Ayesha Jalal

Ayesha Jalal
Jalal at Lahore University of Management Sciences in May 2010
Born	1956 (age 69–70) Lahore, West Punjab, Pakistan
Education	Wellesley College Trinity College, Cambridge
Known for	The Sole Spokesman Scholarship on Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Muslim identity in South Asia
Spouse	Sugata Bose
Awards	MacArthur Fellowship (1998) Sitara-i-Imtiaz (2009)
Scientific career
Fields	History, South Asian studies
Workplaces	Tufts University Harvard University Columbia University University of Wisconsin–Madison Lahore University of Management Sciences

Ayesha Jalal (Punjabi; Urdu: عائشہ جلال) is a Pakistani-American historian specialising in the modern history of South Asia, with a particular focus on Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Partition of India, and the formation of Muslim identity in the subcontinent. She is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University. Earlier in her career she taught at Harvard University and Columbia University. Her first book, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan (1985), is widely regarded as a landmark reinterpretation of the political circumstances that produced Pakistan. In 1998, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Early life and family

Jalal was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1956, to Hamid Jalal, a senior Pakistani civil servant, and his wife Zakia Jalal. She has a familial connection to the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto through two distinct lines: her paternal grandmother was Manto's sister, and Manto's wife Safia was the sister of Jalal's mother Zakia.

Jalal is married to the Indian historian Sugata Bose, a professor of history at Harvard University and a grand-nephew of the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose.

Education

At the age of 14, Jalal moved to New York City when her father was posted to Pakistan's Mission to the United Nations. She completed her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, graduating with a degree in History and Political Science. She then pursued doctoral research at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, where her PhD dissertation examined Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the demand for Pakistan. After completing her doctorate, she remained at Cambridge as a Fellow of Trinity College (1980–1984) and subsequently held a Leverhulme Fellowship at the Centre of South Asian Studies (1984–1987).

Career

Jalal moved to Washington, D.C. in 1985 as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, before serving as an Academy Scholar at Harvard's Academy for International and Area Studies (1988–1990). In 1991 she was appointed associate professor in the Department of History at Columbia University, but her application for tenure was denied following review in 1995. She filed a federal lawsuit alleging discrimination on the basis of religion and ethnic background, a case that was ultimately dismissed. She also taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Lahore University of Management Sciences. In 1999, she joined Tufts University as a tenured professor, where she holds the Mary Richardson chair in history.

Scholarship

Jalal's research is primarily concerned with the formation of Muslim political identities in modern South Asia and the structural factors that shaped the creation of Pakistan. Her first book, The Sole Spokesman (Cambridge University Press, 1985; reissued 1994), is a revisionist account of the decade between the 1937 provincial elections in British India and the Partition of India in 1947. Rejecting the notion that Pakistan was Jinnah's unambiguous long-term objective, Jalal argues that Jinnah deployed the demand for a separate Muslim state chiefly as a bargaining strategy to secure constitutional safeguards for Muslim minorities across the subcontinent.

Her second major work, The State of Martial Rule (1990), examines the structural origins of Pakistan's military dominance in its political economy, tracing the institutional conditions that made military rule a recurring feature of Pakistani governance. Self and Sovereignty (2000) turns to a longer historical arc, exploring the relationship between individual Muslim identity and political community in South Asia since 1850. Partisans of Allah (2008) offers a historical analysis of jihad as a concept and practice in South Asian Islam, distinguishing between ethical and militaristic interpretations across different periods.

The Pity of Partition (Princeton University Press, 2013) is a biographical and literary study of Saadat Hasan Manto that reads his fiction as a lens for understanding the human cost of the 1947 partition of the Punjab. Her most recent major work, The Struggle for Pakistan (Harvard University Press, 2014), provides a broad political and intellectual history of Pakistan from its founding to the early twenty-first century, situating the country's domestic crises within the wider context of Cold War geopolitics and the global War on Terror.

Awards and recognition

Jalal received a Trinity College, Cambridge Fellowship from 1980 to 1984. In 1998 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, held from 1998 to 2003. The Government of Pakistan conferred the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Star of Distinction) upon her in 2009.

The Hindu has described her as "one of Pakistan's most acclaimed historians", and The Express Tribune has characterised her as a historian of "meticulous methods". In April 2016, Maleeha Lodhi, then Pakistan's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, called her "the greatest historian Pakistan has produced."

Bibliography

Books

• Jalal, Ayesha (1985). The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521458504. (reissued 1994)
• Jalal, Ayesha (1990). The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan's Political Economy of Defence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521051842.
• Jalal, Ayesha (1995). Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications. ISBN 9789693506297.
• Jalal, Ayesha; Bose, Sugata (1997). Nationalism, Democracy, and Development: State and Politics in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195639445.
• Jalal, Ayesha (2000). Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415220774.
• Jalal, Ayesha; Bose, Sugata (2011). Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 9780415779432.
• Jalal, Ayesha (2008). Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674047365.
• Jalal, Ayesha (2013). The Pity of Partition: Manto's Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691153629.
• Jalal, Ayesha (2014). The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674052895.

Selected book chapters

• Jalal, Ayesha (1997), "Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia", in Bose, Sugata; Jalal, Ayesha (eds.), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780195644425
• Jalal, Ayesha (2009), "Freedom and Equality: From Iqbal's Philosophy to Sen's Ethical Concerns", in Kanbur, Ravi; Basu, Kaushik (eds.), Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, Volume II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 452–469, ISBN 9780199239979

See also

• Partition of India
• Muhammad Ali Jinnah
• Sugata Bose
• Saadat Hasan Manto
• Jaswant Singh – Indian politician whose book Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence expressed views on Jinnah comparable to those advanced by Jalal

External links

• Ayesha Jalal at Tufts University Department of History
• Ayesha Jalal at the MacArthur Foundation