ABSTRACT The experience of migration as a result of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent has an entirely different level of meaning than that subsumed in migration alone. Here the issues are related to the splitting, in a most organic way, of culture, history, tradition and continuity. Noted modern Urdu writer Intizar Husain was the first to come up with the idea of describing the migration as hijrat. What is the past? When one ponders on this, then history, religion, ethnicity, mythology, old folktales, belief and fears all come into play. This paper revisits Partition and Intizar Husain's fiction through the lens of Urdu literary modernism. How did the “new writers” remember the wounds of this organic splitting of a common culture and memory? I examine Intizar Husain's novel Bastī to illustrate the ways in which writers like him encapsulate the experience of partition—an experience distinctly different from the Progressives “literature of partition violence” (fasādāt kā adab). How does Hussain invoke the past, or use the civilizational memory to heal wounds?

This article pivots around poetry as a category of analysis; and the figure of a poet as a humanistic optic to look at how forms of resistance are shaped in public and private domains in the Indian occupied Kashmir. The analysis considers poets writing in Kashmiri, other vernacular languages as well as English, and Urdu. In an occupied zone, where a war stands at all corners of the homes and streets, poetry ceases to be mere words. Poetry becomes Ehtijaj (meaning “protest” or “dissent”, both in Urdu and Kashmiri). Poetry as Ehtijaj is a “situated” act, a deeply political gesture; written, embodied, commemorative and sometimes unsaid. It is a form of “placemaking” in the face of erasure and occupation. As a situated act of dissent, of placemaking, poetry emerges also as a “right to a remembered presence” (see Said, E. W. Invention, Memory, and Place. Critical Inquiry, 26 (2), (2000) 175–192). It becomes a way to history, and commemoration, however feeble the effort might seem in face of the hegemony of the occupying power of the Indian nation.

This article analyzes Sadyr Japarov's first year in power as the newly elected President of the Kyrgyz Republic. In learning from the mistakes of his governing predecessors, Japarov is attempting to construct and consolidate an authoritarian system. Japarov may ultimately succeed in this endeavor, but Kyrgyzstan will likely forfeit much of its sovereignty to Russia along with its quasi-democratic institutions in exchange for a strongman-style government.

There are many shared historical experiences and similarities between Iran and China. Both are legacies of the long-lasting empires and civilisations in West and East Asia, respectively. Like other great Asian empires, Iran and China were confronted with the expansion of the European imperial powers in the early-nineteenth century which ultimately led to the dislocation of these ancient empires. Both countries had resisted pressures towards peripheralization in the global economy by the creation of nationalist popular revolutions and by building modern nation states and identities in the first half of the twentieth century, despite different political systems, cultures, and external relations. Both Iran and China have been trying to escape from the external pressures and internal socio-economic backwardness by the modernization of their states, societies, and economies via a state-led catch-up development strategy. These efforts led to the rise of China in the late-20th century and the emergence of post-Islamic revolutionary Iran 1978/79 as a ‘contender state' to the hegemony of the United States (US) in West Asia. This development raises two key questions: why did China succeed in rising as an industrialised regional and global power, and has Iran’s development strategy failed so far? I argue that the main reason for post-revolutionary Iran failure to become the regional hegemon comes from two interconnected issues: (i) the failure of its economic development strategy, which was mainly caused by (ii) the ‘offensive' external involvement in its own region before a successful catch-up process. Iran's catch-up development strategy, which is the main material basis for the country's rise, was hampered after the revolution by its ‘offensive, revolutionary and military oriented foreign policy'. This strategy blocked Iran from access to capital, information and technology concentrated in the core area of the global economy dominated by the US. Unlike Iran, China's successful catch-up industrialisation was driven, in part, through rapprochement and consensus between Chinese leaders and the US and its allies in 1970s. This strategy led China to distance itself from Mao's revolutionary offensive foreign relations and replace it with ‘defensive’ and peaceful foreign relations in the era of its catch-up industrialisation (1980-2000s).

"India’s Pakistan Policy: How Think Tanks are Shaping Foreign Relations." Asian Affairs, 53(1), pp. 231–232