Chapati Mystery

Berlin Sketchbook III: Stitch

by sepoy January 3, 2013

Recently, my jacket lost a button. It is a new jacket. But, one of those fancy enough to have a small packet of extra button secreted inside a small inner pocket. I kept wearing the jacket with the missing button. Each time I wore it out, the same thought would occur to me (each time [...]

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better with tablas

Coke Studio by Bilal Tanweer

by sepoy December 31, 2012

This essay originally appeared in Critical Muslim Vol. 4 (Hurst & Co. London: 2012. eds. Ziauddin Sardar, Robin Yassin-Kassab). There are no billboards on the streets. For the last four years, a week or so before the new season of Coke Studio is launched, most of the important billboards in major Pakistani cities are taken [...]

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Postcards from the Archive: Goodbye 2012

by patwari December 31, 2012

Last year it was Sepoy’s essays that were collected in a book, and this year, a collection of Lapata’s essays and art, the second CM book, The Little Book of Terror, was published by Farangi’s Foxhead Books. You can read some reviews of TLBT at the new CM page, CM Books. We had some terrific [...]

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univerCity

Kumkum Chatterjee, 1958-2012

by sepoy December 18, 2012

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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Reviews sheviews

by lapata November 30, 2012

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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Dead Bodies Amongst

by sepoy November 22, 2012

The plight of Gaza civilians has shaken many a torpor-ed digital selves recently. This was notable because the ordinary condition of Gaza, the daily quotidian plight is in itself a crisis of unbelievable moral and humanistic severity. Yet the now-sanctioned ritual sharing of photos, of inflamed or inflammatory opinion pieces, of outrage on social networks [...]

The Selective Politics of Outrage: A Response to Barkha Dutt

by sanyasi November 19, 2012

Barkha Dutt has expressed incredulity on Twitter at being included in my essay “Bal Thackeray’s Poisonous Legacies” as an example of those in the worlds of media, celebrity, and politics who were soft-pedaling Bal Thackeray’s legacy. Dutt’s argument, expressed here and here, is that (a) it was sloppy and careless to include her in this [...]

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Bal Thackeray’s Poisonous Legacies

by sanyasi November 18, 2012

The Indian elite’s reaction to Bal Thackeray’s death raises profoundly disturbing question, argues Rohit Chopra. With news breaking earlier this evening of Bal Thackeray’s death, the movers and shakers of Indian society have been in overdrive as have been their lesser-known followers, minions, and acolytes on Twitter. The event is being milked for all it [...]

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The Stain of Memory

by sanyasi November 3, 2012

Rohit Chopra continues the series on South Asia with a reflection on the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984. Close to three decades after the pogroms, most of those responsible for the violence have not been brought to justice. In 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by [...]

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Socialism, Secularism and the Shifting Goalposts of Indian Democracy

by sanyasi October 20, 2012

CM announces a series of writings on political life and public culture in South Asia, guest curated, gathered, and edited by Sanyasi. The idea is to present here a range of perspectives –by writers, journalists, academics, artists, and others–on the entanglements of culture, public life, and the political in and about the vast swath of [...]

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univerCity

On Dreams and Other Truths

by sepoy October 16, 2012

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 [...]

Berlin Sketchbook II: Act Out

by sepoy September 5, 2012

The cricketers gather under the stone columns of Olympiastadium. The majority are brown. I knew no one, and sat at a respectable distance and watched the easy camaraderie among the others. I caught whiffs of punchlines and scents of anecdotes. After a while, S.K bounded over and introduced himself. I followed him to the field. [...]

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Berlin Sketchbook I

by sepoy August 27, 2012

the first in a new series, gentle readers. i apologize for the protracted silences here. i am now settled in new york city. new job, new city, etc. i didn’t write about berlin much, but here we go. On a nondescript straße – lined with oaks – his restaurant abuts a motorcycle and waterski rental. [...]

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In Golden Hues

by sepoy July 17, 2012

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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imperial watch

Islamophobia in the US

by patwari July 8, 2012

[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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First Terrorist: Review of Maia Ramnath’s Haj to Utopia

by patwari July 7, 2012

[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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Native Apologist

by patwari July 3, 2012

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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Literature in the Oil Age: A Review of Goat Days

by basanti June 27, 2012

by Sarah Waheed From that moment, like the maniyan fly, an unknown fear began to envelop my mind. An irrational doubt began to grip me, a feeling that this journey was not leading me to the Gulf life that I had been dreaming about and craving for. The Gulf I had learned about from so [...]

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Feet First – Essays on Maula Jatt I

by sepoy June 25, 2012

There is no real sense of how Maula Jatt changed Pakistan. Real as in what to quantify and how to do it. At some point, it was everywhere and then it remained. The man playing the role of Maula Jatt was named Sultan Rahi né Mohammad Sultan who was born in 1938 in Uttar Pradesh [...]