By Raza Naeem Raziya Sajjad Zaheer (1917-1979), who passed away in Delhi 40 years ago today, was one of Urdu’s most accomplished but least celebrated and acknowledged women writers. She was a novelist, short-story writer and translator, and a Communist activist and Progressive writer born in Ajmer in 1917. She won the Nehru Award in 1966. She had been contributing short …

Herald Report Soviet architecture in Central Asia, as the name tells, is a fusion of Soviet modernity with traditional Central Asian culture that remains remarkable to this day, writes Xeniya Mironova, in Voice on Central Asia website. Persian and Islamic motifs can be still found among Soviet buildings in Dushanbe, Tashkent, Almaty, and Bishkek. But these buildings are becoming exceedingly …

Artists, historians, and writers are marking Punjab's secular epic, 250 years after it was penned by Waris Shah

Raza Naeem on the style and sensibilities of one of the boldest Urdu short-story writers   Ismat Chughtai’s prose carried within it a creative jewel in addition to its spontaneity and sharpness. She was not necessarily the most elegant stylist but possessed her own style. In fact,  her style was most suitable for the novel and short-story and it had …

The Gapar Aitiev Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts has played a significant role in exploring and preserving the rich history of Kyrgyzstan’s applied and fine arts for nearly a century.

  A submachine gun that started a quest to know more about the Kirghiz exodus from the Pamirs   Raheel Siddiqui   When one is trotting on a horse at a high altitude through a mountain pass, accompanied by a friend who’s running low on sleep due to low oxygen, there is a slight hope that one won’t be bothered …

KRASLICE, (Czech Republic): In the winter of 1978-79, Afghanistan’s communist regime deployed a hit squad to find and kill Babrak Karmal, the high-profile ambassador to Czechoslovakia. Fearing for his life, Czechoslovak authorities secretly hid Karmal and his family in a remote hunting lodge in the dense forests straddling the border with East Germany. The family-of-six lived covertly for a year …

The End of History author on what Karl Marx got right, the rivals to liberal democracy and why he fears a US-China war. By George Eaton History is having its revenge on Francis Fukuyama. In 1992, at the height of post-Cold War liberal exuberance, the American political theorist wrote in The End of History and the Last Man: “What we may …

For centuries, Iran has been producing some of the world’s most influential and inspiring poets, whose works revolutionized the literature of both the East and the West. Spanning themes of love, divine mysticism and human rights, their poetry is an incredible contribution to Iranian culture, and remains entirely relevant today. Here we profile 10 of the most inspiring Iranian poets. by ANAHIT …

  HAH Report Shelley Fairweather-Vega, a Seattle-based writer and translator. She translates literature from Russian and Uzbek languages into English. She collaborates with authors, academics, and activists around the world and has worked on projects as varied as Russian poetry, Uzbek historical fiction, popular science, romance, and detective stories. She is a founder of the literary translation circle in Seattle, …