In Search of Chand Bibi

Sarah Waheed in Gulbarga, Karnataka, during her research on Chand Bibi. (Photograph courtesy Sarah Waheed)

Sarah Waheed first heard about the Deccan’s warrior queen Chand Bibi at her home in Hyderabad, from stories told to her by aunts and grandmothers. “But a few years ago, Chand Bibi found me,” she says. “In the old city of Hyderabad, I walked into a bookshop full of rare books in Urdu, Persian and English and randomly pulled one from the shelf and there she was.” The book was a 1965 play in Urdu, “Chand Bibi Sultan.” On the cover was a woman riding a horse, wearing a turban over her streaming hair and a falcon perched on her arm.

A cultural historian of South Asia, Waheed is an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. She is currently working on her second book based on research funded by a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award in 2022 for a project titled “Chand Bibi Sultan: Why a Medieval Muslim Queen from Southern India Matters Today.” The book highlights the important role Muslim women rulers played in medieval and early modern Indian history.

“History combines my love of storytelling with my commitment to rigorous evidence-based analysis,” says Waheed. “I am drawn to inquiring about the vast diversity of human experience—and South Asia is so diverse—because appreciating past peoples’ perspectives broadens our sense of who we are and has the potential to shape our future.”

Analyzing logic and lore

Waheed’s first book, “Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secularism in Late Colonial India,” focused on the cultural politics during the Pakistan movement. “A chapter of my first book focused on feminist poets and how they reinterpreted women’s lives and stories from the medieval past. It led me to the subject of Muslim female power in the pre-modern India,” says Waheed.

At its core, Waheed’s book is about Chand Bibi, the queen who united the Deccan sultanates and defeated the Mughal armies under emperor Akbar. “Chand Bibi’s story rebels against so much of what we think we know,” she says. “First, it draws our attention to the Deccan, a region often overlooked in South Asian history.” Chand Bibi’s story also challenges myths about docile Muslim women of the harem. “My work on Chand Bibi is also a 16th-century murder mystery, which raises questions about how we grapple with myths and legends,” says Waheed. “According to some sources, she was murdered by her soldiers; in others, she committed suicide; and in yet a third set of sources, it is said that she disappeared by escaping with her female companions.”

The Fulbright-Nehru experience

Waheed applied for the Fulbright-Nehru scholarship in 2019 and was scheduled to travel to India in 2020 but got delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Waheed’s research process highlights how historians work on making sense of competing narratives of the same event, the possibilities that emerge when perspectives at the margins are shifted to the center and what archives in different languages reveal about people and events.

“I spent last year on a journey in search of Chand Bibi through five cities, rummaging in abandoned archives, walking through the ruins of old forts and palaces, spending time at Sufi shrines and interviewing people along the way,” she says. “By traveling to the places where Chand Bibi ruled, lived, and worshipped, I learned how Chand Bibi lives on in the collective memory.”

Paromita Pain is an associate professor of Global Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.