My review of Habibi is out in The Sunday Guardian today. It was originally longer. The full piece is below: I. Hating Art I have hated many pieces of art in my life. An Italian restaurant I used to go to was decorated with enormous abstract oil paintings. The paintings were so aggressively bad they [...]
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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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[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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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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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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For my recent column on Bookslut, I approached the worrisome task of writing about the most exalted stars in the Bangla literary firmament gingerly and with some trepidation. What if my reverence was insufficient? What if I missed some important salient details? Was I even qualified to write about Bankim and Tagore at all? It [...]
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My new column is up at Bookslut. It was with some trepidation that I approached the hallowed topic of Bangla literature. Here is an excerpt: “Neither of them noticed that the period in which husband and wife rediscover each other in the exquisite first light of love—that gold-tinged dawn of conjugal life—had slipped silently into [...]
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Dear Readers, Chapati Mystery is launching a new flash fiction contest, which might just happen one time or might become an OVERNIGHT SENSATION or even a TRADITION. For the first contest, we solicit entries inspired by the following tweet sent out by @polgrim on the occasion of Hosni Mubarak’s removal from the office of President [...]
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Everybody knows who Yara Sofia is in Puerto Rico. And if you don’t, then sorry darling, this is not your world. –One of Kuzhali Manickavel’s favorite quotes from Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Season 3. For the past few months I’ve been up to my earlobes in Blaft Publications. Last week (?) I posted an interview [...]
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My review of a whole raft of Blaft publications comes out in the February issue of Bookslut. In the meantime, I’ll be posting some interviews with prominent Blaft personages. Here is the first: an interview with Rakesh Khanna, co-founder and editor of Blaft, and Pritham K. Chakravarthy, translator for The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp [...]
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My new column on translation, transcreation and Qurratulain Hyder’s two English renderings of her novels is up on Bookslut today. As you will see from the text, I decided to approach the two texts without reading the Urdu first, for reasons that should be clear in my discussion. Now I am reading Aag ka Dariya, [...]
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We, who privilege chronological time over all else, are maddeningly a-chronos or poly-chronos in our personal memories. Often we imbue a specific space with time, and when we leave it, we arrest the passage of time, there, to our last memory. We do this more often with persons – especially loved ones. Other timelines, which [...]
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