Punjab (Pakistan)
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Pakistan Has a Dosa and Nobody Told You
“We Saraiki people make dosa,” my Urdu teacher told me. “We have a name for it: chilla.” A rice batter spread on a tawa and eaten with winter saag, in…
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How Pakistan Punjabified Lahnda and Urdufied Punjab
As Pakistan prepares to debate new provinces, X.T.M asks what Punjab is. He argues that colonial canals, Partition and the census folded Grierson’s Lahnda continuum into “Punjabi”, while the south…
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Cholistan: The Desert at the Edge of Everything
X.T.M portrays Cholistan as a seam rather than a border region: Gulf royalty hunt there, Seraiki is its language, and the dry Hakra river runs through its past. The post…
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Not All Our Ancestors Were “Just Hindu”
X.T.M rejects the claim in Aslan Pahari’s videos that Pakistanis’ pre-Islamic ancestors were uniformly Hindu. He argues the pre-8th-century Indus region was layered and regional, with Buddhists in Sindh, later…
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Pakistan Is Not Yugoslavia
X.T.M argues that Pakistan is not a Yugoslavia-in-waiting. He says a state built around permanent vulnerability tends to centralise and adapt, that 1971 taught that disintegration brings catastrophe, and that…
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A Pakistani Wedding That Refused Not to Be Indian
X.T.M reads the wedding of Nawaz Sharif’s grandson, with Indian designers and Indic styling, as evidence of Indic soft power. He argues that Pakistani weddings show continuity of a subcontinental…
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ZA Bhutto Founds the Pakistan People’s Party in Lahore
Omar Ali reposts Hasan Mujtaba’s Facebook account of how Zulfikar Ali Bhutto founded the Pakistan People’s Party in Lahore, including the origin of its slogan and Bhutto’s later falling-out with…
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Dr Manzur Ejaz. 1949-2025
An obituary of Dr Manzur Ejaz (1949-2025), Punjabi writer and Marxist activist who died in Virginia. It records his belief that defending the Punjabi language is central to working-class politics,…