Hilal Ahmed

Hilal Ahmed is an Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. 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 has edited Companion to Indian Democracy: Resilience, Fragility, Ambivalence (with Peter R. deSouza & Sanjeer Alam, Routledge, 2021), Rethinking Muslim Personal Law: Issues, Debates and Reforms (with R. K. Mishra & K. N. Jehangir, Routledge, 2022), and Sudipta Kaviraj: A Reader (Hindi, Setu Prakashan, 2023. He is currently working on a book project on the politics of Muslim political representation in postcolonial 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 was a Visiting Professor at Krea University (2021-22), Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies-Nantes, IAS-Nantes, France (2018-19), Visiting Fellow at Victoria University Wellington (2013-14), Visiting Asia Fellow at University of Dhaka (2011), and Visiting Professor at University of Pune (2011). He has also been a lecturer of political science at the University of Delhi.

He has designed and conducted the courses Research as Practice (2017, 2018), Politics of Political Representation (2016), Research Methods and Identities: Issues and Debates in Postcolonial India (2015), History, Memory and Identity (2009) for the CSDS Teaching Programme, Researching the Contemporary. He also taught a course Political Sociology at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. Ahmed writes for academic journals, newspapers, and websites in English and Hindi. 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). Ahmed has also conceptualized and developed an academic mobile app SHARC-DILLI, an app on the Partitioned City of Delhi (with Deborah Sutton, Lancaster University)—the outcome of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK.

Ahmed earned his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2007). He was awarded the Institute of Advanced Studies-Nantes (IAS-Nantes, France) Fellowship (2018-19), the Rajya Sabha Fellowship (2015-16), the Asia Fellow Award (2008/2010), the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies Fellowship (2009), the Ford Foundation-IFP Fellowship (2002), the ATRI-Charities Aid Foundation Fellowship (2001), and UGC Senior Research Fellowship (1999) and the UGC Junior Research Fellowship (1997).

The film Beacons of Hope (English, 2008) documents Ahmed’s life story.