Claire Chambers

COLUMN: HINDI AND URDU

Since my last column about Saadat Hasan Manto’s story ‘Tamasha’, I came across his sketch ‘Hindi Aur Urdu’ (1954). Then I read Published 10 Nov, 2024 09:41am

COLUMN: THE TRANSLATION TAMASHA

Last time I wrote about learning Urdu, with a special focus on Ismat Chughtai’s writing. For me, 2024 has been the... Published 08 Sep, 2024 09:32am

COLUMN: THE ELEPHANT IN ‘LIHAAF’

Since March 2020, I have been making a concerted effort to learn Urdu. Recently, I took GCSE exams in this beautiful, expressive Published 07 Jul, 2024 07:42am

COLUMN: THINGS FALL APART

The Bangladeshi-American author Rumaan Alam wrote Leave the World Behind just before the Covid-19 pandemic. The novel was... Published 05 May, 2024 07:42am

COLUMN: REVISITING E.M. FORSTER’S INDIA

This year marks the 100th anniversary of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. When he published the novel in 1924, ... Published 03 Mar, 2024 08:42am

COLUMN: EMPATHY FOR MUSLIM ‘MOTHER-WORK’

In a literary marketplace saturated with Eurocentric accounts of motherhood, Suma Din’s creative non-fiction work,... Published 31 Dec, 2023 08:47am

COLUMN: WATER AND THIRST

Karachi-born Farah Ali is the author of the short story collection People Want to Live (McSweeney’s, 2021). That book is being... Published 29 Oct, 2023 07:03am

COLUMN: COLONIALISM, PLANTS AND HUMANS

Amitav Ghosh’s latest work, a nonfiction book titled Smoke and Ashes, was published in India this July. Being in New Delhi at the Published 27 Aug, 2023 08:53am

COLUMN: Linguistic hierarchies

Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s debut novel, The Centre, takes readers into a cutthroat world of language, translation ... Published 25 Jun, 2023 05:15am

COLUMN: CTRL-ALT-DEL UIGHUR CULTURE

The Uighurs — Turkic Muslims of China’s Xinjiang province, also known as East Turkestan — suffer from a covert but aggressive.. Published 22 Apr, 2023 07:14am

COLUMN: ECO-FEMINISM AND POWER

In South Asia, where women are often subjected to a lot of pressure, climate change is also an urgent problem.... Published 19 Feb, 2023 08:28am

COLUMN: FUTURE IMPERFECT

The causal link between environmental damage and pandemics during the Anthropocene is a recurring topic in books... Updated 19 Feb, 2023 08:26am

COLUMN: THE JOY OF WANDERING

Kamila Shamsie’s new novel Best of Friends begins as a love letter to Karachi, that city by the sea which the writer spent so much Published 16 Oct, 2022 08:17am

COLUMN: AS THE WORLD TURNS DARK

One of the finest facets of Mohsin Hamid’s body of fiction is its exuberant play with form. This experimentation ... Published 14 Aug, 2022 05:12am

COLUMN: TRUE CRIME IN COVID TIME

I’m writing a book about literature, Covid, race and colonialism. During my research, I was deeply moved by Roopa... Updated 13 Jun, 2022 12:14pm

COLUMN: BALOCHISTAN BITES

During a holiday from the school I was teaching at in mid-1990s Peshawar, I was fortunate to spend a few days in... Published 24 Apr, 2022 07:08am

COLUMN: SEVENTY YEARS OF SKIN

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a colonial subject from the small Caribbean island of Martinique, then a... Published 06 Mar, 2022 07:01am

COLUMN: VIRAL IMPERIALISM

In a thoughtful article in The Guardian about burnout amid Covid-19, Christine Berry wrote: “The pandemic isn’t... Published 16 Jan, 2022 06:59am

COLUMN: BLUE AT WORLD'S END

Regular readers will know I’ve been thinking about pandemic literature since Covid-19 went global in early 2020. A... Published 28 Nov, 2021 07:08am

COLUMN: INFECTION FICTIONS

Sally Rooney is everywhere just now because her eagerly-awaited third novel came out on September 7. In Beautiful... Published 10 Oct, 2021 06:36am