Known Turf

Was very pleasantly surprised to find some new(er?) reviews of my novel Prelude to a Riot.   One in Countercurrents says: 'Zaidi’s withh...

Dil oob gaya khamosh rahte rahte Dum ghutne laga ranj sahte sahte Ik jaam idhar, haath badha kar saaqi Aghyaar se koi baat kahte kahte  - Al...

Making an attempt to translate one of my favourite Hindi poets, Kedarnath Singh's 'Mukti'. When I found no other path to liberat...

Julia Kristeva has written of consecrated motherhood as a fantasy of lost territory that is nurtured by all adults. In the religious sphere,...

Is a novel a beautiful thing? What of a novel that is presented as an “outline” for the first draft of a novel that the narrator intends to ...

I've written my first essay for the lastest issue of Wasafiri , themed Futurisms . Here's a very short extract from my essay,  Again...

One of Ali Jawad Zaidi's Urdu ghazals, likely written soon after India won independence:  Ye na samjho matwalo! Kaun ab sataayega? Haar ...

I've tried my hand at translating a poem from English into Urdu. The poem is 'I find Faiz Blowing on his Saucer of Tea' by Imtia...

I took the liberty of doing an Urdu translation of Manglesh Dabral's Hindi poem 'Prem karti stree'. It didn't take much tran...

CAN A WOMAN tell the unvarnished truth about what happened to her? This is the central question at the heart of Anand Ekarshi’s Aattam (The ...

Very pleased to hear that 'Two Way Street,' a short film I wrote has been named by Platform magazine as one of the shorts to look o...

Three new poems in Usawa Literary Review's  tenth edition (Jan 2024) . One of them, below.  There was a country we could have been   ...

My review of Tabish Khair's latest collection, Namaste Trump and Other Stories :  The book’s structure is imaginative, if also unusual. ...

In Western fairy tales, a witch is a scary woman who might ‘eat’ you, cooked or uncooked. In South Asian fairy tales and folklore, she might...

Once upon a time, I was judgmental about selfies. From film stars to your third cousin, everyone was pouting, clicking, and uploading selfie...

Shakeela Akhtar was one of the earliest women writers of Urdu fiction in the twentieth century. Born and buried in Bihar, she was obviously ...

Terrible news. Desraj Kali is gone. Other people have written detailed obits , and  friends like Shekhar have written personal accounts that...

Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales (Aleph 2023) is just out. This is a new edition of Known Turf (2010), with a fresh Introduction...

Here is a transcription of one of my grandfather's ghazals, for those who are interested in poetry but can't read the script. I thou...

I reviewed a new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is still as much fun as it was four hundred years ago. It speaks to the ...