Renowned historian Ayesha Jalal discusses her new book, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide. Jalal’s book offers the first in-depth look in English at the influential Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955). Drawing on Manto’s stories, sketches, and essays, as well as a trove of private letters, The Pity of Partition provides a intimate history of Partition and its devastating toll on the Subcontinent.

Ayesha Jalal is a MacArthur Fellow and Professor of History at Tufts University. She has been Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1980-84), Leverhulme Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge (1984-87), Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C. (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, and Harvard University.

Her publications include The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan(Cambridge 1985 and 1994); The State of Martial Rule: the Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence(Cambridge, 1990) and Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: a Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge 1995). She has also co-authored Modern South Asia: History, Culture and Political Economy (Routledge 1998) with Sugata Bose, which has been published by Oxford University Press in India and by Sang-e-Meel in Pakistan.

This lecture was sponsored by the Hindi Urdu Flagship and the South Asia Institute at The University of Texas at Austin.