Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is a twentieth century historian who works on decolonization, refugees, war, anticolonial practice, nonviolence, the visual archive and contemporary art.
Her book, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia University Press, 2007; Penguin India 2008; Mashal Books, Urdu edition, 2014) combined oral histories with archival research to examine the formation of refugees, borders and citizenship in the devastating aftermath of 1947. Stories from the book have been performed by the Delhi-based Dastangoi (Dastaan-e-Partition), and the book has been an inspiration for Mara Ahmad’s film A Thin Wall (2015), Shayma Sayid’s dance Kanhaiya yaad hai kuch bhee hamari (South Bank Center, London, August 2017), for the San Francisco Enacte Arts’ play The Parting (2018), and more recently for the first episode of the animated anthology Lost Migrations (2022).
When she directed the South Asian Studies Program from 2012-2016, she co-organized Love, War and Other Longings, the Brown-Harvard Pakistani Film Festivals of 2014 and 2015, which is now a collection of essays on cinema in Pakistan (Oxford University Press, 2020). She also led an interdisciplinary reading group Theory from the South, which continued from 2018 to 2020 as the forum Art History from the South. Two publications that emerged from Art History from the South include How Secular is Art? On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia (co-edited with Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Cambridge University Press, 2023), and a special issue of Art Margins entitled Art History, Postcolonialism and the Global Turn (co-edited with Foad Torshizi and Joshua Cohen, July 2023).
Her forthcoming digital book project, Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive: Notes on Art, Repair and the Writing of Indian History, examines the colonial plunder of Gandhara art on the Indo-Afghan borderlands, and its effects on war, historical imagination and anticolonial thought. It is a project that meditates on the archive of counter-insurgency and the politics of restitution and repair. In 2018, she co-founded the Decolonial Initiative on Migration of Objects and People with Ariella Azoulay and Yannis Hamilakis. Films and images made for the project have been exhibited in the solo show Anticolonial at Canvas Gallery (Karachi, June 6-16, 2023) and When Can History Repair at AS220 (Providence, May 2-30, 2026).
Drawing on research for Anticolonial Practice, she wrote a graphic novel When We Are Strangers (Penguin, 2026) in collaboration with the artist Sarnath Banerjee. The graphic novel tells the story of a stolen Buddha and friendship between Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the leader of the Khudai Khidmatgars, on the eve of the Partition of 1947.
With a commitment to public engagement, she has worked with Primary Source, the Choices program, FirstWorks Providence, the RISD Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art and the Isabella Gardener Museum in Boston, the Lahore Museum, and Kunsthalle Taxispalais in Innsbruck, Austria. She has appeared on Christopher Lydon's Open Source Radio and the BBC Radio series Museum of Lost Objects, and her articles have appeared in e-flux, Hyperallergic, Third Text Online, Times of India, The News, Dawn, Time Out Delhi, Caravan, Current History and The Wire.
