CHAND BIBI The Lives and Legends of a Warrior Queen By Sarah Waheed

In 1595, Chand Bibi, queen-regent of Ahmadnagar, defended the Deccan against Mughal imperial expansion, emerging as one of the most formidable political and military figures of sixteenth-century India.

Yet history preserves her only in fragments.

Was she killed by her own soldiers? Did she choose death over capture? Or did she disappear altogether?

Drawing from archival research, oral histories, historical landscapes, and years of work across Hyderabad and the Deccan, including institutions such as Salar Jung Museum, Telangana State Archives, and Urdu literary archives, Sarah Waheed reconstructs Chand Bibi’s life while opening a larger inquiry into how history itself gets written: through evidence, contradiction, memory, and myth.

Set within the politically dynamic world of the Deccan Sultanates, the book expands conversations around sovereignty, gender, Muslim women’s political authority, and histories often left outside mainstream narratives of India’s past.

WHY THIS BOOK MATTERS

Reframes medieval Indian history beyond familiar imperial centres by bringing the Deccan into wider historical conversation.
Recovers histories of Muslim women’s political power through the story of a queen-regent, diplomat, and military strategist.
Blends biography, archival scholarship, folklore, and historical investigation into a work that reads both as narrative history and intellectual inquiry.
Speaks to growing conversations around historical memory, archival recovery, and whose stories become part of public history.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“This book is a major achievement. Like a detective, the author scours written sources, tracks down living memories, and traverses the land of her ancestors in a spirited quest to recover the life and mysterious fate of a heroic warrior queen of the Deccan.”
— Richard Eaton, Professor of History, University of Arizona

“A timely and profoundly exciting work… part of a great new wave of writing that questions historiography and the erasure of South Asian female Muslim voices.”
— Ira Mukhoty, historian and author of Daughters of the Sun

“At a moment when Muslim women rulers are pushed to the margins of history… this book stands as a powerful act of recovery.”
— Rana Safvi, historian and author of In Search of the Divine: Living Histories of Sufism in India

“This book will introduce you to two remarkable women: an engaged historian and the powerful historical figure she brings to life… We need more books like this to make sense of both the past and the present.”
— Sunil Sharma, Professor of Persianate and Comparative Literature, Boston University

“This is a gorgeous book… Waheed’s beautiful prose and erudition pull us into Chand Bibi’s life, times and mysterious death.”
— Supriya Gandhi, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Yale University

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Sarah Waheed is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and a specialist in South Asian history. Her work focuses on South Asian Islam across global and local contexts, with research interests spanning religion and secularism, colonialism and nationalism, gender, and memory.

She completed her PhD in History at Tufts University and has taught South Asian history across institutions including Georgetown University, George Mason University, Mount Holyoke College, Oberlin College, and Davidson College.

She is the author of Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Supported by a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award, her research on Chand Bibi was also selected for a Stanford University Humanities Center Fellowship (2022–23).