Seven years ago, historian Sarah Waheed was killing time on a rainy afternoon in Hyderabad’s old city when she ducked into Haziq and Mohi, a second-hand bookstore whose spines, famously, carry no titles. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular. She pulled a book off the shelf at random. It turned out to be about Chand Bibi, the 16th-century Deccan queen Waheed had heard of only in passing as a child.
“She appeared to me in a dream,” Waheed said while talking about the period that followed when she returned to the US to resume her work as a historian of South Asia at the University of California. “I didn’t even read the book right then. But the deeper I looked into her life, the deeper I entered her world.”
That serendipitous encounter, arriving just as the pandemic closed off any possibility of travel to India, became the seed of Waheed’s recent book Chand Bibi: The Lives and Legends of a Warrior Queen, a project that grew, by her own admission, into something far larger than a single biography.
Stuck at home, she began doing the only fieldwork available to her: poring over old maps, trying to reconstruct the rivers, forts, and landscapes Chand Bibi would have known. “Chand...
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