Saraiki
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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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Pakistani Diversity
I have never actually met a Pakistani who thinks they are Arab or Turk ethnically. Claiming lineage is not ethnicity.
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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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BP Episode 50: South Asian Subnationalism with Prof. Majeed
A BrownCast episode with Professor Majeed on linguistic sub-nationalism and Grierson’s Linguistic Survey, covering how regional language identity grew alongside communalism before independence, why India’s languages stay healthy, and how…
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Are all Arabs “honorary” Muslims?
Starting from whether Pakistanis treat all Arabs as honorary Muslims, the author argues that South Asian identities split along a Hindi-Urdu civilisational fault line, citing the choices made by Bengalis…
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Live Blogging: White noise, séances & colonial linguistics
Live notes on Professor Javed Majeed’s lecture on George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India and its gramophone recordings, covering how the survey shaped the boundaries of regional languages and is…
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Urdu as an intra-provincial link language
Picking up a reader’s point that Urdu binds ethnically diverse provinces, the author notes three Pakistani provinces have large linguistic minorities, discusses Pashtun expansion, the origin of the word vatan…
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The Siraiki question
Arguing the Siraiki language is the key question, the author sees Punjabi as a Hindawi pushback into the Lahnda-speaking West, notes Hindko and Siraiki as Lahnda remnants, and says a…
