Savita Ananthan

Broadly my research area is the history of Islam in South Asia with specialization in South Indian Islam from the late medieval to the modern period. I work particularly on the history of Sufism in South India vis-à-vis printed panegyrics that continue to be preserved and performed orally despite religious reform and resistance leading to decline of such practices. These panegyrics were composed, published and read in the local languages of Malayalam and Tamil—often in a complex rendering of these languages in the Arabic script. My dissertation studies the ecumenism and socio-spatial history of a select genealogy of Sufis in the Malabar and Coromandel regions known as the Bukhari Sufi lineage (c.1700 -1900 C.E.), who trace their origin to a sixteenth century migrant Central Asian Sufi saint.