The life and letters of Elizabeth Draper
Eliza Draper, Sterne’s Eliza by Arnold Wright, London.William Heinmann, 1922. It was a plunge into darkness. She could hear the waves dashing against the wall below, and see the distant light of the...
View ArticleMusharraf’s last stand
Pervez MusharrafFlickr / World Economic Forum One evening in November 2013, a delegation of ex-associates came to call on Pakistan’s former military ruler Pervez Musharraf at his heavily-guarded...
View ArticleA room of his own
Manohar Shetty / Photo by Lora Tomas Standing on the edge of a cliff behind poet Manohar Shetty’s house and watching the sun dip into the cobalt Arabian Sea, it was difficult to believe “there is no...
View ArticleVignettes of defiance – I
Sanjay Kak / Photo by Apal Singh Documentary film in India has transformed from primarily being a medium for the independent state to promote consolidation of national identity to a critical and even...
View ArticleVignettes of defiance – II
Banner depicting radical poet Avtar Singh Sandhu, known by his pen name ‘Pash’. / Courtesy Sanjay Kak Muhammed Afzal P (MAP): Let’s come to your new film Red Ant Dream, the third in your trilogy of...
View ArticleBallots, bullets, bribes and warlords
Flickr/ United Nations Photo. 2009 Afghan elections. With Afghanistan’s Presidential election around the corner, of the 14 original candidates, only nine remain. More are likely to withdraw in the...
View ArticleHell on Ascension
Cover page of the 1726 edition of Leendert Hasenbosch’s diary. On a monsoon day, I went to see Lazarus House, an isolated and lacklustre building on the island of Vypin at Cochin, facing the calm...
View ArticleRajapaksa defeated in presidential election
Photo: Flickr / Vikalpa | Groundviews | Maatram | CPA As Maithripala Sirisena defeats President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka’s 2015 presidential election, a look at our recent coverage of the...
View ArticleThe task of writing
Photo: Flickr / Kayla Sawyer Farah Ghuznavi is a Bangladeshi writer and the author of Fragments of Riversong, a collection of short stories. Her writings have appeared in publications in the UK, US,...
View ArticleThe novelist’s canvas
Kamila Shamsie (centre), with writers Michael Ondaatje (left) and Teju Cole (right), at the 2014 Palestine Festival of Literature in Haifa, Palestine.Photo: Flickr / Palfest Kamila Shamsie is...
View ArticleBad trouble man
Rassul Galwan, a ‘servant of the sahibs’, translated his surname into ‘bad-trouble-man’. In 1923, W Heffer & Sons Ltd published an unusual book titled Servant of Sahibs: A Book to be Read Aloud. It...
View ArticleMourning, memory and resistance in Pakistan
‘Family’ by Syed Husain (This article is an adaptation of a talk given by the writer on ‘Social Resistance and the Militarized State: The Radical Love of Sabeen Mahmud’, organised by the Department of...
View ArticleThe importance of being honest
In Minneapolis, 1986, in my quasi-Gandhian attire Photo : Provided by author (An extract from Siddharth Dube’s upcoming memoir No One Else: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex to be published...
View ArticleThe tomb of Sha-Za-Fa
Bahadur Shah Zafar in 1858, just after his trial and before his departure for exile in BurmaPhoto : Wikimedia Commons (An extract from Salil Tripathi’s upcoming book, a collection of travel essays...
View ArticleArt beyond boundaries
‘Moderate fantasy violence’ by Faiza Butt. Image courtesy the artist The ‘Sensation’ moment for Pakistani art may have passed with ‘Hanging Fire’ at the Asia Society in New York in 2009 where, to...
View ArticleA world of new solidarity
Photo : Beena Sarwar Cross-border solidarity isn’t exactly a new idea. The rallying cry, “Proletarians of all countries, unite!…” that emerged in 1848 from The Communist Manifesto has resounded around...
View ArticleRewriting the Empire: an interview with Shrabani Basu
Shrabani Basu at the Galle Literary Festival 2018. A million and half soldiers from undivided India were involved in the First World War. This is a figure that London-based journalist and historian...
View ArticleA conversation with Asma Jehangir
Photo: UN Geneva / Flickr Asma Jehangir, lawyer, human-rights advocate and activist in the women’s movement in Pakistan, passed away on 11 February 2018 at the age of 66, following a cardiac arrest....
View ArticleMourning, memory and resistance in Pakistan
‘Family’ by Syed Husain (This article is an adaptation of a talk given by the writer on ‘Social Resistance and the Militarized State: The Radical Love of Sabeen Mahmud’, organised by the Department of...
View ArticleThe importance of being honest
In Minneapolis, 1986, in my quasi-Gandhian attire Photo : Provided by author (An extract from Siddharth Dube’s upcoming memoir No One Else: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex to be published...
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