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When We Lit Lamps Together: Interfaith Participation Before Partition

  Hello, everyone. I want you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine a landscape. We are in the plains of the Punjab or perhaps the dusty stretches of Sindh, three centuries ago. You see a grand festival approaching. There are lights, music, and a sea of people. Now, let me ask you: Who do you think is celebrating? If you looked at the modern map, you might expect a clear answer—a Muslim festival, a Hindu rite, or a Sikh gathering. But if we stepped into that pre-colonial world, that question wouldn't just be hard to answer; it would almost be meaningless. You would see a Muslim merchant lighting lamps for Diwali, a Hindu peasant beating his breast in a Muharram procession, and a Sikh devotee seeking a blessing at the tomb of a Sufi saint. Today, we are going to explore a lost world—an "entire civilization of co-existence," as the historian Mushirul Hasan called it. We will trace how the fluid, porous boundaries of the past were systematically hardened into the...
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"Mrs. Company": When South Asians Personified the East India Company as an Old Lady

 Mrs. Company Imagine that you are a powerful nobleman in 19th-century India. You are wealthy, sophisticated, and you’ve seen it all. One day, a high-ranking British official arrives at your court. You want to show him the ultimate respect, so how do you introduce him? Well, if you were the Nawab of Awadh in 1803, you would announce him to the room as: "The Lord Saheb’s nephew and Mrs. Company’s grandson". Yes, you heard me correctly. "Mrs. Company." Today, we’re diving into one of the most bizarre, hilarious, and deeply revealing "lost-in-translation" moments in history. We are going to talk about how a massive, cold-blooded, profit-driven corporate machine—the East India Company—was transformed, in the minds of millions, into a wealthy, elderly matriarch living in a posh house in London.   The Corporate Ghost Now, before we get to the "old lady," we have to understand what the East India Company actually was. Founded in 1600, it sta...
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Bodies on Trial: Ordeal by Fire and the Political Economy of Justice

  Hello, everyone! Imagine for a moment that we are standing in a parched village in the Punjab during the scorching summer of 1883. The monsoon has failed. The earth is cracked, the grain bins are empty, and the cattle are dying. In this atmosphere of suffocating anxiety, a theft is reported. A young man from a lower caste is accused. There are no witnesses, no fingerprints, no CCTV footage. Instead, there is a ditch filled with burning embers. The village council, the panchayat , gathers. The accused is asked to walk on fire. He is told that if he is innocent, the fire will not harm him; if he is guilty, his flesh will betray his sin. Now, I must ask you: In that moment, are we witnessing a primitive religious ritual? Is this simply "oriental barbarism," or is there a deeper, more calculated machinery of power at work? Today, we are going to dismantle the traditional narrative that views the ordeal by fire—the agnipariksha —merely as a relic of "superstitious...
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Mirrors and Maps: How the European Gaze Reshaped Religious Identity in 19th-Century Balochistan

 The Horse Trader and the Empire Imagine, if you will, the year 1810. A young man named Henry Pottinger is making his way across the arid, wind-swept landscape of Balochistan. He isn’t travelling as a British lieutenant, which he is, but is instead disguised as a horse trader. Why? Because in the early 19th century, this region—stretching from the Arabian Sea to the Hindu Kush—was a "nebulous" space in the imperial imagination, a place where, in Pottinger's words, "a European, avowedly such, could not hope to penetrate." For the next ninety years, a steady stream of British officers, surveyors, and spies would follow in his footsteps. But here is the question we must ask ourselves today: Were these men merely reporting what they saw, or were they, through their reports and maps, fundamentally reshaping the categories through which society understood itself? The answer is that they did both—but the act of categorization itself became a form of creation. ...
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Bab-ul-Islam: The Making of a National Myth

  Hello, everyone! Today, we are going to talk about a title that almost every student in Pakistan has heard since they were in primary school: Bab-ul-Islam—The Gateway of Islam. We have been taught that Sindh is this gateway, the threshold through which the light of monotheism finally pierced the "age of ignorance" in the Indian subcontinent. The story is legendary: in 712 CE, a brilliant teenage general named Muhammad bin Qasim arrived, defeated the "tyrant" Raja Dahir, and just like that, the doors were flung open. But let me ask you a question that might sound a bit strange: If a gateway is the first point of entry, then why do we call Sindh the gateway? You see, historical geography tells us something very different. Decades before the Umayyad soldiers ever set foot in Sindh, Arab armies had already captured the Makran coast in modern-day Balochistan. Chronologically, Makran was the first point of contact and conquest. So, why does Sindh get the heavy title...
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Sufi Sindh: From Colonial Construct to Nationalist Identity

  We often hear a single, resonant phrase used to describe the province of Sindh: the "Land of Sufis." It is a title that evokes images of spinning dervishes, the scent of rose petals at shrines, and the egalitarian echoes of the Shah jo Risalo . Politicians, scholars, artists, and journalists frequently claim that the province remained peaceful for decades solely due to the overwhelming influence of Sufi teachings. It is a comforting thought, isn’t it? A cliché repeated by Sindhis and non-Sindhis alike. But today, I invite you to look closer. We must ask ourselves: Why is Sindh uniquely labelled this way? Was it always so? Or is this identity a carefully crafted mosaic, assembled over two centuries by British officers, Hindu intellectuals, and Sindhi nationalists? To understand the Sindh of today, we must look beyond the incense and the shrines. We must confront a history where spiritual poetry meets colonial surveillance, and where the "peaceful Sufi" was of...
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