There is a moment in Mohammed Hanif’s new novel where Baghi, founder of a cut-rate English tuition centre in Rawalpindi watches a Himalayan quack hawk libido supplements to a crowd of labourers on the morning after erstwhile PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging. Grief hangs in the air like smoke. The country is in shock. And…
Author and journalist Fatima Bhutto reflects on how caring for her pet dog shed light on her own relationships in this tender and insightful memoir of a doomed love affair.
“All points on a circle are always the same distance from the center.” These exquisite personal essays trace the orbit of Pakistani-American author Samina Najmi as she reflects on events, people, and places that shape her traditional childhood in Pakistan and continue to inspire her as she pursues her dreams of education and travel, enlarging…
Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple.
The noun “Partition” (with a capital “P”) has, in South Asia and perhaps globally, come to mean the 1947 split of India and Pakistan, a climactic event that still roils, if not poison, domestic and international politics.
Pakistani writer Faiqa Mansab’s second novel The Sufi Storyteller is a South Asian take on stories about stories blended with a murder mystery. It opens with a murder in the library which doubles up as the office of the protagonist Layla, an expert on women and their role in storytelling traditions teaching at a university…
History has scarred South Asian cities in very concrete ways. The most well known of these have been carrying the burdens of colonisation and communalism, and, after independence, a rewriting of their histories that are governed by ideologies of nationalism. Lahore, in Pakistan, is one such city. In his book Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways…
Pakistan’s history since independence is… complicated. Partition wrecked the economy, leaving all the economic infrastructure in India. Democracy was weak, as the military launched multiple coups to overthrow the civilian government. The country was split into an unsustainable two halves—with one declaring independence as Bangladesh by the 70s.
Fifteen years into his marriage, Noor Mohammad Ganju has never seen his wife naked. He lusts after her but sex, when she occasionally obliges him, is reduced by veils—literal and symbolic—to tedious and unimaginative coupling in the dark.
With their intricate interplay, of the diverse identities that shape Pakistani society, art and literature serve as crucial tools in challenging the narrow definitions of Pakistan, particularly those imposed by the West.
Pakistan’s politics is so complicated that it can be hard to determine either a trajectory or even a throughline. If Tahir Kamran’s enormously-detailed Chequered Past, Uncertain Future is any indication, this is not due to any failure of imagination. Kamran is focused mostly on the country’s often fraught relationship with democracy, but leaves one with…
South Asian fiction based on the Partition of 1947 is generally concerned with specific incidents of trauma and violence. Urdu writer Ali Akbar Natiq’s Naulakhi Kothi, recently translated into English by Naima Rashid, adds a different dimension to the existing ways of narrating fiction. Its story begins several years before the partition and ends several…
Kashmir has always been the point of connection between South Asia, Central Asia and Xinjiang. Winding their way through the mighty Himalaya, Pamir and Karakoram Mountain ranges, traders, travelers and officials created a series of close historic economic, cultural and political ties that have bound the region together.
Post-independence India had a big problem–about 40% of its land wasn’t, well, India. Instead, this land was in the hands of the princely states: Rulers who had signed agreements accepting the rule of the British Empire, while getting a relatively free hand to rule their local jurisdictions. And these weren’t small states. Hyderabad—whose ruler made…
Taha Kehar’s recent novel, which unfolds over a protracted party on a single night, revolves around six estranged friends, family members and a “mystery guest”. In order to fulfill the final request of the titular, but recently-deceased, Nazia, her sister Naureen has invited five people to celebrate her death rather than attend a funeral, as…