The Idea of India
Poets & Poetry
A Dancer’s Map Of Lucknow
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 […]

Deconstructing Kashmir – Part IV: Through The Gilded Windows Of Emperors
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
Deconstructing Kashmir - Part V: Lost Paths To The Shared Or Historical Elisions That Divide
Forever Spring: Ghalib’s Benares
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 Poetry of Kabir
The Art of Blasphemy: The Poetry of Kabir

The Kabir Project has a new film by Shabnam Virmani, on the meaning of Ram and the dreams of Kabir Ω 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 […]