Publications
I always have a new essay or book chapter in the pipeline. It's just a matter of awaiting that next sabbatical or course release, when I'll have time to actually write it (maybe). Despite a lot of teaching and administrative duties, to say nothing of community work and personal life(?), I've published a few things. Apart from my first book, The Broken Spell, here are some other publications, the pre-prints for which are freely available on my Knowledge Commons repository.
Knowledge Commons is a scholarly repository initiated by colleagues at Michigan State University. I deposit my pre-prints there rather than at The Other Place, which has for many years now showed its colours as an AI-ridden Facebook clone for academics, and a spam tidal wave machine. In 2025, the new US government clawed back their funding, leaving them dependent upon crowdfunding. Please donate to this open-source, open-access network!
'Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani and the Courtly Storytellers of Mughal India
Khan, Pasha M. "'Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani and the Courtly Storytellers of Mughal India." In Urdu and Indo-Persian Thought, Poetics, and Belles Lettres, 23–72. Brill, 2017. https://doi.org/10.17613/qma7-8q94.
Report on the historical details of a number of neglected storytellers in Iran and South Asia from the 16th to 17th centuries CE, including Zain al-'Abidin Takaltu Khan, 'Inayat Allah Darbar Khan, Fusuni Yazdi, Mir Muhammad Hashim, Iskandar Qissah-khwan, Haji Qissah-khwan Hamadani, Nizam Shirazi, Mir Qissah, Muhammad Tanburah, Mirza Muhammad Fars Hamadani, Mulla Asad, Mulla Rashid, Mir 'Abd al-Baqi, and 'Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani.
Marvellous Histories: Reading the Shahnamah in India
Khan, Pasha M. "Marvellous Histories: Reading the Shahnamah in India". The Indian Economic & Social History Review 49, no. 4 (2012): 527–56. https://doi.org/10.17613/sp9b-je84.
This article considers the reception and genre of the Shāhnāmah in India. It takes as its starting-point comments made by the poet Mirza Asad Allah Khan Ghalib in 1866, moving on to look at a Mughal Shāhnāmah adaptation, the Tarikh-i dil-gusha-i Shamsher-Khani, and its Urdu translations, as well as other Persian, Urdu and Arabic texts. It investigates the (mis)identification of the Shāhnāmah's genre, looking at cases in which it was understood as historiographical rather than as a romance, and seeking an explanation for this 'contamination' of the sincere genre of history by the mendacious romance genre. A methodological split in the historiographical corpus is proposed, between a rationalist ('aqli) and transmission-based (naqli) method. The contest between these two methods is considered, and the prevalence of transmission-based history and its similarity to romance is brought forward as a possible reason for the porousness of the border between these ostensibly opposing genres.