In Conversation with Sarah Ansari
- Lucy Ham
- Aug 6
- 11 min read
Lucy: So, could you just introduce yourself and what you do here at Royal Holloway?
A: Hi, I’m Sarah Ansari and I’m professor of history here at Royal Holloway with a particular focus on South Asia, sometimes still referred to as the Indian subcontinent. While I teach South Asian history and that of the wider (non western) world more generally, much of my research has concentrated on a part of South Asia that’s in Pakistan today, though it used to be part of British India before 1947, namely the province of Sindh and its mega port city of Karachi.
Lucy: So, what sort of modules do you teach here?
A: I have a full spectrum of modules that goes from the first year through to MA level. For first years I’m part of the ‘Mao to Bin Laden’ team which introduces wider world history through the lens of individual political leaders. In this way students are introduced both to the individual countries associated with these leaders and to the bigger themes that connect the 20th world – nationalism, war, independence struggles, and so forth. For second years I have a survey module ‘Global Challenges: Historical perspectives on the 21st Century’, which encourages students to recognise just how relevant understanding the past is to the present. I also teach on another survey module called ‘Mutiny to Modi’, which explores the history of South Asia from the middle of the 19th century through to virtually the present day. That’s very close to my heart just because that’s how I got interested in South Asian history in the first place, by starting to explore as it an undergraduate. For third years my Special is ‘Drawing the Line’, which investigates how India and Pakistan secured their independence and why rather than one united country two separate states emerged with the partitioning or splitting of British India in 1947. It also explores what happened next. India and Pakistan do not enjoy a happy relationship and tend to be seen as two very different places because of their political histories, but, in reality, they had a great deal in common when it came to how they made the transition to independence – after all, they shared a common past. I think that’s worth remembering because otherwise we lose awareness of the collective experiences that South Asian people, whether they were Indians or Pakistanis or future Bangladeshis, lived through. Then we get to my MA teaching, for which I offer an option called ‘Gendering the Modern Islamic World’, which looks at issues connected with gender and in particular women across the 19th and the 20th centuries.
Lucy: You touched upon the areas you’re particularly interested so you’ve mentioned South Asian history and women’s history, are there other areas that you’re particularly interested in?
A: What connects a lot of my research are questions linked to migration and identity. These are big topics, but they connect my different research focuses. I would also add gender to the list, and lastly, to some extent, religion as well, though not ‘religion’ in the theological sense but more in terms of people’s lived experiences. When I did my PhD, I looked at the social and political influence, which was absolutely massive, of local Muslim religious leaders (or pirs) during the colonial period in a province of British India called Sindh – today this is in Pakistan, and though it may not be somewhere that is terribly familiar to people in Britain, some of the worst of last year’s terrible f loods occurred there. In South Asian history writing, there was a trend from the 80s and 90s to start looking at ‘localities’ - or regions - as a deliberate way of getting away from always approaching developments from the perspective of the centre. In many ways, I regard myself as a historian of a particular locality. Indeed, I would argue that when we look at the margins - be that a geographical place or of a marginalized community - we can learn a great deal about the bigger picture, and that is certainly what I have found by focusing on Sindh. Interestingly, when the British annexed the province in 1843 there was an infamous cartoon that appeared in Punch magazine that showed the British general responsible - Sir Charles Napier - and underneath there was just one word, Peccavi, which in Latin means ‘I have sinned’ as in ‘I have done wrong’. This was because when the British took over Sindh, opinion was divided - unsurprisingly there were some British interest groups that were all for it, but there were others who saw the move as frankly immoral and for them Napier deserved a big bad mark against his name, as reflected in the cartoon’s use of the word Peccavi.
Lucy: So, what sort of research are you currently undertaking?
A: I published a book at the end of 2019 (Boundaries of Belonging: localities, citizenship and rights in India and Pakistan), and, if I’m honest, since then life has been complicated by other things. However, a couple of years ago I co-taught a workshop for the Concepts module on the history of emotions with Niki Phillips. The whole point of Concepts is that workshops are run by two colleagues with interests in different time periods or places (in our cases, the long eighteenth century in Britain and modern South Asia respectively). After the workshop was done, I wrote an article that is now in the pipeline to be published. It explores developments in Pakistan in the post Independence period when emotions were running high in all sorts of ways. More specifically, my article focuses on how women were advised to exercise appropriate emotional decorum or patience (sabr), what was considered to be the right emotional way of responding to their circumstances, and appropriate ways of engaging emotionally with their families, their children, their in-laws, even their servants if that’s what they had. In it I spend most of my time thinking about love. So, I’m building my own personal ‘emotional turn’ into a bigger exploration in which the plan is to cover a longer period following Independence. I have put my toe in the water, so to speak, and now it’s a question of identifying the sources that are out there, which ones I can access, my key research questions, and how I am going to build a logical framework for moving forward – exactly the same challenges that students face when working on their own independent projects!
Lucy: It’s quite a niche sort of topic in the sense that you’re not really doing the politics of Partition, more focused on the longer-term social impact of Partition. So, I was wondering how you decided to get involved in that sort of research or what made you interested in this early on?
A: Here we go, cards on the table time! I did an undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway but during that history degree I probably only did three weeks of South Asian history maximum. In fact, for most of my time as an undergraduate I was more attracted to Italian history. But then, before I graduated, I met the person whom I got married to and he’s from that part of the world and so I just followed my heart. I did however have some prior non-academic interest in South Asia. Between school and university, I had a gap year that I spent mostly in Italy. But before going to Italy I went on a charity project to India for six weeks helping out at a hospital in a small village. Anyway, at the end of my undergraduate degree, having committed myself to somebody and committed myself to wanting to know more about the history of where they came from, I changed tack, and I did a masters at SOAS in South Asia Area Studies. My major was history and I minored in social anthropology and chose Urdu as the language to learn. This was tough going at times because I am in no way a linguist but it’s good to have challenges! In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard as I did in that one year that my masters lasted. It was while doing the MA that I worked out what I wanted to do for a PhD, and, thinking back, it was quite random really. One week in my history seminar we were studying a particular protest movement – the Khilafat movement - that took place in India just after the First World War. When reading for this, I noticed several references to religious leaders or pirs who came from Sindh. Their involvement was flagged up as important as far as the popularity of this movement was concerned, but frustratingly I couldn’t find any more details about them. So that’s what I built my PhD project around, looking to work out what the role of these pirs was, not just in the Khilafat movement but more generally during the period of British rule. I supposed that what initially drew me to it was wanting to know about somebody else’s history rather than my own, though you could argue that I was influenced by personal factors, considering what was powering my interest in the first place! Thinking back, I certainly didn’t do a PhD because I thought that I wanted to be a university academic - I just did it because I was interested in learning. Today, with so much emphasis on planning for the future, this might seem a bit indulgent, but it worked out in the end and, if I hadn’t ended up an academic, then I wouldn’t have regretted doing the PhD. We don’t necessarily think through everything that we do - life often includes unexpected twists and turns, things happen.
Lucy: You worked with the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and so I wondered whether you could discuss what your role sort of entailed in that. I think a lot of us read journals and not a lot of us know about the behind the scenes.
A: I was the editor of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society until 2021. As a journal editor you’re looking for good quality research-based articles and are overseeing the whole peer review process. ‘Peer review’ is when a research article goes out to other experts in the field, and they evaluate and write reports on it. Sometimes you’ll get reports back and they’ll say, ‘not ready for publication’, and sometimes you’ll get, ‘this is brilliant, and it needs publishing’. More often than not, reviewers highlight ways that an article has to be improved before it can be reconsidered for publication. Annoyingly, occasionally one reviewer says an article is brilliant while another decides it’s no good, so you then have to seek out a third or fourth opinion. In other words, as a journal editor, you’re making decisions based on your and other people’s expertise regarding what can be published, what must be rejected, and what should be revised. Journal editors are also responsible for how a particular issue is framed in terms of its content. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society has a huge remit that covers Asia from antiquity to the modern day, including history, religious studies, literature, and linguistics, just for starters. So, I had to work out what would make a good issue and interest readers from a range of different academic backgrounds. Then there’s the technical side of the role because of how the editor liaises with the production people. There’s a sub-editor who produces the final copy, correcting grammatical mistakes and other errors that get overlooked by authors. The texts of articles are then set, the proofs come back, and these must be checked by the author and in-house as well. It’s a complex process and doesn’t just happen.
One of the things we learn as historians is how to pay attention to detail. We make a big thing about referencing and footnoting with our students when it comes to essays, and this might seem a bit irritating but it’s the precisely this attention to detail that can be so usefully applied in other contexts. Many history graduates go into careers like publishing where they look closely at texts, and they are able to bring an all-important eye for precision to what they’re doing. The editing process not something that other people necessarily appreciate, but it has to go on behind the scenes to get a good quality finished product. My successor as JRAS editor is another South Asian historian (based in the US), so I think there is probably something about historians and their relationship with texts that works so productively in this role! However, I’m now no longer the editor because I’ve been upgraded! I’m now the President of the Royal Asiatic Society! The Royal Asiatic Society goes back to 1823, so 2023 is the 200th anniversary of its founding and I’m the first ever woman to be its President! It’s pretty satisfying to imagine its male founders turning in their graves at the thought of a woman being in charge! Being a journal editor is something that keeps us busy alongside our ‘day jobs’, and this also applies to the role of RAS President. Students see us in the lecture theatre, in the seminar room or in the corridor but we have ‘secret lives’ that we juggle alongside our College responsibilities. If you did a poll of colleagues in the department, I suspect that most of us are involved in journals, either editing them or on their editorial boards, and we all get asked to review manuscripts as part of the dreaded peer review process.
Lucy: Thank you for that and congratulations! It’s something a lot of us have no idea about. It was the 75th Anniversary of Partition last year and I know you wanted to do something for South Asian History Month, and I noticed you do a lot of work trying to encourage schools to teach about Partition. So maybe if you wanted to speak a little bit about that.
A: For me, as a historian of South Asia based in the UK, I think it’s absolutely crucial for there to be more space for the teaching of South Asian history, including the 1947 Partition, in schools here. There are large numbers of people in the UK that have direct links to Partition, and although it’s a few generations back now it’s still part of their history. But Partition is also part and parcel of British history because of Britain and India’s long, albeit complicated, relationship. Back in 2015 ahead of the 70th anniversary of Partition I became an academic member of the Partition History Project set up by inter-faith clergy who were worried about frictions between different South Asian communities in this country that seemed to be connected to the long-term legacies of Partition. Instead, they believed that the shared history of Partition could be repurposed to bring people together precisely because, though it’s difficult and painful, it’s not a history that involves is a simple division between ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. "The shared history of Partition could be repurposed to bring people together" All the communities involved suffered because of what happened but, likewise, members of all communities were implicated in what happened. Put another way, the aim was to get something positive out of something negative, and that’s the bottom line as to why I think it’s important for us to teach this history today. That initiative then evolved into the Partition Education Project which I originally co-chaired when it took shape in 2018. During last year’s 75th anniversary, I gave a lot of talks about Partition. In 2017, I had also given talks but this time round I was asked to speak, not just to schools, but to commercial companies, to civil servants at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, and I participated in a high-profile public meeting organized by the Mayor of London’s Office. So, gradually we are seeing more recognition here of Partition’s importance as a historical event. But it’s a slow process. We have to remember that though Holocaust education is now firmly integrated into the UK school curriculum, this didn’t just happen overnight. It took decades of campaigning for the Holocaust to be recognised as something that needed to be taught. So maybe in another ten years’ time those of us advocating for Partition will have pushed through the pain barrier so to speak, and it will be well and truly on the history agenda.
For me there’s an important inclusivity dimension bound up in integrating South Asian history into the UK school curriculum, though, of course, someone with a South Asian heritage doesn’t have to be interested in South Asian history just because their families possess that connection. At the same time, for me what is also important is all school students irrespective of their heritage are given the opportunity to study Partition, because, as I have already emphasised, it’s a shared history after all. One of the reasons why I think history is so relevant today is that our discipline helps us to appreciate the plurality of people, the diversity of human experience. History introduces us to people from other times and other places, and through studying their histories, we are better placed to understand what diversity means in practice and hopefully we can then translate these insights into a better grasp of the pluralistic world in which we all live. We can then translate these insights into a better grasp of the pluralistic world in which we all live.
Written by Lucy Ham (22-23 Editor), 3rd Year History.
Issue 11, Global History, Spring 2023
Thank you Sarah for your time, we here at Historia wish you all the best with the bicentenary of the Royal Asiatic Society! For more information on the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and it's history please visit www.royalasiaticsociety.org
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