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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The christian colony, the milk colony, the officers colony, the even more ridiculously named murghi-khana (hen coop) neighborhood, all packed together, surrounded by acres upon acres of open spaces teeming with puchal parei, churail, jinn, chalawa.1 *I should note that this will be the last in the series. I needed to begin a writing project [...]
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The modern traveler, wrote Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques, is forever chasing after “vestiges of a lost reality”. Such that writing about a city becomes a mode of constant nostalgia, a constant looking back, either textually or experientially. Sarnath Banerjee’s Harappa Files (which I read recently; thankfully, after I had already planned and written some of [...]
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Once again, I missed it. Eight years ago this little experiment – which, in 2011 produced two books (!) and countless millions of dollars (!!) – began. There is no denying the fact that dhandha has been manda here lately. I have not found too much time to write.Yet, I have had so many amazing [...]
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You can’t see through cement – and neither can I. When I look at Lahore and the ways in which cement has cordoned off sight-lines, I see a city full of people blind-folded. The gated communities were the first variant – ghettos of the elite – where cement walls rose up to seclude and to [...]
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In Cairo, I thought I met Khizr. More likely, I found a new way of walking. Following hints, barely visible pathways, I try only to keep my sense of direction overpowered by my desire to get lost. Cairo, around Tahrir Square, looks a lot like the late colonial city abutting Old Lahore – the architecture [...]
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At some point in Old Lahore’s life, cement won. Floors stacked like cardboard boxes, and filled only with cardboard boxes, sprung up everywhere. The sky which is hard enough to find, now simply hides behind slabs of grey loosely slapped into holes or onto bricks. When you see an older building, terror-stricken and shaky, you [...]
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I sincerely apologize for the absence, gentle Readers. Let it be known that I have been tweeting in my absence here, and I wrote a very short note on Ismat Chughtai: These essays showcase the best of Chughtai’s range and mastery as a writer – they are erudite, self-aware and always probing. This is not, [...]
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I try not to say much when I am a little overwhelmed. Agha Shahid Ali overwhelmed me a while ago – when I started to seriously read his collected works. Over the years, I have mentioned him many times here, or quoted his Faiz translations or highlighted writings on him. But when I began to [...]
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Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. His fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in various international magazines including Granta, Vallum, Caravan, and Words Without Borders. He was one of Granta’s New Voices for 2011 and one of the eleven recipients of the 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant. He teaches literature and fiction writing at LUMS, Lahore. He’s [...]
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I like to think I wrote a fair amount this year – maybe not as much as last year but still, a fair amount. But I also have a bunch of posts stuck in the “Draft” view. Gonna delete them, but here are the snippets for what-might-have-beens. Objects Yesterday, I went to see Schätzes des [...]
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The recent hissy fit thrown by historian Niall Ferguson (racist! imperialist!) because Pankaj Mishra wrote a scathing review in the LRB deserves comment. Mishra’s review of Ferguson’s TV-Book Civilisation, Watch This Man, led with drawing attention to White supremacists like Theodore Stoddard and the twin peaks of their insanity – the inherent belief in their [...]
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Nandini Ramachandran reviews WTWFA for the Sunday Guardian: The size of its betrayal would’ve forced Manto into asking his fellow citizens what he once asked Uncle Sam — my country is poor, but why is it ignorant? This is a query that haunts Manan Ahmed as much as Manto, and his book is an antidote [...]
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Below the fold, a twitter-based debate on a review essay in NYT.
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(A version of this review essay ran in The Friday Times, Vol. XXIII, No. 41) Review Essay by C.M. Naim In May 1962, when the first groups of America’s newly established Peace Corps were flying out to various “underdeveloped” countries to help them along the road of “progress”, a twenty-eight years old woman set off [...]
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Naim Sahib, one of my teachers at Chicago, has a must-must-must read “rant” (as he puts it) in Outlook India. I really think it is one of his best and critically lays bare a key disconnect between the intellectual engagements within Urdu and English presses when it comes to matters of Muslims and Islam. I [...]
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Taste the war paint on my tongue/as it’s dripping with my sweat/place my gaze in the futures path/seeing things that ain’t come yet Many years ago, a different me was in a car driving down a highway I had travelled many hundreds of time to a destination I was intimate with, and from a base [...]
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Some more important readings for you in terms of the DU/Ramanujan. – Shahid Amin (Professor, History, Delhi University), When a Department Let a University Down, The Hindu, Nov. 3, 2011 At the first sign of trouble, in a letter written in September 2008, OUP decided to thank those who felt aggrieved by it, “for pointing [...]
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Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day 1935. Professor of Sanskrit on cultural exchange; passing through; lost in Berlin; reduced to a literal, turbaned child, spelling German signs on door, bus, and shop, trying to guess go from stop; desperate for a way of telling apart a familiar street from a strange, or [...]
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I loved the space and the wonderful people at the Asian Writers’ Workshop who were kind enough to host my book launch a month ago. Magical! So, I pass on, with enthusiasm, a festival of awesomeness for their 20th anniversary! They feature Teju Cole, Amitava Kumar and some other people (ok some of the other [...]
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