A Meditation on Revolution, Secularism, and South Asia’s Futures
Inspiration arrives in the strangest of places.
Recently, I found myself deep in yoga, settling deeper roots in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Itâs not clear whether this will be our long-term home yet but even so time to lay down the contours of a life (our main life of course still remains Cambridge, UK while Chennai, India is a must thrice yearly ensconcement).
Iâve come to realise that itâs often more productive to write full posts than to engage in fragmented comment threads. The richness of thought requires a form that can hold tension, contradiction, and nuance but comments, by design, resist that.
The Upper-Caste Template of South Asian Dharmic Discourse
Take, for example, sbarrkum, who shares personal reflections and images from his life on the common board. While one might raise questions about permissions or boundaries, itâs also important to respect dialectical differences in how people choose to engage. Thereâs no single valid mode of expression.
That brings me to a broader reflection: how the very structure of discourse in Dharmic South Asia has long been shaped by upper-caste templates; especially under Western influence. Over two centuries, upper castes have Brahmanised, Saffronised, Persianised, and then Westernised themselves, adopting and enforcing norms of discourse, authority, and ârationality.â
I wanted to share something that floored me. Through Sahil Bloom, I came across this poem by Kahlil Gibran, and it struck me with its simplicity and depth. As an aside, it is worth remembering that Gibran was deeply inspired by Ê»Abduâl-BahĂĄ, whose vision of unity and spiritual renewal touched many thinkers and artists of his time.
For the Commentariat, itâs worth noting that one of the 20th centuryâs greatest poets had Muslim antecedents: Gibranâs maternal great-grandfather converted from Islam to Christianity, a reminder that conversion did happen, and that traditions were more porous than the common perception that âMuslims can never leave Islam.â
Today (well, technically yesterday, since itâs past 12) is Pakistanâs Independence Day. I personally felt no extraordinary zeal or zest for the land of the pure. Is it my lack of patriotism (sun), my anxiety about belonging (moon), or rising sedition? (Please pardon my astrological metaphors; recently learned from a friend.)
I neverâof course, I am exaggerating; thatâs what poets do anywayâfelt much for my own birthday. Perhaps I am still unable to grasp the importance (or the dread and brevity) of the flow of time.
If time is creativity unfolded, I donât feel progress. If it is a movie playing with no rewind, I still lack the desire to go back.
âFor Ghalib, life is an unending search. Neither the holy of holies in Mecca nor even the attainment of paradise is the end of it.â ~Ralph Russell
Weâve all heard of that crooked genius, Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan Ghalib â whether through our school Urdu courses (unfortunately encountered at an age when our consciousness is still unripe) or through pop culture. Sometimes itâs his well-known fantasy for mangoes; other times itâs when someone shares a couplet whose slightly convoluted vocabulary immediately earns it the label of âa Ghalib shayrâ; and other times, his destitution and scrambling for a pension.
As a Gen Z myself, I can say that most of todayâs youth are largely alienated from the Urdu language, let alone Persian. And of course, this doesnât mean weâre reading Byron or Eliot instead; rather, itâs the excess of TikTok. Decoding Ghalib feels like a Herculean task for us. This dilemma not only distances us from a rich poetic tradition but also from the timeless lessons it has nurtured.
If China endured a century of humiliation, India has lived through a thousand years of it. Invasions and exploitation left it poor in wealth but rich in culture; intricate, adaptive, and resilient. That depth shows in Desi English, which often favours long, ornate sentences over plain ones.
This habit echoes Persianâs former role in the subcontinent: a prestige language whose mastery signalled rank. Even Ghalibâs vast Persian verse drew less love than his Urdu. In India, Persian was the colonial language of power; today, English plays that part.
In Iran, Persian changes fast. Slang, borrowed terms, and foreign tones reshape it so quickly that many in their forties struggle with teenage speech. My own Persian, kept alive in Kuwait and India, is closer to Shirazi and Tehrani standards than to the language my ancestors spoke. Iâm self-conscious with Iranians, but with diaspora Persians, I speak freely; we share a looser, accented form of speech. Continue reading Why Indian English Loves Long Sentences
There is no context to this poem; it was a pure exodus of emotions. An expression / defence of romanticism in this capitalist, postmodern, post-ideological world.
The context of this poem is a bit complex. I wanted to experiment with some poetic gymnastics to venture into new terrain, like writing from the perspective of non-living things. So I chose The Communist Manifesto. Such a paradoxical choice, I must say in hindsight.
The copy I still possess.
I first (and sadly, the last time) read it many years ago, sometime in 2019, when I was in my second (and final) year before university (though I never actually went to university, another detour we can explore some other time). I was at Edwardes College then (see the post “Against Platonic Love”for more details).
The idea for the poem surfaced after watching a dogfight â intellectually speaking â between the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj ĆœiĆŸek and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. If you havenât already, I recommend watching their full debate.
Iâd said to myself: Why donât I do my own Bhartiya-karan, that is, Indianise myself, before someone else thinks of doing it? The first problem was my name. Perhaps you donât know: my name is Iqbal Chand. It occurred to me that âIqbalâ is an Arabic word. What kind of nationalism is it to live in India and have an Arabic name? And so, I changed my name to Kangaal Chand. As it happens, this name is far better suited to my financial condition considering that âkangaalâ means âpoorâ. And why just me, it suits the rest of my country too.
The second problem that arose was of the dress. There was no trace of Indianness in the pants, coat and tie that I wore. In fact, all three were a reflection of my slave mentality. I was amazed that I had worn them all this while. I decided to wear pajamas instead of pants. But then, a certain Persian person told me that the pajama had come to India from Iran. And so, I began to wear dhoti and kurta. But not a kameez, as the word âkameezâ, too, is of Arabic origin and it reeks of the stench and stink of an Arab!
The third problem was of hair! After all, was it not treachery against the country, a blatant form of antinationalism, to keep oneâs hair fashioned in the English style? I instructed the barber to keep only one lock of long hair at the back of my head and shave off the rest. He did exactly that. I had seen images from ancient India showing men with long and lush moustaches. Following their example, I began to grow my moustache. When my friends saw the large moustache on my somewhat small face, they assumed that I had put on a fake one, possibly because I was acting in some play. Forget my friends, when I saw myself in this new look, I began to feel that I had been created not by God, but Shankar, the cartoonist. But I did not lose heart. One has to do all manner of things to be Indian.
An excerpt from a story by Kanhaiyalal Kapoor in âWhose Urdu Is It Anyway?: Stories by Non-Muslim Urdu Writersâ, edited and translated by Rakhshanda Jalil.
As the posting on BP (and the comments) are pretty fast and furious; my capacity to edit and moderate is getting pretty stretched..
Fatima Ijaz, born in Karachi, studied linguistics in the United States and currently serves as the editor of The Pandemonium Journal. Her debut poetry collection, The Shade of Longing, offers a complex interplay of memory, language, and abstraction, often resisting closure and certainty.
In the preface, she articulates a powerful and poignant idea that serves as a compass for the bookâs aesthetic and emotional journey:
âThe contemplation of the past involves an evocative presence of a surreal presentâŠIn doing so, you are in a heightened state of present-past â a double consciousness that is more than the sum equal of its partsâ
This is, in many ways, a deeply Hegelian thought. One is reminded of the famous assertion in The Phenomenology of Spirit that:
âThat the True is actual only as system, or that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit-the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion. â
In essence: the memories, she is talking about, are sort of in itself objects (fixed) and also subjects (variableâdependent on the person recollecting).
Reading this book feels like discovering a cache of love letters written in a fever of emotion, letters meant for someone dearly beloved. But just before mailing them, the writer realizes how insufficient they are. So she burns them all, and what emerges from the ashes are these poems: not just expressions of feeling, but indictments of language itself. A complaint, perhaps, that language lacks the fidelity to truly capture the depths of human experience.
By acknowledging the futility of language, she leans into abstraction. She chooses uncertainty over certainty and, the infinite over the finite, and invites the reader to participate in meaning-making. The gaps in her verse are not absencesâthey are openings. The reader is asked to bring their own memories, their own hauntings, to fill in the silences.
In the poem âEcho of a word, x memory,â the structure is minimal yet haunting. A single wordââ(stray)ââis repeated eight times on one line, and this continues for thirteen lines. The effect is disorienting, hypnotic. Memory here is not narrative, it is reverberation, a stutter echoing in an unreachable corridor of time.
Celestial imagery recurs throughout the collection (stars, suns, moons) often to widen the emotional and metaphysical frame. She reaches for the planetary to express the personal, as in lines like:
âThe face of the sun is smeared with the curseâ
âI saw the shadow moon hunt down oblivionâ
âLanguage emerges out of this exchange between fiery sun and eternal skyâ
âThe moon becomes a cosmic mirror on such…â
Another recurring anthropomorphic presence is that of bones and the black crow, symbols that oscillate between the sacred and the ominous.
âthere wasnât an ounce of regret in my bones / I knew I had practiced the art â and thus â the sacrifice.â
âThen there is the stubborn case of the black crowâŠâ
In the poem âTear-Drop,â regret and remorse seep through the lines:
âIt does not matter, because I can touch / The midnight with my azure-blues / Perhaps the blame is on the harpsichord / Perhaps itâs on one of us / The black consciousness has entered / and there is no un-doing it.â
Her languageâor rather, her suspicion of languageâremains central. The âshadeâ she refers to is not just the shadow of longing but also a hue: the specific color of yearning that permeates the book. Itâs a longing that refuses to be pinned down, named, or resolved.
In the penultimate poem, the titular piece, she writes,
âDo you think we become in the end / characters of our own stories? Do we finally / own them enough to discard them, have the infinite power / to reform our mind of its strange habitat?â
This is a moment of quiet brilliance. One could read this as a critique of ideologyâfirst acknowledging the narrative scaffolding of the self (âIâ) and then, in almost Lacanian fashion, gesturing toward the Real (one of Lacanâs three registers). To âdiscardâ the story is to momentarily crumble the illusion of coherence.
Jacques Lacan (French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist)
Shade of Longing is not a book that yields itself easily. It is not meant to be understood in one sitting. It is a space to dwell in, misread, reread, and reinhabit. Like ghosts or witches watching from the periphery, these poems linger long after the final page is turned. Their magic lies not in answers, but in the haunting questions they leave behind.
