Ajam Podcast #48: Muslim Warrior Queens of the Persianate Deccan

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In this episode, Belle interviews Sarah Waheed, Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, about her new book, Chand Bibi: The Lives and Legends of a Warrior Queen (Penguin Random House India, 2026). 

Waheed narrates the histories of Chand Bibi, a sixteenth-century warrior queen of the Deccan, the south-central region of India. Waheed writes of her journey searching for traces of Chand Bibi both as a historian and as a woman raised in Hyderabad, in the heart of the Deccan. Chand Bibi interweaves histories of Muslim women in the Deccan world of the 1500s, with narratives of Muslim women in India in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Waheed offers insight into multiethnic empires, the histories written about them, and the racialized, classed, and gendered tensions that marked them. We also dig into the importance of religion, astrology, and the occult alongside the utility of architecture, poetry, and painting for uncovering the past.

In the podcast, we first discuss what drew Waheed to writing a history of Chand Bibi that foregrounds her family history and personal experience. Waheed shares how her journey began on a full-moon night at a Sufi shrine in Gulbarga, which she visited as a pilgrim and in search of the final resting place of Chand Bibi. 

From architectural structures to paintings, poems, illustrated manuscripts, court histories, and oral histories, Waheed wound her way through what she terms the “heart maps” of Hyderabad and beyond. She emphasizes the importance of “going to ground” and seeing where Chand Bibi herself lived and ruled, including the Ahmadnagar Fort.

Chand Bibi is not the only Muslim warrior queen we discuss, nor the only warrior queen of the Deccan or Persianate worlds. Khunza Humayun, Chand Bibi’s mother, is another major figure. Waheed shares an episode of curious turns in searching for lost letters between mother and daughter, highlighting the adventures historians embark upon to find archival gems. She highlights the importance of acknowledging absences of sources, in addition to reading between the grain of those sources which do exist. She also addresses how sources can be manipulated at different points in time, and how those moments are just as crucial to address as the histories themselves.  

We conclude with a discussion of the differing narratives of Chand Bibi’s demise. Waheed shares how the legend of Chand Bibi’s escape through the tunnels of a fort, as she defended against the Mughal imperial advance, served as a metaphor for the author’s method in writing the history of Chand Bibi. Throughout the episode and book, Waheed considers the connections between the Deccan landscapes, built environment, its ruins, and the writing of history.

Guest

Sarah Waheed

Sarah Waheed is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Chand Bibi: The Lives and Legends of a Warrior Queen (Penguin Random House India, 2026), and Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secularism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is a cultural historian who specializes in South Asian Islam in global and local contexts across the India-Pakistan divide. Her approach to the past is transregional and comparative and her scholarship broadly speaks to issues of religion and secularism, colonialism and nationalism, and gender and memory.

Host

Belle Cheves

Belle Cheves is a senior editor at Ajam Media Collective and the Roshan Institute Assistant Professor of Persian and Iranian History at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the history of family in Qajar Iran, specifically on how transformations of marital practices and affective perceptions of gender, race, and ethnicity shifted understandings of kinship, enslavement, and domestic service over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Credits

Episode No. 48
Release Date: 26 October 2026
Recording Location: remote
Recording Date: 19 August 2026
Produced by Belle Cheves
Audio Editing: Belle Cheves and Nicholas Gunty
Music: Yavaran (Intro: “404 day in heaven;” Outro: “Har Chi”)
Cover Image: Portrait of Chand Bibi on Horseback Holding a Falcon (nd): Manuscripts of the Muslim World. Rare Book Department. Free Library Philadelphia: Philadelphia, PA. Courtesy of Sarah Waheed.