HYDERABAD: The 272nd urs celebrations of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, Sindh's most popular sufi saint, commenced formally Friday morning in the town of Bhit Shah in Sindh's Matiari district. Informally, celebrations began after dusk on Thursday, in line with the religious tradition.......

For too long now there has been a parochial understanding of what Pakistani history as anACADEMIC discipline entails, as there is a firm assumption that it has to be accountable to the public eye. Many are of the idea that history is perhaps, already present in the past. ...

“The pity of partition was not that the country had been divided into two, Independent India and Independent Pakistan; but it was that people had become slaves to bigotry, religious passions and barbarity,” says Ayesha Jalal, Professor of History at Tufts University, . ...

Rabindranath Tagore was once asked why he got the Nobel Prize for literature and Allama Iqbal did not. Tagore replied “Probably because I write in my mother tongue and Iqbal doesn’t.” With this answer Tagore touched on two important points. First,...

I think it was substantially shaped by my personal experiences: in the sense that what impressed me most since my childhood – and later agitated me most when I found that we were depriving ourselves of it – was the plurality of this society. The social fabric of Pakistan, despite Partition, was so magnificently plural. ....

A timely book by Shamsul Islam demolishes stereotypes associated with the role of Muslim masses during Partition The standard narrative about the Partition, actively propagated by the Hindu communalists and innocently believed by most Hindus, puts the ...

The Khayyal Festival brought together a diverse array of accomplished, pioneering, critical voices from Pakistani society. Arshed Bhatti, having attended the festival, feels that this augurs well for us., .....

KARACHI: Perhaps it is inevitable that Indian visitors have to face the partition question and the state of Muslims in India. And credit to most who address the question as tactfully as possible as was done by Prof Saghir Afraheim of the department of Urdu...

During a trip to India in early 1984 (my first and last), I was a second-yearstudent at a college in Karachi. My fellow travellers on that trip were three friends, all of them Sindhi-speaking. We had travelled to Mumbai (then called Bombay) for a vacation. ...