Eve Tignol
History
Eve Tignol is a historian of colonial South Asia and a permanent researcher at the CNRS, based at the Centre for South Asian and Himalayan Studies (UMR8077) at EHESS, Paris. Her research explores the cultural, political and emotional histories of Muslim communities in colonial North India, particularly from 1857 to 1947.
She is currently a visiting researcher at the MFO until December 2026, where she is pursuing a project entitled “The History of an Emotion: Shame and Blushing in Colonial North India, c. 1900-1947” funded by a mobility grant (SMI) from CNRS Sciences humaines & sociales. The project pays particular attention to blushing, a physiological phenomenon which was central to 19th century Western theories of emotion although it is rarely discussed in contemporary Urdu sources. Drawing on a corpus of dictionaries, periodicals, aesthetic manuals and psychological and medical writings, it examines vernacular emotional lexicons, conceptions of the body and complexion, and the circulation of knowledge between Western and South Asian intellectual traditions.
Selected publications
with Farha Noor, “‘Vikram, le vampire et le conte’ d’Intizar Hussain (1972)”, Agastya : Textes expliqués du monde indien 2 (2026) « Non-humains », open access. 10.35562/agastya.452
“Female columnists in the early days of Payām-e Taʿlīm (1926–1937): Education and the politicization of women’s work”, Journal of Urdu Studies 5, 1-2 (2025), pp. 29-56. 10.1163/26659050-12340064
“Shame and Safety Pins: Dress controversy and “moral technologies” in 1900s Urdu magazines for women”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 47, 3 (2024), pp. 596-615. 10.1080/00856401.2024.2350891
Grief and the Shaping of Muslim communities in North India, c. 1857-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). 10.1017/9781009297684
“From wakīl to numā’indah: A history of Urdu concepts for political representation in North India, 1858-1919”, Contributions to the History of Concepts 18, 1 (2023), pp. 68-94. 10.3167/choc.2023.180104
“The language of shame: A study of emotion in an early-twentieth century Urdu children's periodical (Phūl, 1910)”, South Asian History and Culture 12, 2-3 (2021), pp. 222-243. 10.1080/19472498.2021.1878793
“Genealogy, Authority and Muslim Political Representation in British India”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 30, 3 (2020), pp. 449-465. 10.1017/S1356186320000243