Author: Kabir

I am Pakistani-American. I am a Hindustani classical vocalist and ethnomusicologist. I hold a B.A from George Washington University (Dramatic Literature, Western Music) and an M.Mus (Ethnomusicology) from SOAS, University of London. My dissertation “A New Explanation for the Decline of Hindustani Music in Pakistan” has recently been published by Aks Publications (Lahore 2024). Samples of my singing can be heard on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/artist/0Le1RnQQJUeKkkXj5UCKfB

Review: A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer

From my Substack:

Aatish Taseer begins his new essay collection A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Catapult 2025) by recounting the Indian government’s 2019 cancellation of his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI). The pretext for this decision was that Taseer had concealed the Pakistani origin of his father (the late Salman Taseer, a former Governor of Punjab who was assassinated by his own bodyguard after calling for Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to be amended). However, Taseer believes that the real reason that his OCI was canceled was that he had written a critical article about Prime Minister Modi entitled “India’s Divider in Chief”. He writes: “In one stroke, Modi’s government cut me off from the country I had written and thought about my whole life, and where all the people I grew up with still lived.”

Later in the “Introduction”, Taseer describes the impact that this decision had on him and how it led to the essays contained in the book under review:

If these essays feel like a return to self, it is because they represent the return of my natural curiosities and, dare I say it, cosmopolitanism, after the long night of cutting away parts of myself in order to better fit back into Indian life. They are a response to the illusion of the idea of home. The strand of elation that runs through them is the simple joy of being out in the world, free of the pressures of belonging. Perhaps there could not have been any other response, given that my country, my material, my world in India,had been snatched from me. I grew up in what felt to me like the crucible of all anxieties related to belonging. Those anxieties run through these essays, but they are also a tribute to the individual. After all the wringing of wrists, the stewing over questions of place, of feeling myself forever betwixt and between, I woke up one day to find the bars of my prison had magically disappeared, and, far from being scared, I felt a new vein of intellectual curiosity had opened for me. With the idea of home gone, I stepped out into the world again.

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Review: Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple

From my Substack:

When South Asians speak of “Partition” they are usually referring to the 1947 partition of British India that created the nation-states of India and Pakistan. This partition involved the division of the provinces of Punjab and Bengal on the basis of religious demographics and led to some of the worst ethnic cleansing of the 20th century. It is estimated that between 200,000 to 2 million people were killed and 12 to 20 million people were displaced. The word “partition” may also remind Pakistanis of the 1971 secession of East Pakistan (what Bangladeshis refer to as the “liberation” of Bangladesh). However, as Sam Dalrymple argues in his new book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins 2025), the British Indian Empire actually spanned a much greater geographical extent than today’s India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, including areas such as Aden (in today’s Yemen) and Burma. In his “Introduction” he writes:

The collapse of the Indian Empire has remarkably never been told as a single story. With every division archives were scattered across twelve nation states– thirteen if we include Britain. Subsequent divisions between the ‘Middle East’, ‘South Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’ crystallised after the Second World War. Each Partition is now studied by a different group of scholars and the ties that once linked a quarter of the world lie forgotten… This book, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches. (Dalrymple 8)

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