I wrote, The makers of Pakistan were peasants and laborers. In 1940, they passed a resolution in Lahore to demand a separate homeland for Muslims and an end to British colonial occupation. In 1946, their votes brought a political party, the Muslim League, to power. They chose Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a modernist technocrat, as their [...]
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a. Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an archive? Let me begin at the beginning. My left eyebrow has a scar. It is jagged, and usually the droop of the eyebrow hides it from view. I see it sometimes when I look in the mirror. When I see it, I am [...]
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[see earlier in the Berlin series: I, II, III (also, earlier: I, II, III) On the city, see companion series on Lahore: I, II, III, IV, V, VI] My first ghost sighting in Berlin was on September 8th, 2009, on the fifth floor inner balcony of a building at the corner of Duisburgerstrasse and Brandenburgerstrasse [...]
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Tentative title: The sentimental and the melodramatic: exploring Partition aesthetics We seek essays for a volume (Routledge) looking at the sentimental and melodramatic aesthetics of images, art, gossip, and writings that remind us of the unspeakable acts of 1947 and their political and cultural aftershocks in Punjab and Bengal. Critics who have variously written about [...]
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In 2008, I organized a panel at the Annual South Asia conference at Madison on vernacular histories. Our chair and discussant was Kumkum Chatterjee. Earlier that year, her article “The Persianization of Itihasa: Performance Narratives and Mughal Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century Bengal” had appeared in Journal of Asian Studies. Chatterjee did a reading of the [...]
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At the recently concluded 41st Annual South Asia Conference at Madison, WI, I chaired a panel on dreams in the medieval Islamicate world. Most of my paper was part of a chapter in the book, but I thought I share a bit of it here (in light of CM’s long standing tradition of sharing conference [...]
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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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#OccupyMadisonConcourseHotel2011!! Ahem. It is the Annual Awesomeness that is the Madison conference – this is the 40th one! Big times now. I will be on two panels – giving a paper on something I am quite excited about and discussing a set of papers elsewhere. I wish there was a way to link to my [...]
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We were just talking about the scholastic and the imaginative that underpins some gems of scholarship – such as Ramanujan’s work on the Ramayana (and his work on poetry, in poetry), and here comes another deeply inspiring articulation. Nauman Naqvi, anthropologist, delivers a wonderfully framed, evocative,(and beautifully filmed) lecture ruminating on the art, the poetics [...]
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The First out of the four experts termed the text as “appropriate” for the syllabus, second expert congratulated the History Department for including the essay, third expert opined that the contents of the essay are “unexceptional”. Only the fourth expert proposed to incorporate other texts in lieu of Ramanujan’s text, as “anything that goes against” [...]
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I am rather stuck on the fliegender Teppich in the NPD ad. I want to continue the link I made between Hans Schweitzer’s anti-Semitic cartoons and the NPD flying-carpet by focusing on this particular relationship between orientalism and anti-Semitism. The 1926 Lotte Reiniger movie Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed was one of the first “animated” [...]
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Ich bin ein Ausländer doch Berlin ist mein zu Hause meine Heimat meine stadt hier kriegst du auch mal auf die Schnauze – Alpa Gun There is a recessed walkway leading up to the side entrance of a building which bears the plaque that Albert Einstein worked here after moving to Berlin in 1914. Ehrenbergstraße [...]
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The wind blows cold outside your door/it whispers words I’ve tried before But you don’t hear me anymore/your pride’s just too demanding The end is coming soon, it’s plain/a warm bed just ain’t worth the pain – Tower Song, Townes van Zandt Two things I know about Houston – my Babu hails from that town [...]
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The esteemed Amitava Kumar, who wrote the foreword for the CM book, interviewed me for his column on academic blogging: Manan Ahmed is a historian. He is also a blogger who started the blog Chapati Mystery. His blog-posts have been curated into a book that is coming out this month. Manan’s publisher asked me to [...]
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EVERYONE IN NY GO SEE LAPATA Wednesday, April 20, 5pm This Is Not That Dawn: A Book Launch Symposium on the English Translation of Yashpal’s Jhutha Sach. Jhutha Sach (1958-1960) is widely considered to be one of the masterpieces of Hindi literature, the most enduring of all works penned by militant Indian novelist, Yashpal (1903-1976). [...]
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Belatedly, I have learned that the one of the most significant historian of Sindh, and one of the most meticulous historian in Pakistan, Nabi Bux Khan Baloch passed away on April 6, 2011. Almost every thing I have touched, directly related to my dissertation, was created, edited, compiled or reflected upon by Dr. Baloch. I [...]
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I spent the last few days in The Reg. For my next parlor trick, I need to find magazines which circulated among the middle class Pakistani households during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It sometimes confuses people that such materials exist in a place like University of Chicago. This is where post-War politics and the [...]
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Heading home is always a highlight and soon enough, I will be in sweet Hyde Park drowning in snow, slush, Powell’s and Istria. Life will be as it ought to be. As it once was. However, before that, I am participating in – it readily appears – a wonderful conference at the University of Pennsylvania. [...]
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It was startling to recognize my life these many years, codified Also, this bit of Ad-copy from that same issue is too precious to miss.
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I have been doing some translation work on Shibli Naumani for a small project. He was a major historian of early Islam who published seminal works in the early 20th century. He was also a committed reformist who wanted to modernize “Muslim” education. But reading around on him, I got to read his letters to [...]
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