Ayesha Jalal Biography and latest books by Ayesha Jalal

Ayesha Jalal is a Pakistani-American sociologist and historian. Her father, Hamid Jalal, was a senior Pakistani civil servant. She is the niece of the famous Urdu fiction writer Saadat Hasan Manto. 

Ms. Jalal came to New York at the age of 16 and is married to Indian historian Sugata Bose.

She obtained her BA, majoring in History and Political Science, from Wellesley College, USA, and her doctorate in History from the University of Cambridge.

Jalal has been Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1980-84), Leverhulme Fellow at the Center of South Asian Studies, Cambridge (1984-87), Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC (1985-86) and Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (1988-90).

She has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Tufts University, Columbia University, Harvard University and Lahore University of Management Sciences. She is a 1998 MacArthur Fellow.

Jalal is among the most prominent American academics whose work deals with the creation of Muslim identities in modern South Asia, touching upon the history of South Asia prominently. Her innovative scholarship has led to frequent criticisms by the governments of both Pakistani and Indian establishment scholars. Her most prominent works are on the role of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the partition of India.

She is the author of The Sole Spokesman and many other books on the partition of the British India in 1947. She received Sitara-i-Imtiaz from the Pakistani government on 23rd March 2010.

In the book The Sole Spokesman, Jalal examines what happened in the years between the 1937 elections and the partition, identifying the factors which led to the creation of Pakistan and providing new insights into the nature of the British transfer of power in India.

Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia is her second major work, where she examines the histories of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh over the last fifty years. She argues that the authoritarian nature of the colonial state continues and the only difference between the Indian and the Pakistani versions is that of overt and covert authoritarianism.