AHA Session 158
Society for Advancing the History of South Asia 4
Society for Advancing the History of South Asia 4
Saturday, January 10, 2026: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Salon C5 (Hilton Chicago, Lower Level)
Chairs:
Shireen Hamza, Northwestern University
Jaideep Pandey, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Jaideep Pandey, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Papers:
Session Abstract
This session explores the migration of knowledge across historical routes linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, the Middle East to South Asia. Inspired by scholarship in the longue durée history of knowledge, we bring together work on the translation of texts, objects, and practices. Each presentation interrogates the complex ways that regions have been historically defined and placed in relation to each other, to move beyond the ways area studies historiography conceives of regions. The panel brings together histories of law, literature, agriculture, medicine, and architecture to show that certain routes for circulation and processes for knowledge transmission endured across seismic historical shifts such as colonialism. Though translation varied widely across historical periods, the panel considers translation a capacious framework for the work of a range of actors, across diverse constellations linking places and times from the Mediterranean to South Asia. Shireen Hamza investigates how Galenic medicine, originally developed in the Mediterranean, was adapted to the arid climates of western India. Focusing on medieval water infrastructure, especially stepwells and hammams, she shows how the medical imperative to heat and cool the body was shared and adapted across a vast geography in the second millennium. Jaideep Pandey maps out the circulation routes through which medieval Arabic historiography of Muslim Spain was translated into Urdu in colonial South Asia via rubrics of Orientalist knowledge and scholarship. Looking at translators’ prefaces to these histories, he demonstrates how engagement with Orientalist scholarship and modes of historical thinking triggered alternate conceptions of translation, temporalities, and interregional cartographies. Leena Ghannam explores land and property policies amongst the rural peasant and merchant populations of south Greater Syria in the 18th century, by reviewing a broad range of primary sources, including maps, court registers, fatawa, and firmans (religious decrees from the Ottoman sultans) in order to map out the changing dynamics between Ottoman era Istanbul and Palestine. Ibrahim Badshah considers twentieth and twenty-first century Malayalam translations of Palestinian poetry, in order to look at new forms of solidarity against state violence, grounded in resistance poetry. Together, these four scholars explore the ways different bodies of knowledge, from imperial law to embodied medical practices to literary and scholastic translation, connect and reimagine connectedness across the Islamic world.
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