As I write this, Israel’s latest assault on Gaza has claimed more than a hundred Palestinian lives. The immediate context of this senseless violence is the ongoing dispossession of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. However Israel opportunistically chose to distract attention from an acute political crisis at home to begin […]
The figure of Vladimir Lenin – born 151 years ago today – exercises a talismanic hold on revolutionaries everywhere, across time and space. While Lenin’s signal achievement – the Bolshevik Revolution, whose centennial was celebrated in 2017 – is richly represented in Urdu literature, writings on Lenin himself, whether poems or fiction, are few and […]
The most conspicuous introduction of Major Ishaq Muhammad – the peasant leader and arch-dramatist who was born a hundred years ago today in Jalandhar – is that he was a revolutionary leader constantly at war with the Pakistani establishment. He was arrested in 1951 by the Liaqat Ali Khan government in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. […]