About this fistful of dust

I am an Associate Professor and Chair in Urdu Language and Culture at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. I am interested in marvellous tales in languages such as Urdu-Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian, as well as literature more broadly, and South Asian/Muslim diasporic history. I teach courses on the Urdu-Hindi language and its literature; and on Sufism, South Asian cultural history, racialised diasporas, and Islamicate tales. My first book was The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu.

I was born in Toronto to Punjabi Pathaan parents, and raised especially by my Kashmiri-origin maternal grandmother in Scarborough. As an undergraduate, I attended the University of Toronto (Victoria College), completing a double major in English Literature and Near and Middle Eastern Civilization.

I finished my MA (2007) and PhD (2013) at Columbia University under the benevolent supervision of Urdu scholar Prof. Frances Pritchett, who had been the PhD student of Prof. C. M. Naim at the University of Chicago, and a close associate of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. I began teaching at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill in 2012.

I am the second holder of the Chair in Urdu Language and Culture, after Prof. Sajida Alvi. The Urdu Chair was established in 1986, following efforts by Institute of Islamic Studies Director Prof. Donald P. Little. Prof. Little met with the Pakistani dictator General Zia ul-Haqq at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal in 1982. The Chair was ultimately funded with contributions by the Canadian Ministry of Multiculturalism, the Government of Pakistan, the Institute of Islamic Studies, and the National Federation of Pakistani Canadians.