Dissertation

The Prophet and the Leviathan: Islamic Habitus and Imperial Infrastructure in the Indian Ocean, c. 1850-1955

My dissertation examines the life-worlds of Indian Ocean Muslims in the age of steam imperialism. It traces the material and affective worlds of the lascars, laborers, pilgrims, poets, and revolutionists that inhabited the engineered environs of the British Indian Empire, an oceanic world-system that stretched from the Suez Canal to the Bay of Bengal—and which formed an inadvertent nexus for accelerated inter-Islamic connections. As a new history of Islamic modernity between West and South Asia, this dissertation reads vernacular sources of Muslim mobility, sentiment, and thought through the material lattice of submarine telegraphs, steamship routes, coal depots, custom houses, and other maritime facets of imperial infrastructure. Employing sources in Arabic, Bengali, French, and Urdu, this dissertation attends to the interpretive worlds of Indian Ocean Muslims as they navigated the abstractions of new imperialism, oceanic (im)mobility, and global capitalism.

Education

Ph.D in History, Harvard University (ABD)
M.Phil in World History, University of Cambridge
B.A. in History, Philosophy, Near & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Toronto

Research Interests

Indian Ocean
South Asia
West Asia
Global Islam
Political Economy
British Imperialism
Science and Technology Studies
Environmental Humanities

সুখানীর কথা (1927)