Urdu
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Why Hasn’t Pakistan Collapsed Yet?
X.T.M argues Pakistan has held together because it anchors a self-image drawn from the Lucknow-Delhi Indo-Muslim tradition, and that ownership of that legacy follows continuity among people, not territory, census…
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Caste in America
The author argues that Brahmins are the civilisational custodians of the subcontinent and that anti-Brahmin undercurrents in some Dalit-justice coalitions risk cultural erasure, while supporting Dalit rights. He also revisits…
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Faiz, Subh-e-Azadi, and Pakistan’s 78th Birthday:
On Pakistan’s 78th Independence Day, the author reflects on feeling little zeal for the occasion, and questions whether Faiz’s “Subh-e-Azadi” is a happy or sad poem, recalling a disagreement between…
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Ghalib for Gen Z
A young reader’s review of “Thinking with Ghalib” by Anjum Altaf and Amit Basole, praising its transcreations and its epistemological reading of Ghalib’s poetry as a way into a poet…
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What kind of nationalism is it to live in India and have an Arabic name?
X.T.M posts an extract from Kanhaiyalal Kapoor’s satirical story in Rakhshanda Jalil’s anthology of non-Muslim Urdu writers, in which a narrator renames and re-dresses himself to prove his Indianness, and…
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Against Platonic Love
The writer introduces an interview with the Urdu poet Ahmad Faraz, whom he ranks behind Faiz, and translates Faraz’s answer rejecting platonic love in favour of passionate, complete love for…
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Dead Poets of Pakistan
X.T.M argues that Pakistan’s creative energy lies with a Westernised, English-fluent ‘boundary class’ outside patronage and power, and contrasts India’s confident, 80 per cent one-faith civilisational script with a Persianate…
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Pakistaniat & Urdu from Qasim to Quaid
X.T.M reflects on Urdu as a language between Persian and Arabic, shares a Bahá’í prayer in Urdu, and suggests Pakistan is a project rooted in sentiment rather than soil, in…
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Was Partition Good for Muslims?
X.T.M argues that Partition, sold as deliverance, was a sophisticated act of self-disinheritance for South Asian Muslims, leaving them divided across three states, without electoral leverage, with a psychological cleft,…
