Anthropologist Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro takes us to an invaluable site in the Indus-Kohistan region. While traveling along the Karakorum Highway, one comes across many rock art sites that need to be promoted as potential tourist destinations. Sadly, they escape the attention of the authorities. Rock art tourism plays a significant role in the local economy of communities in many of …
Herald Report As we celebrate the near four decades struggle launched by women activists for equal rights in Pakistani society and for democratic and secular values, there is a need to learn from past experiences, failures, successes and redefine the objectives, and direction of such movements in the face of emerging challenges like climate change, rising tide of extremism, authoritarianism …
by Karim Ullah The Khor bridge: Perhaps, one of the longest suspension bridges in the region, the 1,200ft bridge was built in 1999 by the Sarhad Rural Support Programme (SRSP) with the financial assistance of Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) which connects four mountainous villages in remote Sheshi Khor valley. Earlier people of the surrounding four valleys used to cross …
Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro on the heritage and folklore of the people of Punial in Gilgit-Baltistan by Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro Punial valley of Ghizer district of Gilgit-Baltistan is known for its oral history, folklore, visual culture, looming Hindu Kush mountains, verdant and sprawling villages, nullahs (side valleys) full of pastures, gushing Gilgit River coursing through Punial valley and, of course, the …
Professor Faisal Devji on Muslim depoliticisation, Hindu nationalism and historians mimicking detectives. Here is excerpts from an interview with Seema Chishti of The Indian Express What do you make of contemporary history writing? As Gandhi realised more than a century ago, history, or rather historical consciousness, had not only come to define the self-proclaimed superiority of western civilisation in …
By Aziz Ali Dad Every ideology, religion and worldview contains seeds of discontent within. The Enlightenment brought about a change in every sphere of life. But like any other transformation, it also sowed the seeds of discontent. After disenchanting the world it had, in a manner of speaking, thrown the individual into the world. Bereft of old certainties, human individuals …
Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro on the ornate and unique graves that tell a story of timber, power and upheaval by Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro here are many carved wooden grave railings in Tangir and Darel in Diamer district of Gilgit-Baltistan. Such monuments are also located in many areas of Indus-Kohistan, Dir-Kohistan and Swat-Kohistan in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa where I am doing research for …
In the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, thousands of young girls and women are kidnapped every year to be forced into marriage. Although the practice was outlawed in 2013, bride kidnapping continues to exist, with destructive consequences for society. By Iris Oppelaar With WILDNESS, Iris aims to de-sensationalize the practice of bride kidnapping and instead reveal the motives and societal …
Algerian poet Djamal Amrani was born in 1935 in Sour El Gozlane. Central to his life and work were his involvement in the Algerian liberation movement, and his arrest and torture by the French Army for participating in a 1956 student strike. Amrani was imprisoned for two years for his revolutionary activities, and then expelled to France. From this ordeal …
Dinmukhamed Kunaev was a leader of Soviet Kazakhstan. As the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan he was in office from 7 December 1964, to 16 December 1986. The house opened as a museum on January 12, 2012, Kunaev’s birthday, and displays almost the entire heritage of its owner, creating an authentic atmosphere of the recent, but at the same …
