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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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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[editor's note: This is the first part of M. Neelika Jayawardane's two-part essay on South African Desis. A longer version of this essay appeared in Transition 107. Our sincere thanks to her for allowing CM to host it.] As a child growing up within Southern Africa’s socio-political landscape, I found no easy, seamless fitting in. South Asians [...]
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[Part 6 of 6 -- A short version of this series was published at DAWN - Books & Authors] That three million perished in the 1971 conflict is widely stated around the world. Salil Tripathi points out that “Killing three million people over 267 days amounts to nearly 11,000 deaths a day. That would make it one [...]
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[Part 5 of 6] [...] men see the abuse of “their” women as a degradation of their masculinity. What counts is not the suffering of the women, but the effect it has on men. Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: Analytical Approaches” All facets of the 1971 conflict and the subsequent nation-making processes had a devastating [...]
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[This is a guest post by my friend Anil - who x-posted on my request - he is a very qanuni dude - sepoy] (Cross-posted at Dorf on Law) Right in time for Valentine’s Day, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has sent Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani a love letter – in the form of [...]
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[Part 4 of 6] Marshaling colonial legacies, the post-colonial state seeks to consolidate the nation as a new form of empire, demanding hyper-masculine militarization and territorial and extra-territorial control. This requires the manufacture of internal and external enemies to constitute a national identity, constructed in opposition to the anti-national and non-native enemies of the nation. [...]
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[Part 3 of 6] I hate all armies. Yours, mine—all armies. -Muhammad Zinnatul Alam, the lone survivor of the Thanpara massacre.1 The main focus of Sarmila Bose’s much talked about book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is the civil war in East Pakistan, and not the international war between India and [...]
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[Part 2 of 6] Translation: The Ideology of Pakistan: Every nation has a specific civilization and culture. The civilizational and cultural capital of the Muslims of the Subcontinent comes from Islam. This capital, their beliefs and religious rituals, mannerisms, religious and historical literature, literary and technological research, is preserved in their literature and philosophy. On this [...]
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[Part 1 of 6] Forgetting is imposed as a strategy to hide the haunting memories that cannot be revealed without destroying our romance with nationalism. ~Yasmin Saikia During the many blackouts and power outages in the Pakistan of my childhood, my family used to sit in the veranda of our home cursing the electricity department [...]
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[This is a guest post from Rohit Chopra -eds] 16 excursuses in despair 0. Sepoy and Lapata have very kindly given me the opportunity to share some thoughts about the Rushdie affair (the new one, at the Jaipur literature festival this year, which, of course, is connected to the old Rushdie affair, 23 years to [...]
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Sepoy insists that I share this painting of Nehru by my grandfather. He also has asked me to share my thoughts and feelings. Here they are: When I painted Nehru, I didn’t realize, at least not consciously, that my grandfather had painted him. When I found out, it made me feel kinda funny. Look at [...]
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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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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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