Posts Tagged ‘Poet’
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
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 […]
The Omnipresent Baba, January 22nd 2010
Baba Farid’s reputation and influence spreads from the regions of Punjab all the way down to the Southern tips of Tamil Nadu. I visited his main shrine in Pakpattan in what is now Pakistan while pursuing the story of one of the Mumbai attackers Ajmal Kasab Kasab ironically comes from the land of the people […]
Deconstructing Kashmir-Part II: The Wandering Tribe: The Kashmiri Pandits In Purgatory
The alleyways are empty. The shops are closed. Wild dogs sleep in shaded corners. The temples are locked. I hear no human voice that would suggest life inside the small, gaudily painted brick shanties. I walk around in the narrow lanes expecting to run into someone, but no one walks towards me, in to me […]
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 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 […]