Urdu
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Pakistan’s Punjab, the Urdu literary hub of Pakistan, is slowly waking up to its lost Punjabi identity
A quoted Scroll article arguing that Pakistan’s Punjab, long an Urdu literary hub, has lost its Punjabi identity as the language was cut off from education, shared by X.T.M without…
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Two Videos in Urdu (both having problems with the language)
Omar Ali compares two Urdu videos, one from a Pakistani elite journalist and one from a woman from Kasur, to argue that neither speaker’s Urdu is their mother tongue and…
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The Sun that Rose From the Earth
Kabir Altaf reviews Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s The Sun That Rose From the Earth, novellas about the lives and works of Urdu poets such as Mir and Ghalib in the late…
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Paki Elites & where they live
X.T.M offers an impressionistic guide to where Pakistan’s elites live, placing political and bureaucratic power in Islamabad, the military in Rawalpindi, economic elites in Lahore and the country’s most cosmopolitan,…
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Why Colonialism is always wrong..
Arguing colonialism is always wrong, the author lists drawbacks of British rule in South Asia, including English displacing a native literary lingua franca as the high culture and the long…
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Bahá’ís & Pakistan
Responding to Omar Ali’s post on Pankaj Mishra, a Bahá’í writer notes the book’s passage on Jamal-ud-Din Afghani, the Babis and Bahá’í emigres to Bombay, and compares Urdu to the…
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Home – Lost, Found and Imagined
Reposts Ruchira Paul’s 2007 personal essay from her Accidental Blogger archive on being an NRI and the idea of home, with an excerpted passage on her late father-in-law, a noted…
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Hindustani Culture as a Link culture?
Arguing that the Hindustani vernacular and Bollywood bind South Asian desis from Tamil to Pashtun, the author writes as both insider and outsider to this cultural complex, citing his Urdu-speaking…
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Aqlima. Daughter of Adam
An English translation, by Ruchira Paul, of Fahmida Riaz’s Urdu poem Aqlima, about the sister of Cain and Abel, posted with the Urdu text and an audio recording in the…
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Ajmal Kamal Reviews Alakh Nagri: The Babas who really run Pakistan (and the world)
The author reposts Ajmal Kamal’s Urdu review of Mumtaz Mufti’s autobiography Alakh Nagri, calling it brilliant, and explains for non-Urdu readers the background of Qudratullah Shahab’s nationalist autobiography that Mufti’s…
