Tag: Pakistan

Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.

Many thanks to Kabir for inspiring this piece.

Toor at the Courtauld

Salman Toor was born in Lahore in 1983 and paints in New York. On Thursday TIME put him on its first TIME100 Art list, and he told the magazine “I straddle two cultures“. On 2 October the Courtauld opens his first solo show in Europe, nineteen paintings made since 2019. He describes the work as queer and immigrant lives, caught between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. One of the principal pictures, a bar on East 13th Street, revisits Manet’s bar at the Folies-Bergère, which hangs downstairs in the same building.

Two weeks ago his partner’s Pasoori became the first Pakistan-made music video to pass a billion views, and nine-tenths of those views came from outside Pakistan. I wrote about it. Add Toor. Add that Britain’s Muslim public face is Pakistani. How does Pakistan gets so much of so little that in the end it is the hegemon of “Monsoon” (Sub-altern) Islam, when technically it doesn’t even belong in that category. My candidate is the language, and I am not sure it is enough.

The Indus was the corridor, not the capital

Start with the map. Pakistan is the Indus, and the Indus was where everyone arrived. Alexander crossed it. Mahmud of Ghazni crossed it seventeen times. Babur crossed it and kept going, because the prize lay east. Lahore mattered: fourteen years as Akbar’s capital, Jahangir’s tomb, Shah Jahan’s gardens, Aurangzeb’s mosque. But the high culture that made modern Urdu crystallised farther east and later. Mir and Ghalib wrote in Delhi. Lucknow kept the court after Delhi lost it. Sir Syed built the college at Aligarh that manufactured the class in the next section. Lahore joined the Urdu world in earnest when the colonial state put Urdu above Punjabi in the province’s offices and schools, which is the story of the Lahnda post.

In 1947 Pakistan got the corridor and Lahore. Delhi, Lucknow and Aligarh stayed on the other side. On paper that is a house with a doorway with just about one good room.

Alavi’s salariat Continue reading Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.

Pakistan Has a Dosa and Nobody Told You

A dosa in wheat country

My Urdu teacher is from Rajanpur, at the bottom of Punjab where the Koh-e-Sulaiman begins and, as he puts it, three provinces meet. On Friday morning, Pakistan time, he told me about a bread I could not picture. “We Saraiki people make dosa,” he said. “We have been making it for centuries. We have a name for it: chilla.”

Then the method. “Rice flour. Make it into a batter, thin as gravy. Spread it on the tawa with any bowl.” That is a dosa. Nobody rolls a chilla. In Delhi a cheela is a gram-flour pancake. His is rice, in a province that eats wheat. His mother makes it every winter and the family eats it with saag. In summer nobody touches it. He sent me a photograph of last winter’s, taken on the tawa.

“What a mixture Punjab is,” he said. “We sit eating a South Indian dosa with saag. Punjab’s authentic food with South India’s.” He does not know where it came from. He thinks there is some connection between South India and South Punjab, a Dravidian one and a roti one.

Is there a Dravidian residue in South Punjab, on the plate and on the tongue?

What Friday looks like

Continue reading Pakistan Has a Dosa and Nobody Told You

In Remembrance of Shaheed Lt. Ashfaqus Samad, Bir Uttam (My Cousin Nishat Bhai):

by Shawkat

A Tribute to A Family of Freedom Fighters

In 1971, my cousin Ashfaqus Samad (Nishat Bhai) was a student in the Statistics dept. of Dhaka University, having graduated from St. Gregory’s School and Notre Dame College. A talented student, he was considering options of graduate study at MIT and elsewhere. Pakistan Army’s genocidal crackdown started on the night of March 25th; on the 27th, he and his friends Badal, Bodi (Shaheed) and Masud left for Kishoreganj and met with EBR forces there. On April 4th, they returned with a few .303 rifles, some ammunition and 25 grenades, thus becoming the first guerrillas to organize armed resistance in Dhaka. The cache was initially stored at his home, and subsequently moved cross-town at great peril to his friend Towhid Samad’s Dhanmondi residence. Realizing that it was inadequate, he then went to Agartala, India, for further military training.

After seeing sporadic action in the Saldanadi sector, in June he was selected for the First War Course of Bangladesh Army, to be trained by the Indian Army at Camp Murti, near the Indo-Bhutan border. Bearing ID No. S.S. 33, he was one of 61 Commissioned Officers, including Sheikh Kamal (eldest son of Sheikh Mujib), who graduated on October 9th, and one of only two of his batch to be killed in action (KIA) during the war. He was assigned to Sector 6 in Dinajpur and Rangpur, where he helped liberate several areas, notably Bhurungamari, the first upazila (sub-district) to be freed.

Continue reading In Remembrance of Shaheed Lt. Ashfaqus Samad, Bir Uttam (My Cousin Nishat Bhai):

How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims

The comments have turned into a meditation over whether Urdu ends up as one more dialect of Hindi. I think the fight is about something bigger. Partition took one Muslim political world and cut it into three. Seventy-nine years on, one of the three sets the culture for all of them, and it is the one that took the language.

By reference Muslims I do not mean the most devout or the richest. I mean the group whose speech, dramas, music and religious manner supply the default picture of a South Asian Muslim outside its own borders.

Three blocs, one language

Pakistan has ~230 million Muslims, India ~200 million, Bangladesh ~150 million. In 1971, when the second partition finished the job, the three stood almost level at about 60 million each. Pakistan has pulled ahead since by having more children. Nobody planned any of it. The Muslim League asked for a homeland for the Muslims of India, got two-thirds of them inside one country, and lost half of those within a generation.

The three blocs were never one culture. A Bengali cultivator, a Punjabi Jat, a Sindhi tenant and a Lucknow ashraf household shared a mosque and not much else. What they shared at the top was one political world and one elite language. That language was Urdu, and Urdu was not Pakistani. It grew up in Delhi and matured in Lucknow. Ghalib is buried in Delhi and Mir in Lucknow. Aligarh taught it. The Punjab, which became Pakistan’s heart, spoke something else entirely, as I argued in my last post.

Pakistan made it the state language anyway. In March 1948 Jinnah stood in Dhaka and told the Bengalis they could keep Bengali for their province, but that the state would speak Urdu and only Urdu. Few in either wing spoke it at home then. The 2023 census puts it at 9.25% of Pakistanis now. The Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns and Baloch learnt it at school. On 21 February 1952 police shot Bengali students in Dhaka for objecting, and the road to 1971 opened from there. The Bengalis kept their language. They still lost the argument about whose culture the Muslims of the subcontinent would run on.

So the language of the Indian Muslim elite now carries a Pakistani label. When a Hindu in Delhi hears Urdu, he hears Pakistan. When a Pakistani hears Urdu, he hears himself.

Why Urdu does not dissolve Continue reading How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims

How Pakistan Punjabified Lahnda and Urdufied Punjab

As promised I wanted to write on the ongoing argument about Provinces of Pakistan. Mohsin Naqvi lit it in July by declaring the system of governance collapsed. On 10 September the parliamentary affairs minister, Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, said Parliament would debate new provinces in October. Two days later Rana Sanaullah said the decision belonged to Parliament, with a referendum to follow if a joint sitting approved one. Sindh’s assembly had already passed a resolution on 3 September rejecting any division of the province, and Saraiki nationalists said in August that their claim to a province is older than any administrative tidy-up.

The argument is framed as administration. Punjab has 127 million people; should it be split? The better question is what Punjab is. The province Pakistan inherited in 1947 had already been remade once. The British had moved Punjabi cultivators, including large numbers of Sikh Jats and Muslim agriculturalists from the crowded central and eastern districts, into its west. Partition moved more. The middle of the old continuum was increasingly counted as Punjabi, while Pakistan put Urdu above it. The latest census suggests that linguistic hierarchy is still reshaping how Punjab identifies itself.

What Grierson found

Continue reading How Pakistan Punjabified Lahnda and Urdufied Punjab

Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian Walk Into Delhi

Since Sbarrkum (Sereno), RIP, had such passionate views about the post-colonial setup, I thought the first post after his obituary would be on this topic. In Memoriam to all the victims of 9/11 and its aftermath. May they all rest in Peace.

Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian sat in the same hall in Delhi this morning while an American fleet blockaded Iran’s coast.

Narendra Modi opened the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam by saying the grouping is “not against anyone“. Xi had landed a few hours earlier, on his first visit to India in seven years. Prabowo Subianto came for Indonesia, the country that hosted Bandung. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came for Egypt. The UAE was in the room, and so was Iran, which the UAE cut off from trade and finance in August after Iranian missiles landed on Emirati soil.

The New Delhi Declaration went to the wire because Tehran and Abu Dhabi both dug in. It passed on the first day. Pezeshkian said on his way to Delhi that the BRICS bank exists to free countries from the dollar. Modi used his closing remarks to say that outdated institutions cannot steer a changed world. Two men in one building, each alluding to the same hopes from a GS (Goldman Sachs) derived acronym for GS (Global Southern) based organisation (the irony). BRICS is the new non-aligned movement reborn except there is now only one hegemony to be non-aligned against.

The hurried decapitation that failed

Continue reading Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian Walk Into Delhi

Are All Postcolonial Nations Brahmanical Constructs?

Note: Emotional comments are for the Open Season Thread. 

Every postcolonial elite preserves the borders it inherited. That is the reason we live in the world we live in: every succeeding elite has been very keen to preserve the boundaries of its state, and it is never the case, under a postcolonial elite, that nations go back to their original topographies. The map, once drawn, becomes sacred. The question in this title is whether the post-colonials are Brahmanical gatekeepers (I’m aware the Commentariat don’t like the nomenclature but it is particularly apt for an Apex Elite).

I. A Brahmanical construct

Continue reading Are All Postcolonial Nations Brahmanical Constructs?

Did the British Divide India?

This comes up all the time, and i happened to write a long tweet about this today> As usual, no time to fix into a real article, but I am posting the whole thing here for discussion.

My version is that Pakistan was ultimately the creation of the Muslim league (and therefore of Islamism) but at crucial points this wud not have been possible without SOME British rulers promoting it for their own purposes.. so:
1. British imperial officials were very conscious of the need to divide and rule (they were all trained on the Roman empire, they understood these things, they were not dumb), so they relentlessly promoted local divisions (Muslim vs Hindu, Sikh vs Hindu, Upper caste vs Lower caste etc), that does not mean they CREATED those divisions, but they definitely had an interest in promoting them and did so.. That contributed to the rise of the Muslim league.
2. In 1939, INC failed to support them in an existential war. This led the viceroy to promote a relatively small party (the muslim league) to counter them. The viceroy’s favorite (sir zafrullah) wrote the Pakistan resolution. Then gandhi doubled down on his errors with the Quit India movement and that gave loyal Muslims another leg up. Pakistan propaganda operated unhindered while INC had 1000s in jail. Advantage Muslim league.

Continue reading Did the British Divide India?

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