Urdu
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From Yohani to Nora: How Bollywood Mughalizes Everything
Using Royals and the Manike Mage Hithe remix, X.T.M argues that Bollywood ‘Mughalizes’ regional inputs, so India kept the composite culture without religion while Pakistan kept the religion but lost…
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“Mimicstan”: the burden of Purity from Pagan origins
X.T.M argues that Pakistan’s Anglo-Urdu elite is a ‘mimic elite’ that imposed a post-colonial ideology of rupture from the subcontinent, suppressing Pashtun, Baloch and Bengali identities, and contrasts it with…
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“I’m not white, I’m Pakistani.”
Comments on a viral clip of a woman saying she is Pakistani, not white. The author reads it as showing how assimilated Muslims are in the English-speaking world, and argues…
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Modi’s Sufi Gambit: Is Hindu India the True Heir to Urdu Culture?
Argues that Modi’s patronage of the Jahan-e-Khusrau festival may position Hindu-defined India as Urdu culture’s heir, modernising it as the Pahlavis did Persian. The author sees this as a strategic…
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The role of Comedy in our age
An aspiring stand-up comic describes growing up in Pakistan with little stand-up culture, learning humour from Urdu television and Western shows, and the gap between written Urdu humour and performance.…
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Review: The Anarchy, by WIlliam Dalrymple
The reviewer lists errors in the glossary of William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, including its definitions of ‘alam, firangi, Id-ul-Azha, masnavi and Muharram, and argues that masnavi names a verse form…
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William Dalrymple, Imran Khan & Xerxes’s Jinnah moment-
Replying to a reader who calls his worldview ‘Urduised’, the author defends a Persian, Arabic and Urdu cultural ideal, says William Dalrymple’s like of his tweet has made him warm…
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A Dalit writes on Oppresive Hindi
An extract from an essay on Hindi, quoting historian Sumit Sarkar that literary Hindi was bound up with Hindu-revivalist movements, and arguing that it carried Brahminical and communal impulses from…
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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…
