I wrote, The makers of Pakistan were peasants and laborers. In 1940, they passed a resolution in Lahore to demand a separate homeland for Muslims and an end to British colonial occupation. In 1946, their votes brought a political party, the Muslim League, to power. They chose Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a modernist technocrat, as their [...]
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I have an op-ed in NYT on the subject of elections and minority rights in Pakistan: On Saturday, Pakistanis will head to the polls to choose a new government; for the first time in 66 years, a democratically elected administration has completed its term. Given Pakistan’s tumultuous past, this is an impressive achievement, but it [...]
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Our lapata is interviewed at CNN’s OutFront on her recent book and her “controversial” art: OutFront: Our last conversation got a lot of attention and really seemed to upset a lot of people. Why do you think that happened? Rockwell: It seemed as though people were especially bothered by the fact that I was Norman [...]
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a. Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an archive? Let me begin at the beginning. My left eyebrow has a scar. It is jagged, and usually the droop of the eyebrow hides it from view. I see it sometimes when I look in the mirror. When I see it, I am [...]
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In The State, vol IV, I have a small bit of writing “The State Shall Remain Nameless” – which is a reading of the 1979 Punjabi movie Dubai Chalo!: In 1980, we went to Lahore for our annual visit and I heard, for the first time, Dubai Chalo! It was a catchphrase. It was everywhere. [...]
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Over at Caravan, I have a review of Dalrymple’s latest on the Anglo-Afghan War. How to do Empire Right? In Return of a King, Dalrymple seeks to offer a corrective to the imperial mission in Afghanistan while highlighting the work of Afghan historians and accounts in Dari or Persian from the 1840s so as to [...]
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Millions of souls nineteenseventyone homeless on Jessore road under grey sun A million are dead, the million who can Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan Taxi September along Jessore Road Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load past watery fields thru rain flood ruts Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts – Allen Ginsburg, On Jessore Road, December [...]
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[What precisely is a response to the drones? Recently Teju Cole introduced drones in first lines of well-known fiction works and got more tweets than any of the current drone strikes. Almost simultaneously, Himanshu Suri (aka HEEMS) released the video of his "Soup Boys" single which feature drones. Let us just say that while Pitchfork.tv [...]
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[see earlier in the Berlin series: I, II, III (also, earlier: I, II, III) On the city, see companion series on Lahore: I, II, III, IV, V, VI] My first ghost sighting in Berlin was on September 8th, 2009, on the fifth floor inner balcony of a building at the corner of Duisburgerstrasse and Brandenburgerstrasse [...]
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Recently, my jacket lost a button. It is a new jacket. But, one of those fancy enough to have a small packet of extra button secreted inside a small inner pocket. I kept wearing the jacket with the missing button. Each time I wore it out, the same thought would occur to me (each time [...]
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This essay originally appeared in Critical Muslim Vol. 4 (Hurst & Co. London: 2012. eds. Ziauddin Sardar, Robin Yassin-Kassab). There are no billboards on the streets. For the last four years, a week or so before the new season of Coke Studio is launched, most of the important billboards in major Pakistani cities are taken [...]
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In 2008, I organized a panel at the Annual South Asia conference at Madison on vernacular histories. Our chair and discussant was Kumkum Chatterjee. Earlier that year, her article “The Persianization of Itihasa: Performance Narratives and Mughal Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century Bengal” had appeared in Journal of Asian Studies. Chatterjee did a reading of the [...]
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The plight of Gaza civilians has shaken many a torpor-ed digital selves recently. This was notable because the ordinary condition of Gaza, the daily quotidian plight is in itself a crisis of unbelievable moral and humanistic severity. Yet the now-sanctioned ritual sharing of photos, of inflamed or inflammatory opinion pieces, of outrage on social networks [...]
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At the recently concluded 41st Annual South Asia Conference at Madison, WI, I chaired a panel on dreams in the medieval Islamicate world. Most of my paper was part of a chapter in the book, but I thought I share a bit of it here (in light of CM’s long standing tradition of sharing conference [...]
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The cricketers gather under the stone columns of Olympiastadium. The majority are brown. I knew no one, and sat at a respectable distance and watched the easy camaraderie among the others. I caught whiffs of punchlines and scents of anecdotes. After a while, S.K bounded over and introduced himself. I followed him to the field. [...]
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the first in a new series, gentle readers. i apologize for the protracted silences here. i am now settled in new york city. new job, new city, etc. i didn’t write about berlin much, but here we go. On a nondescript straße – lined with oaks – his restaurant abuts a motorcycle and waterski rental. [...]
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Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Between Clay and Dust is microscopic examination of a mood. The mood is nostalgia or if that word evokes more negative connotations, wistfulness. Then Ustad Ramzi’s attention wandered away. He could not tell how long his mind was blank. When he regained his attention, Gohar Jan was saying: ‘A girl’s face is [...]
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There is no real sense of how Maula Jatt changed Pakistan. Real as in what to quantify and how to do it. At some point, it was everywhere and then it remained. The man playing the role of Maula Jatt was named Sultan Rahi né Mohammad Sultan who was born in 1938 in Uttar Pradesh [...]
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My friend and Berlin-based American artist, Rajkamal Kahlon’s artist book, The Winning of the West, is now available. You can browse through the book here, and if you are near Ludwigshafen who can go to her solo show. In the book, there is a conversation/interview between us, that I am presenting for your enjoyment. The [...]
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Here is how I introduced Jahangir earlier: I walk down towards the rooms – there is an old man, in white wife-beater, a dhoti, and two fistfuls of shockingly white beard. He is sitting in front of a canvas on which is a bucolic village scene with a tube-well and a date palm. He looks [...]
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