Poets & Poetry
A Dancer’s Map Of Lucknow
Jab chhorh chaley Lakhnau nagari, Kaho haal adam par kya guzeri… (When we left our beloved Lucknow, See what befell us..) Wajid Ali Shah Its [British colonial education] cumulative effect was to be described…as nothing short of a chasm that…made it impossible for the new generation of the educated and the older generation of the [...]
Deconstructing Kashmir – Part IV: Through The Gilded Windows Of Emperors
The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of [...]
Deconstructing Kashmir – Part V: Lost Paths To The Shared Or Historical Elisions That Divide
The principle of the national state, that is to say, the political demand that the territory of every states should coincide with the territory inhabited by one nation, is by no means so self-evident as it seems to appear to many people to-day. Even if anyone knew what he meant when he spoke of nationality, [...]
Forever Spring: Ghalib’s Benares
Varanasi, as Benares is now known, is a Hindu city. That is how I had known it, and it was not until I arrived here that I started to see a different side of it. And it happened because I could not find a hotel room! The hotel I had booked a room at refused [...]
The Art of Blasphemy: The Poetics of Kabir
His early life is a mystery, with some arguing that he may never even have existed. He is said to have been raised by a Muslim family, in a Muslim neighborhood of the holy city of Benares (today’s Varanasi). But his studied under a Hindu sage he tricked into initiating him. Some say he was [...]