Ode to the Road: Truck Art of North IndiaImage Gallery
Poetry
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Choked to death with a shoelace for his poetry, Mir Ja’far Zatalli did not believe in sophisticated language and mincing words. Long ignored, we look at how Zatalli was a pioneer in creating a small but effective oeuvre of Urdu poetry and prose during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (In…
in Article
Rightly called ‘Voice of the Times’, Akbar Allahabadi was one of Urdu language’s premiere political satirist in Hindustan. His words spared neither the British nor Indians who supported the Raj. He pre-empted the existence of Hinglish as a colloquial language, and injected his poetry with just the…
in Article
Vijay Kumar Yadav, 40, is a truck driver from Sant Kabir Nagar in Uttar Pradesh. He likes to hum a couplet[1] when he drives his truck. It speaks of his predicament, he says, for ‘a driver has no home other than the truck he drives.’[2]
In his 20-year career as a driver, Yadav never got such a…
in Article
Trucks are universally known for their utility in freight transportation. But in South Asia, they have a special place in the public imagination: they are seen as mobile canvasses for art with their bodies decorated with colourful paintings and artistic expressions. A significant part of truck art…
in Overview
Trucks are universally understood as means of freight transportation, but in India as in South Asia, they serve as sites for literary production as their bodies are decorated with poetic expressions. Those expressions often represent the truck driver’s worldview, as they deal with the ideas of home…
in Module
Living through the carnage of the 1857 Revolt, Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib’s was most pained at the ruin of his beloved city, Delhi. Interestingly, we find that while in his ‘official and published’ diary, ‘Dastanbuy’, he writes in support of the British (his then patrons), some personal letters…
in Article
In Baburnama, the Mughal Emperor’s memoirs, Babur expresses his most intimate emotions, among which is the yearning for his homeland. Even in victory of the great land of Hindustan, Babur is lonely and desolate, as he expresses his pain through ghazals and rubais. Here, we present the vulnerable…
in Article
From the heart of a well-known family of Hyderabad to life in a single room with the barest of necessities, Shaukat Kaifi’s memoir of her life with the renowned poet Kaifi Azmi speaks of love and commitment. A marriage of over a half a century, a life steeped in poetry and progressive politics,…
in Article
She is a deputy magistrate, currently posted at Malda collectorate, West Bengal. Apart from avisangi, she is best known for her books of poems Sabhyataka Pendulamharu (2016) and Ma Deh Raato Ranginchu (2019). In this interview, Pavitra Lama talks about the genre of avisangi and the aspects that go…
in Interview