Soheb Niazi joins the Friedrich-Meinecke Institute as a postdoctoral fellow funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. He specializes in the social and economic history of modern India. His research focuses on non-elite (non-ashrāf) Muslim actors in South Asia. His current research project investigates the entangled networks of meat, hides and leather industry in colonial India. His further research interests include, the history of science and technology as well as Urdu literature and poetry.

Soheb has been a Doctoral Fellow at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS) where he defended his PhD on social stratification and hierarchy among Muslims in colonial India from the Department of History and Culture Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Following his doctoral studies, he was a fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden as well as the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, New Delhi. He is also a co-editor of the project Tazkira-e Jamia: Retrieving Past Lives from Jamia, a collaborative initiative of the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies and the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi.

Journal Articles

Niazi, Soheb. 2024. ‘Towards a history of non-ashrāf Muslims: Notes on the Muslim Occupational Castes in Late Colonial India,’ Economic Political Weekly, Vol. 59 (33), 48-56.

Levesque, Julien and Niazi, Soheb. 2023. ‘Introduction: Caste politics, minority representation, and social mobility: the associational life of Muslim caste in India’, Contemporary South Asia, 31(3): 413–425. [https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2023.2240258]

Niazi, Soheb. 2022. ‘Local History in the Making: Tārīkh Nigārī at Qasbah Amroha (1878-1934)’, Urdu Studies, 2(1): 25-45.

Niazi. Soheb. 2020. ‘Sayyids and Social Stratification of Muslims in Colonial India: Genealogy and Narration of the Past in Amroha’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 30(3). [https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186320000358]

Editor of Special Section

‘Caste politics, minority representation, and social mobility: the associational life of Muslim caste in India’, Contemporary South Asia, 31(3): 413–425. [https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2023.2240258]

Podcast

Muslim Caste Associations in India with Soheb Niazi and Julien Levesque, A podcast from the International Institute of Asian Studies, hosted by Benjamin Linder. [https://www.iias.asia/the-channel/muslim-occupational-castes]

Academic Blog

Tazkira-e Jamia: Retrieving Past Lives from Jamia [https://tazkirajamia.hypotheses.org/]