meethapani

LOOKING IN FROM WITHIN Durriya Kazi At school in British India, my mother was penalized by her British teacher for writing in her history assignment, “The War of Independence”, instead of “The Mutiny”. This small incident is a microcosmic view of what is increasingly being considered a primary obstacle in creating an appropriate space for study by, what is termed as, the “home” scholar. [1] There is a need to develop a vocabulary that is free of the pre-associations of current cultural theories that grew out of European post-modern approaches. While cultural studies have passed on to “home” scholars, the paradigms of debate used are the same. It is only by examining and developing a new lexicon that we can avoid hearing “inflections of the mother tongue in alien hands” [2] . This is a complex task. The experience of colonization in South Asia is more or less the experience of other decolonized nations of the world, and each of these nations is struggling to spea...

Celebrating Change The famous classical qawwal Munshi Raziuddin died almost two years ago. He was in his eighties. He must have been in his 20s when Pakistan came into being. His training would have been in the old ethos of the classical arts. Nusrat Fateh Ali, the more widely known Qawwal, made famous when he dared to collaborate with the rock musician, Peter Gabriel, died prematurely in 1997, the fiftieth anniversary year of Pakistan . He was in his 40’s, and was born a Pakistani. Capable of fine classical renditions of Qawwali, he chose to experiment with his craft, locating himself in his own times addressing a new generation of music audiences. The miniature painter, Imran Qureshi, following in the steps of the pioneer of neo-miniature, Shazia Sikander, pulled miniature painting even further out with tenuous links with old practices when he collaged scraps of newspaper from the Urdu press and scrawled a Ghori missile on it with the mere hint of a hashia. S...