DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

On leave 2024–2025 as a Buffett Faculty Fellow

Daniel Majchrowicz (Ph.D. Harvard University, 2015) is Associate Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture. His work is committed to thinking about South Asia and its place in the world as it is envisaged, imagined, and expressed through the medium of language and literature. His teaching and research particularly considers the history and culture of Muslims and Islam in South Asia, with a special emphasis on Urdu literature, travel writing, popular culture, and language politics.

He is a translator from Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian, and director of the South Asia Research Forum (on leave 2024–25), vice-president of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and a board member of the Modern Endangered Archives Program. 

His first book is The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a study of South Asia’s global imagination as it was expressed in Urdu-language travel writing from 1840 to the present. The book argues that travel writing in South Asia was a broadly ecumenical genre that let Indian travelers not just describe the world as they found it, but to imagine it as they wished for it to be. Opening this vast South Asian travel atlas, The World in Words introduces a new literary genre, unlocks new forms of literary subjectivity from long-ignored voices, and reveals new modes of circulation, mobility, and connection between India, Asia, and Africa.

His second book is Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press, 2022), which he co-wrote and edited with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma. This book, which was the recipient of a three-year grant from the Leverhulme Foundation, argues that travel was a key site at which Muslim women negotiated their relationship to Islam and the Muslim community. The book contains original studies of travel accounts by forty-five women authors written in twelve languages. Each chapter includes excerpts and translations from the accounts under study. 

Majchrowicz’s third book tells the fascinating life story of Begum Sarbuland Jung, an influential Muslim woman who lived at the very heart of one India’s wealthiest kingdoms, but who never herself stepped into the spotlight. A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910 (Indiana University Press, 2025) provides the first full English translation of Begum Sarbuland's nearly-lost Urdu travel diary of a journey to the Middle East and Europe. Originally intended for circulation among friends and family and later published, her informal entries reveal the everyday practices of an Indian woman of her time and detail her impressions and reactions as she explored the world alongside her husband. As Begum Sarbuland met other women and Muslims during her travels, those encounters shaped her reassessment of her own identity as a Muslim woman. Enriched with years of original research, archival work, and family interviews, A Journey to Mecca and London restores the nearly forgotten narrative of one of India's first Muslim women travel writers to its rightful place in Indian and Islamic history.

His current book project, Hindi: A Global History, asks what it might mean to become a citizen of the world through the medium of a subaltern language of the global South. Hindi today claims an estimated 850 million speakers, slightly more than half of whom speak it as a second language. This makes it the third most commonly used language on earth (behind only English and Mandarin Chinese), with more speakers than Spanish and Arabic combined. Like these languages, Hindi is not, and has never been, only a regional or a diasporic language. And yet, if you do not speak the language yourself, you will be hard pressed to realize its ubiquity. Hindi: A Global History tells the story of Hindi’s global past to ask if what might it mean to be global without English.

Books

 A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909-1910.
Indiana University Press, 2025.

 

The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

 

 Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women.  Co-edited with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 

A Long Way from Hyderbad: Diary of a Young Muslim Woman in 1930s Britain. Muhammadi Begum; tr. Zehra Ahmad and Zainab Masud; ed. Kulsoom Husein; introduction, Daniel Majchrowicz. New Delhi, Primus Books, 2022.  

E-Books

Zer o Zabar: An Introduction to the Urdu Script. With David Boyk. 2023.

Selected Articles

“‘Can’t Touch This’: Early Indian Muslim Responses to the Saudi Conquest of the Hijaz.” Journal of Urdu Studies 3, no. 1 (2023): 63–87.

“Muslim Women Travellers from South Asia to Britain, c. 1890s to 1940s.” With Siobhan Lambert-Hurley. In Muslim Women in Britain, c. 1860s to 1960s, ed. Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor and Jamie Gilham. London, Hurst Publishing, 2023.

 “Begum Hasrat Mohani’s Journey to Iraq,” in Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing. Ed. James Uden. Boston, Ilex (Harvard University Press), 2022.

“Malika Begum’s Mehfil: Retrieving the Lost Legacy of Women’s Travel Writing in Urdu,” in the South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, October 2020.

“Fingernails Torn from Flesh: Intiz̤ār Ḥusain, Rām La‘l, and Travel Writing across the India-Pakistan Border” in the Journal of Urdu Studies, October 2020.