Staff profile

My research focuses on early modern South Asia and the subcontinent’s links with regions and communities across the western Indian Ocean. I am currently preparing my first monograph, Mobile Manuscripts, in which I trace shared cultural histories between the Red Sea region and western India through the circulation of Arabic manuscripts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Based on archival research in Cairo, Istanbul, London and across India I study the practices of transmitting and reading Islamicate texts among Arabophone communities from Egypt to the Deccan. I have published articles on forms of Arabic history-writing in South Asia, Arabic philological practices at the Mughal court, and the movement of learned individuals across the western Indian Ocean.

I am currently developing a new project on interconnections of early modern shrine cities and the political actors that moved between them.

Before coming to Durham in 2020 I was a research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut, Lebanon (Max Weber Foundation). I received my PhD in History from SOAS, University of London in 2018. Previously I completed an MA in Historical Research Methods at SOAS in 2014 and a Magister Artium in Islamic Studies and South Asian History at the University of Heidelberg in 2013. In the academic year 2010/11 I studied at Damascus University and the Central University, Hyderabad, India.

My studies and research have been funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, 2008-2013), the Erika and Ekmar Schoeneberg Foundation (2013-2014), through a SOAS Research Fellowship (2014-2017) and an Isobel Thornley Fellowship of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), University of London.

• Arabic in South Asia
• Social and cultural histories of the Indian Ocean region
• Early Modern manuscript cultures
• Political histories
• Shrine cities

Book review

• Bahl, C. (online). Khafipour, Hani (ed.): The Empires of the Near East and India. Source Studies of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Literate Communities. H-Soz-u-Kult,
• Bahl, C. D. (2021). Testimonies of Enslavement: Sources on Slavery from the Indian Ocean World. Cultural and Social History, 18(5), 711-713. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2021.1973738
• Bahl, C. D. (2021). Ebba Koch, ed., in collaboration with Ali Anooshahr, The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan, Mumbai: The Marg Foundation, 2019, 320 pp, Illustrations and Maps, Index and Glossary, ISBN 978-93-83243-26-6. Der Islam, 98(2), 618-621. https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2021-0044
• Bahl, C. D. (2019). Sebastian R. Prange, Monsoon Islam. Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, Series: Cambridge Oceanic Histories, xvi + 344 pp., 4 Maps, 22 Figures, 4 Tables, Index and Bibliographical Information, ISBN 978-1-108-42438-7 (Hardback). Der Islam, 96(2), https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2019-0045
• Bahl, C. D. (2018). Muhsin J. al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters. Arabic Knowledge Construction, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015, 449 pp., 9 Illustrations, Appendix, ISBN 0-268-02044-2 (Paperback). Der Islam, 95(1), 240-245. https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2018-0017
• Bahl, C. D. (2017). Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus. Eine Privatbibliothek im osmanischen Syrien und ihr kulturelles Umfeld. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 44(3), 466-467. https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2017.1290773
• Bahl, C. (2016). Dharampal-Frick, Gita; Dwyer, Rachel; Kirloskar-Steinbach, Monika; Phalkey, Jahnavi (Hrsg.): Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies. . New Delhi 2015. ISBN 978-0-19-945275-0, In: ., 24.05.2016

Chapter in book

• Bahl, C. D., & Hanß, S. (2022). Information, Interpretation, Interaction: Global Cultures of Colophons, c. 1400–1800. In C. D. Bahl, & S. Hanß (Eds.), Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons, 1400–1800 (1-35). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90154-7_1
• Bahl, C. D. (2022). A Prosopography in Circulation: Advertising Scribal Travails in Arabic Manuscripts across Early Modern South Asia. In C. D. Bahl, & S. Hanß (Eds.), Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons, 1400–1800 (37-61). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90154-7_2
• Bahl, C. D. (2021). Arabic grammar books in Ottoman Istanbul: The South Asian connection. In E.-M. Wagner (Ed.), A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic (65-86). University of Cambridge and Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0208
• Bahl, C. D. (2020). Eunuch and Scholar - Two Ways to be ‘Indian’ Socio-Cultural Significances of the Category ‘al-Hindī ’ in the Late Mamlūk Period. In S. Kiyanrad, & et al. (Eds.), Islamische Selbstbilder: Festschrift für Susanne Enderwitz (25-37). Heidelberg University Publishing. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.531.c9251
• Bahl, C. D. (2016). Preservation through elaboration. The Historicisation of the Abyssinians in al-Suyūṭī’s Rafʿ shaʾn al Ḥubshān. In A. Ghersetti (Ed.), Al-Suyūṭī, a polymath of the Mamlūk period (118-142). Brill Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004334526_009

Journal Article

• Bahl, C. D. (2020). Transoceanic Arabic historiography: sharing the past of the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean. Journal of Global History, 15(2), 203-223. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1740022820000017
• Bahl, C. D. (2020). Arabic Philology at the Seventeenth-Century Mughal Court. Saʿd Allāh Khān’s and Shāh Jahān’s Enactments of the Sharḥ al-Radī. Philological Encounters, 5(2), 190-222. https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10004
• Bahl, C. D. (2018). Creating a Cultural Repertoire Based on Texts. Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 9(2-3), 132-153. https://doi.org/10.1163/1878464x-00902003
• Bahl, C. D. (2017). Reading tarājim with Bourdieu: prosopographical traces of historical change in the South Asian migration to the late medieval Hijaz. Der Islam, 94(1), 234-275. https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2017-0010