Biography:
Ihsan Ul-Ihthisam works on the history of languages and religious traditions in the Indian Ocean, with a particular focus on their intersections with Sufi writing, performance, and devotional practice in the Muslim vernaculars of premodern South and Southeast Asia (Southern Asia). His dissertation explores the circulation and transformation of lyrical and hagiographic traditions associated with the Sufi saint Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī and his Qādiriyya Sufi order across the Indian Ocean world. He engages in close philological and literary analysis of premodern and modern lyrical traditions in Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, and Persian, examining how Sufism shaped vernacular languages, poetics, and imagination in Islamic Southern Asia.
Research Interests:
Indian Ocean Sufism, Arabic in South Asia, Persianate South India, Arabi-Malayalam and Arabu-Tamil Literary History, Early Modern South Asia and Southeast Asia.
Education:
MA, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2020.
BA, Jamia Millia Islamia, 2018.
Publications:
1. “Paṭappāṭṭus in the Indian Ocean: Connected Literary Sensibilities and the Circulation of Texts and Sounds across Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit Cosmopolises.” In Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought, by Dilip M. Menon and Nishat Zaidi, 115–34, 1st ed. London: Routledge India, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003300939-10.
2. With Rohini Menon, “Is There Singing in the Time of Crisis? Sounding Flood Songs of Coastal and Riverine Malabar in the Indian Ocean.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 45, no. 6 (2022): 1037–1053. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2022.2119026.
3. “Bolly-wooded devotion.” In Seminar, Vol.741, (2021), pp.77-82, https://www.india-seminar.com/2021/741/741_ihsan_ul_ihthisam.htm
4. With Aboobacker K., Arabi-Malayalam: bhāṣa sāhityaṁ saṅgītaṁ, (Calicut: Book Plus Publishers, 2025). https://bookplus.co.in/books/arabi-malayalam-bhasha-sahityam-sangeetham/
5. With Simi K. Salim. “Persianate Malabar: Muhammad Shah’s Takiyya and the composition of an Arabi-Malayalam Sufi romance-mathnawī in Southern India.” Postmedieval 15, 875–902 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-024-00335-0