[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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In December, it is the custom of taste-makers everywhere to create lists of the ten best things of the year. Taste-makers, aware that they will be called upon to perform this task, work hard throughout the year winnowing through possible entries into this category so they will be prepared by December to do their duty [...]
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My new December column is up on Bookslut. There’s so much more to say about this book, and I will have write more in the coming days, but for now, here is an excerpt: I read War and Peace a number of years ago in Allahabad, India, in March or April, when the temperatures begin [...]
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Go read all of The Language of Developmental Literature by zunguzungu. But this brought smiles. As I hope is clear, the appeal to the American example is specious on its own terms. But that’s what makes it such an interesting rhetorical move: however problematic it might be to declare that American literary history must be [...]
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My post for the November issue of Bookslut goes up today. Here it is below, excerpted in full. The conversation has just begun, so please do join in the comments section. I. Polemics Years ago, when I was engaged in the pursuit of the Hindi PhD that I now have, I was approached for an [...]
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“Translation for me stems from two different but interrelated impulses: a good text matures for the reader with every reading, reveals itself gradually—call it literary striptease. I can delve into it only through extended togetherness. Translation makes it possible to tease out all I can through this prolonged intimacy. The other insatiable impulse is to [...]
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It has been a while since the Sunday reading was last done and I actually didn’t even manage to do my sunday readings until early monday morning. Yet, here we are: “He set it for 7.00. That was 7am on this thing. For 7pm, what he wanted, it should have been 19.00.” Lorraine Adams and [...]
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