in partnership with the South Asia Center & Political Science Dept
About the Speaker:
Hilal Ahmed is an Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi and a CASI Fall 2024 Visiting Scholar. He works on political Islam, Indian democracy, and politics of symbols in South Asia. He is also a faculty member of the Lokniti program at CSDS. His first book, Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation (Routledge 2014), explores these thematic concerns to evolve an interdisciplinary approach to study Muslim politics. His recent books, A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (Penguin-Random House 2024), Allah Naam ki Siyasat (Hindi, Setu Prakashan, 2023), Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islam in India (Penguin-Random House, New Delhi, 2019), and Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India (with Peter R. deSouza & Sanjeer Alam, Bloomsbury, 2019) further elaborate these themes and make a modest attempt to explain the discursively constituted nature of contemporary Muslim political discourse in India. Ahmed is the Associate Editor of South Asian Studies, the journal of the British Association of South Asian Studies. He is also part of the editorial team of CSDS’s Hindi journal Pratiman. He has produced two documentaries, Encountering the Political Jama Masjid (English, 2006) and Qutub: Ek Adhura Afsana (Qutub: An Unfinished Story, Hindi with English subtitles, 2016). The film Beacons of Hope (English, 2008) documents Ahmed’s life story.