Ayesha Jalal

Ayesha Jalal (Punjabi; ) is a Pakistani-American historian specialising in the modern history of South Asia, with a particular focus on Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Partition of India, and the formation of Muslim identity in the subcontinent. She is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University. Earlier in her career she taught at Harvard University and Columbia University. Her first book, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan, is widely regarded as a landmark reinterpretation of the political circumstances that produced Pakistan. In 1998, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Early life and family Jalal was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1956, to Hamid Jalal, a senior Pakistani civil servant, and his wife Zakia Jalal.

Jalal is married to the Indian historian Sugata Bose, a professor of history at Harvard University and a grand-nephew of the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose. She filed a federal lawsuit alleging discrimination on the basis of religion and ethnic background,

Scholarship Jalal's research is primarily concerned with the formation of Muslim political identities in modern South Asia and the structural factors that shaped the creation of Pakistan.

The Pity of Partition (Princeton University Press, 2013) is a biographical and literary study of Saadat Hasan Manto that reads his fiction as a lens for understanding the human cost of the 1947 partition of the Punjab.

Awards and recognition Jalal received a Trinity College, Cambridge Fellowship from 1980 to 1984. In 1998 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, held from 1998 to 2003. The Government of Pakistan conferred the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Star of Distinction) upon her in 2009.

The Hindu has described her as "one of Pakistan's most acclaimed historians", and The Express Tribune has characterised her as a historian of "meticulous methods". In April 2016, Maleeha Lodhi, then Pakistan's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, called her "the greatest historian Pakistan has produced."