Ali Khan Mahmudabad

Prof Ali Khan Mahmudabad teaches political science and history at Ashoka University in India. In particular, he focuses on matters of religious identity, democracy, culture, literature and politics of both South Asia and the Middle East. Prof Khan’s first book was Poetry of Belonging: Muslim imaginings of India 1850-1950. It was on the formation of Muslim political identity in North India and presented a history of the public space of poetry (the mushā‘irah) and a genealogy of the idea of homeland (watan) over this period. He has published a translation of Khan Mahboob Tarzi’s Urdu novel Aghaaze Sahar with Penguin Books under the title The Break of Dawn in 2021. Prof Khan published a collection of his Urdu essays entitled Sada-e Dil in 2022. He conducts research in a number of languages in including Arabic, Persian and Urdu. Prof Khan has consistently written for newspapers and magazines in English and Urdu and has occasionally appeared on television and radio, as he believes that a wider public engagement is important in order to spread ideas beyond the academy.