Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s drama series Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar has put a spotlight on Lahore’s neighbourhood of courtesans, which suffered a decline in the 1980s before artist Iqbal Hussain, a courtesan’s son, sought to humanize the area through and helped make it a popular attraction
The pronounced contribution of Muslims to the Indian film industry is well known, but the pioneering role of Muslim women such as Fatma Begum, India’s first female filmmaker, does not get the attention it deserves
The idea of Pakistan was dismissed as ‘chimerical and impractical’ in the 1930s, but it gathered steam with tacit British support as payback for Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s backing of their war effort before the colonizers quit India, leaving Indians at each other’s throats after India’s Partition
Pakistan and northwestern India have many commonalities in terms of languages, food, culture, social norms, history, etc, and one needs to look further—South India—to understand the real difference between the two countries
What makes The Other Side of the Divide an impressive read is that it combines a literary extraction of experience with years of reading to produce a nonfiction work that has elements of travel, history, conversation, and journalistic observation
The 2023 Amazon Prime Video show Made in Heaven promoted the myth of Polygamy among Muslims, although census data shows its negligible prevalence among all religious groups, and has more to do with class and education rather than faith
Bitter fruits of British colonialism—India’s division in 1947 and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland for Israel’s creation a year later—informed Indian policies towards Palestine until the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose to power in 2014
Pakistani Parsis are far fewer but much like in India the Parsi community’s achievements are extraordinary also in Pakistan, where they own the only brewery, the oldest shipping firm, and a chain of hotels besides being regarded as makers of the country’s financial hub of Karachi
The experience of being forced to drink a mixture of milk, clarified butter, curd, cow urine, and dung to purify him after touching a so-called ‘lower-caste’ woman’s sari inspired Bindeshwar Pathak’s lifelong commitment to improving sanitation
Shah Rukh Khan, India’s biggest film star, defines the potential of Indian soft power in unlikely places such as Iraq where hardly anyone even understands the language of his films
