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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[This is the final installment of M. Neelika Jayawardane's three-part essay on Mahvish Khan's memoir. A longer version will appear in an edited collection. Previously: I, II ] III Khan’s My Guantánamo Diary: A Memoir in the Interstices Americans love personal confession and public testimony — whether on the Oprah Winfrey show, in a church or in a [...]
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[This is the second installment of M. Neelika Jayawardane's three-part essay on Mahvish Khan's memoir. A longer version will appear in an edited collection. Previously: I] II. Translating the Other, Transforming the Self Most Americans cannot forget the iconic images of orange-clad, black-hooded prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Ironically, however, these highly publicized images served only to [...]
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[This is the first part of M. Neelika Jayawardane's three-part essay on Mahvish Khan's memoir. A longer version will appear in an edited collection.] Mahvish Rukhsana Khan‘s memoir My Guantánamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me chronicles her experiences as an Afghani-American law student who volunteered to be a Pashto translator for a law firm representing [...]
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Rohit Chopra reviews Ramachandra Guha’s Patriots & Partisans (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2012). A shorter, slightly different version of this review appeared earlier in The Sunday Guardian. In a footnote to an article written for the Economic and Political Weekly, Ramachandra Guha recalls a saying of the renowned Indian sociologist M.N. Srinivas: “Media attention is [...]
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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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About seventeen years ago, I started a project translating a collection of the Hindi author Upendranath Ashk’s short stories. The project has had a checkered career but is finally coming to fruition in March 2013 from Penguin India. The collection will be called Hats and Doctors, and two excerpts are now available online, one from [...]
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For your reading pleasure, a list of our favorite books from 2012–books that we read in 2012 that is, because we reject the Cult of the New and don’t care when they were published. Sepoy’s Six: Herein no particular order are some books that caught attention and didn’t let go. They may or may not [...]
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1. All Hail Salman Rushdie. All Hail Joseph Anton. At times, when she was reading the memoir, she was reminded of that cherished moment in her youth, when she had first read prose in Latin class. That too was a memoir, as it happens, and one also written in the third person singular. Gallia est omnis [...]
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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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[A shorter version of this essay appeared in Dawn.] Empires carve out and sustain their political and economic privilege with unrelenting violence, but, without a hint of irony, deem their mission moral and ethical, verging on the altruistic. A necessary counterpart to this blindness, is a paranoid fear of a dark, hostile world. Islamophobia serves [...]
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[Editor's note: We thank Hussein Omar for contributing this essay. This review was commissioned by Bidoun for issue #27. We especially thank Bidoun for allowing us to run it. ] by Hussein Omar On the 15th of June, 1914, an obscure Egyptian newspaper based in Geneva printed a rousing call-to-arms: To you, my fellow men and fellow [...]
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A snippet from my review of Irfan Husain’s Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam and the West: The Global War on Terror has spawned a cottage industry of commentators and “experts,” who simply repackage the American public’s commonly held beliefs and serve it back to them: The Muslims are crazy, they hate America (and each other), and America is [...]
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I reviewed Alia Malek’s Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice for Dawn. You can read the full review here. On March 21, 2012, Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi woman, was fatally beaten with a tire iron in Southern California. A note found near her said, “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist.” The investigators asserted that [...]
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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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