Celebrating 152 years since the birth of the great Soviet writer and pioneer of socialist realism. The following presentation was given by Paul Cannon to the Stalin Society in London on 16 December 2018. “Forty years in the literary career of a great writer will always cover a large area on the ever-growing map of world culture. It is only at a distance …

Raza Naeem remembers the iconic revolutionary from Sindh on his centenary   “This city like my skill is alive within me Spirit of the land, I am no stranger, recognize me” (“The Second Man in Mohenjodaro”, Himayat Ali Shair) The life of Sobho Gianchandani – born a hundred years ago earlier this week – seems like a legend told by …

Raza Naeem remembers the iconic revolutionary Sobho Gianchandani on his centenary A hallmark of Sobho Gianchandani’s student days at Rabindranath Tagore’s institute, Shantiniketan, was the celebration of independence day on January 26, 1940. In 1928 the Congress had approved the resolution for independence day. It was a real challenge since Tagore had forbidden the celebration of independence day for five …

Translated by Raza Naeem   Translator’s Note: May 11 was Saadat Hasan Manto’s 108th birthday. In the last years of his life, he achieved notoriety – and also immortality – by his satires on the mullahs and his series of Letters to Uncle Sam. More than a decade after his untimely demise, his friend and contemporary Mohammad Khalid Akhtar paid the ultimate …

The case of the Shughni language by Farman Ali The Pamirian languages are spoken by people in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral regions of Pakistan as well as Xinjiang province of China. The Pamirian Languages — a linguistic term — has been employed even before the advent of the Soviet Union, the first socialist state, by one of the pioneers …

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar “If you do not condemn colonialism if you do not side with the colonized people, what kind of revolution are you waging?” ~ Ho Che Minh For all of the outrage that many rightly feel, it is not surprising that the Pakistan state’s inherently authoritarian streak has come to the fore in the midst of the pandemic. …

There was an uncanny similarity between the lives of Pushkin and Manto, writes Raza Naeem. Both were largely unrecognised in their own lifetimes, despite believing unapologetically in their own greatness, achieving immortality only after death   Herald Report On May 11, Google celebrated the 108th birthday of renowned short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto with a doodle. Saadat Hasan Manto was …

Her most criticized book, “The Romance of American Communism,” has become a modern classic.     By Sophie Pinkham   Vivian Gornick specializes in personal narrative. Sometimes this means artful memoir: Her most admired book is 1987’s Fierce Attachments, about her relationship with her mother, and she sat for The Paris Review’s second-ever “Art of Memoir” interview in 2014. But …

By Lorenzo Alfano Antonio Gramsci died on April 27, 1937, after eleven years in fascist prisons. We remember his revolutionary life and his contributions to the struggle against capitalism. It’s late at night on Turin’s Via dell’Arcivescovado. A man with a Southern accent shows up at L’Ordine Nuovo’s office, insisting on speaking with the lead editor. For L’Ordine Nuovo is not only the workers’ …

Dr Aftab Husain in his essay critiques South Asian literates’ response to catastrophe and epidemics and how writers in Pakistan react to COVID-19   There is a proverb in Persian and Urdu that could be roughly translated thus — ‘A collective death has an air of festivity’. The great Urdu poet, Ghalib, however, would have not subscribed to this notion …