Date: Wednesday, September 17th, 2025
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: 413 Fayerweather Hall (1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027)

Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Modern South Asia

Join the Qalam Pakistan Initiative and the Department of History for a book talk by Shayan Rajani (Michigan State University) featuring discussant Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University). Leaving Legacies is a fresh account of the individual in early modern South Asia. A gendered practice carried out by men, leaving legacies involved assembling three kinds of material traces: monuments, books, and sons. This book shows that a concern for the individual self was not an exclusively western phenomenon. Rather, the practice of leaving individual legacies was a crucial means for the production and reproduction of empire, family, and social order in South Asia.

Shayan Rajani is a historian of early modern South Asia. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. His research focuses on the relationship between individual and community, and region and empire. He is also interested in questions of gender and sexuality, and animal-human relations. His first book, Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2024), examines the enterprise of assembling texts, monuments, and children as concerted material traces for posterity. It investigates the intellectual, social, and material history of the individual in South Asia between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Using little-known and to-date underutilized textual sources in Persian and Sindhi, alongside the study of buildings, epigraphy, and objects, the book shows that a concern for the individual self was not an exclusively western phenomenon. Rather, the practice of leaving individual legacies was a crucial means for the production and reproduction of empire, family, and social order in South Asia. Rajani’s second book project, titled Invisible, Everywhere: Women, Sexuality, and the Gender Order in Early Modern South Asia, explores the material and cultural history of gender segregation in the Mughal world.

Pier Mattia Tommasino is an Associate Professor of Italian at Columbia University. Tommasino’s teaching and research explores the generative contact between the Italian peninsula and the Muslim world from the fourteenth through the early eighteenth centuries. His first book is The Venetian Qur’an: a Renaissance Companion to Islam, published in Italian in 2013 and in English in 2018. He is currently finishing his second monograph, entitled Port Voices, Courtly Texts. Five Observations of Late Medici Orientalism, 1666-1673.

Date: October 22nd, 2025
Time: 4:30 – 6:00 PM
Location: 413 Fayerweather Hall (1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027)

The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War is most often remembered for its human cost in East Pakistan and the international dispute over Pakistani prisoners of war held in India. Much less known, however, is the parallel story of thousands of Bengalis who were rounded up in West Pakistan and interned in some fifty internment camps between 1971 and 1974. These internees—ranging from senior officials and army officers to ordinary civilians—were suddenly recast from citizens to traitors. This talk explains how suspicion of treason reshaped the meaning of citizenship, eroding belonging and justifying extrajudicial punishment through mass internment.

Speaker Bio: Ilyas Chattha is an Associate Professor of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He is the author of Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–1974 (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Discussant Bio: Naeem Mohaiemen is Associate Professor & Area Head of Photography, Visual Arts, at Columbia University School of the Arts. He combines photography, films, archives, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings)– beginning from Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and then radiating outward to unlikely, and unstable, transnational alliances and collisions. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (2024) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Drishtipat, 2010); and co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (2024) and with Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007).