JHI Undergraduate Fellow
Palvasha Khan is a third-year student double majoring in History and Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Toronto. For the past two years, she has served as the Editor-in-Chief of The Future of History, an annual journal released by the History Students’ Association. During this time, she has worked as a research assistant to the Leonardo Sciascia Archives and to Professor Donna Orwin. She is primarily interested in postcoloniality in South Asia, and holds an exploratory interest in the transmission of collective memory, Islamic intellectual history, and exile and estrangement.
Fellowship Research Project—Spectral Sovereignty: Materializing Jinn Absences at Lahore's Moti Masjid
In Islamic theology, jinns are invisible spirits traditionally associated with madness, possession, and ruination. Yet, at the Moti Masjid in Lahore, jinns are popularly sanctified and addressed with petitions from worshippers hoping to amend the injustices. This research project examines the reimagining of jinns as benevolent figures at the Moti Masjid, and proposes that jinn veneration is a unique practice emerging from Pakistan’s post-Partition landscape. It suggests that in the absence of state stability, jinns counter the precarity of everyday life by connecting worshippers to a premodern temporality, and open an alternate sovereignty to that of the Pakistani state.