DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Asian History

Thematic Field(s):  Political and Policy History; Religious History

Principal Research Interest(s):  19th and 20th century South Asia

Biography

Ashish Koul is a historian of South Asia from the eighteenth century to the present. Her research interests cover histories of caste, religion, politics, law, and gender in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. She has published scholarly articles in The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and South Asian History and Culture. She joined Northwestern in the fall of 2018 after serving as a postdoctoral associate at Yale University’s South Asian Studies Council and completed her doctoral degree from Vanderbilt University. 

Her first book, Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India (Stanford University Press, 2026) examines the intersection of Islam, caste, and state power in colonial India. It argues that some Muslims in colonial India emplaced their caste consciousness and identities within the Islamic tradition, rather than trace or connect these to Hindu cosmological notions of ritual purity and pollution or buy into contemporary visions of Islam as an unequivocally egalitarian faith. By revealing a caste-centric history of Arain Muslims, a predominantly agrarian Punjabi Muslim caste, Reinventing Caste shows how elite Arain Muslims used creative political strategies such as publishing new genealogical histories, forming a new caste association, and reinterpreting controversial socio-religious and legal issues to reinforce their uniqueness as a caste distinct from others both higher and lower than them in status. Overall, the book demonstrates that not only did caste hierarchies cross religious boundaries in the Indian subcontinent, but some Muslims were committed to rearticulating their caste identities as consonant with their understanding of ‘true’ Islam.

Her second project stands at the intersection of family history, political history, and history of objects and emotions. Using textual, visual, material sources alongside oral history interviews, it examines questions of home, homeland, and displacement among twentieth century Kashmiri subjects. Paying closer attention to articulations of home, homeland, homelessness in Koshur language, the project asks how Kashmiris have imagined and reimagined their home during this period while living inside and beyond the geographic bounds of the Kashmir.

 At Northwestern, she teaches the following courses:

• Caste, Race, and Religion in the Global South (graduate seminar)
• History of South Asia, ca. 1750 to the present (undergraduate lecture)
• South Asians in the world, 18^th century to the present (undergraduate lecture)
• Women, Power, and Modernity in Islam (undergraduate seminar)
• Empires, Borderlands, and Nationalisms (undergraduate seminar)