04/02/2025
LISTEN! Dr. Manan Ahmed Asif, Associate Professor, at Columbia University is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE in conversation with author Maniza Naqvi about his book 'Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore'.
Manan Ahmed's areas of specialization include intellectual history in South and Southeast Asia; critical philosophy of history, colonial and anti-colonial thought. He is interested in how modern and pre-modern historical narratives create understandings of places, communities, and intellectual genealogies for their readers.
He is a member of Columbia's Center for Study of Ethnicity and Race, Center for the Study of Muslim Societies, SOF/Heyman and Committee on Global Thought. He is a Senior Editor at Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He is on the Editorial Board for the journals Philological Encounters, South Asian Studies, and Al-'Usur Al-Wusta: The Journal of Middle East Medievalist.
His first monograph, A Book of Conquest: Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2016), is on the intellectual life of an early thirteenth-century history Chachnama. You can listen to two podcasts on the book--New Books and Ottoman History. There is also a book talk in Urdu.
His second monograph, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press, 2020; pbk, 2023; Folio Books Pakistan, 2023) is a concept-history of “Hindustan,” focusing specifically on the work of the seventeenth century Deccan historian Firishta (fl. 1570-1620). The Loss of Hindustan was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize 2021. An Arabic translation by Ayman Shehata Assal, Diyā Hindstan, came out in July 2022 from Al-Maktab Al-Arabe Lil-Maaref Egypt. You can listen to a podcast about the book with The Scroll India.
His third monograph, Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore (The New Press, 2024) is a history of Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, Lahore, and a meditation on textual and material histories of the place. It combines ethnography, oral histories and deep archival work, covering over a thousand years of this pivotal city. You can listen to a podcast about the book with New Books.
He is currently working on two book projects. The first A Subcontinental Parable is a study of hermeneutics on a set of texts from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century which defy genres (as conceived in modern scholarship) and which remain imbricated in nationalist history-writing projects. He is also conducting research on the history of Area Studies, Data Sciences and A.I. as knowledge system projects in the history of colonization and decolonization.
He has extensive background in digital history, in the history of archives in the global south and the problems of access and control to digitized materials. He founded Chapati Mystery--a cultural and intellectual history blog--in 2004. In 2018, he created and collaborated on "Torn Apart/Separados"--a digital platform of visualizations and essays which focused on the humanitarian crisis on the southwestern US borders. In 2022, he co-authored Targeted Harassment of Academics by Hindutva: A Twitter Analysis of the India-US Connection, a study focused on right-wing social media. He is now focused on community based archival projects in Harlem.
Dr. Manan Ahmed Asif, Associate Professor, is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE in conversation with ...
