1948 Annexation: Muslim Belonging and Histories of the Long Partition

Asian Affairs

ing and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim... more ing and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim migration in relation to Partition-related displacements and attempts to overcome them through economic conditions provided by migration. The partition of India prompted waves of migration—such as the later migration of Hyderabadi Muslims to the Persian Gulf in the wake of 1970s oil boom—and their sense of displacement persisted long past the mid-twentieth century, reshaping Muslim notions of belonging. The use of the nation-state as the dominant framework to analyze these shifts is insufficient for understanding Hyderabadi Muslims&#39; sense of belonging and citizenship, which must be also contextualized in terms of upward class mobility along the axes of global and local contexts.

AFTER HYDERABAD'S 1948 ANNEXATION: MUSLIM BELONGING AND HISTORIES OF THE LONG PARTITION

Asian Affairs, 2022

ing and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim... more ing and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim migration in relation to Partition-related displacements and attempts to overcome them through economic conditions provided by migration. The partition of India prompted waves of migration—such as the later migration of Hyderabadi Muslims to the Persian Gulf in the wake of 1970s oil boom—and their sense of displacement persisted long past the mid-twentieth century, reshaping Muslim notions of belonging. The use of the nation-state as the dominant framework to analyze these shifts is insufficient for understanding Hyderabadi Muslims' sense of belonging and citizenship, which must be also contextualized in terms of upward class mobility along the axes of global and local contexts.

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Beyond the Wounded Archive: Partition's Hauntings and Bombay Cinema

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Women of 'Ill Repute' : Ethics and Urdu Literature in Colonial India

The courtesan, the embodiment of both threat and allure, was a central figure in the moral discou... more The courtesan, the embodiment of both threat and allure, was a central figure in the moral discourses of the Muslim 'respectable' classes of colonial North India. Since women are seen as the bearers of culture, tradition, the honour of the family, community, and nation, control over women's sexuality becomes a central feature in the process of forming identity and community. As a public woman, the courtesan became the target of severe moral regulation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The way in which the courtesan was invoked within aesthetic, ethical, and legal domains shifted over time, and by the third decade of the twentieth century, there appeared a new way of speaking and writing about the 'fallen woman' within the Urdu public sphere. A social critique emerged which heralded the prostitute-courtesan as an ethical figure struggling against an unjust social order. Since the courtesan symbolized both elite Mughal court culture as well as its decay, she was a convenient foil for some nationalists to challenge the dominant idioms of nationalist and communitarian politics. Moreover, certain late medieval and early modern Indo-Persian ethical concepts were redeployed by twentieth century writers for 'progressive' ends. This illustrated a turn to progressive cultural politics that was simultaneously anticolonial and anti-communitarian, while maintaining a critical posture towards the dominant idioms of Indian nationalism.

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Whatever Happened to Chand Bibi Sultan Narratives of a Deccan Warrior Queen

Journal of South Asian Studies, 2024

Download

Women of ‘Ill Repute’: Ethics and Urdu literature in colonial India

Modern Asian Studies, 2014

After Hyderabad’s 1948 Annexation: Muslim Belonging and Histories of the Long Partition

Asian Affairs

AFTER HYDERABAD'S 1948 ANNEXATION: MUSLIM BELONGING AND HISTORIES OF THE LONG PARTITION

Asian Affairs, 2022

ing and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim... more ing and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim migration in relation to Partition-related displacements and attempts to overcome them through economic conditions provided by migration. The partition of India prompted waves of migration—such as the later migration of Hyderabadi Muslims to the Persian Gulf in the wake of 1970s oil boom—and their sense of displacement persisted long past the mid-twentieth century, reshaping Muslim notions of belonging. The use of the nation-state as the dominant framework to analyze these shifts is insufficient for understanding Hyderabadi Muslims' sense of belonging and citizenship, which must be also contextualized in terms of upward class mobility along the axes of global and local contexts.

Download

Beyond the Wounded Archive: Partition's Hauntings and Bombay Cinema

Download

Women of 'Ill Repute' : Ethics and Urdu Literature in Colonial India

The courtesan, the embodiment of both threat and allure, was a central figure in the moral discou... more The courtesan, the embodiment of both threat and allure, was a central figure in the moral discourses of the Muslim 'respectable' classes of colonial North India. Since women are seen as the bearers of culture, tradition, the honour of the family, community, and nation, control over women's sexuality becomes a central feature in the process of forming identity and community. As a public woman, the courtesan became the target of severe moral regulation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The way in which the courtesan was invoked within aesthetic, ethical, and legal domains shifted over time, and by the third decade of the twentieth century, there appeared a new way of speaking and writing about the 'fallen woman' within the Urdu public sphere. A social critique emerged which heralded the prostitute-courtesan as an ethical figure struggling against an unjust social order. Since the courtesan symbolized both elite Mughal court culture as well as its decay, she was a convenient foil for some nationalists to challenge the dominant idioms of nationalist and communitarian politics. Moreover, certain late medieval and early modern Indo-Persian ethical concepts were redeployed by twentieth century writers for 'progressive' ends. This illustrated a turn to progressive cultural politics that was simultaneously anticolonial and anti-communitarian, while maintaining a critical posture towards the dominant idioms of Indian nationalism.

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Sarah Waheed

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