Hyderabadi Takbir Fatima is an architect, engineer and educator who is always on the lookout for projects that challenge her.
As part of Hyderabad Design Week, Takbir Fatima from Designaware is doing a series of workshops and installations leading up to the event. She is in the city to conduct workshops on design. “We’re experimenting with crowdsourcing the design process to bring together many minds to create something collectively.
Under the theme of Humanizing Design for Hyderabad Design Week, we are crowdsourcing through multiple activations leading up to the event, involving students, young designers, architects and children in designing installations and public art for Hyderabad,” says Takbir, who has completed her BArch from CSIIT School of Architecture & Planning (JNAFAU), Hyderabad, and an MArch (Architecture + Urbanism) from the Design Research Lab at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London.
Born in Hyderabad, Takbir was shuttling on and off between Saudi Arabia and Hyderabad. She was inspired by one of the greatest architect in Hyderabad sparking her interest in the profession.
Highly creative, she has handled some challenging projects at a very low cost. One such project was a hilltop school located in Golconda. She explains, “Bright Horizon Academy is a charity school. The challenge was the Golconda fort, which has an outer wall and inner wall, which is a part accessible to the public.
The outer wall has a very old settlement as old as the fort. All these houses share a common wall. Everything is on a hill, so for this particular site we had to completely sheer rock and boulders. Half of the site was on the upper part of the cliff and half made up the lower part. It was quite challenging to navigate the terrain.
And budget was an issue as it was a charity school. We designed a building which uses low energy as much as possible, and with lot of windows and natural light in the centre. There is sunlight and natural ventilation in every part of the building. It has been awarded the silver rating by the Indian Green Building Council in 2018.”
For most of her projects here, Takbir follows Vastu in residential and commercial properties. “If the client is not particular, we do recommend the vastu, as the property will have a resale value,” says Takbir who was given the Telangana Young Architect award by the Indian Institute of Architects in 2016 and was also recognised as Emerging Architect of the Year by NDTV Design & Architecture Awards 2016.
Takbir feels that now there is lot of opportunities for design aspirants and she aims to bring design to as many people as possible. She wants to do away with the misconception that design is not affordable and not for common people. Currently, her company is handling a few residential projects, restaurants, series of workshops, etc.
source: http://www.telanganatoday.com / Telangana Today / Home> Personalities / by Madhuri Dasagrandhi / September 11th, 2019
Symposium: Shukoor Pedayangode (centre) has been holding literary gatherings at his tea shop for four years. | Photo Credit: S.K. MOHAN
Welcome to Veranda, a teashop in a Kerala village, where ideas flow as liberally as the tea, run by school dropout-turned-littérateur Shukoor Pedayangode
At first glance, the roadside tea shack with a blue poly tarp stretched on wooden poles seems nondescript. Shukoor Pedayangode, its 50-something owner, looks equally unassuming as he tosses the sweet milk tea back and forth from saucepan to glass before serving it to his customers. But don’t be fooled: both this chayappeedika (teashop) in Pedayangode village, about 35 km from Kannur, and the tea-seller are as special as it gets. Over the years, this teashop called Veranda has become a literary hub, with celebrity authors not just from Kerala but also from neighbouring Karnataka and Tamil Nadu gracing it with their presence.
When I meet Pedayangode, it is late August and he has just reopened Veranda after a longish break when his shop was submerged under the waters of River Bavali when it breached its banks earlier in the month. But Pedayangode’s spirit hasn’t been dampened: he is all cheer as he talks about the next literary gathering at his teashop, scheduled for September 29. The special guest at the event? Tamil author Perumal Murugan — copies of the Malayalam translation of Murugan’s Poonachi are displayed at the teashop.
Free for all
The school dropout Pedayangode began to organise informal monthly literary gatherings at his teashop some four years ago. And he has so far hosted 34 discussions. Among the Malayalam writers and poets who have visited are Paul Zacharia, M. Mukundan, Khadeeja Mumtaz, P.F. Mathews, Kalpetta Narayanan, Rafeeq Ahmed and N. Prabhakaran, a veritable who’s who. Kannada writer Vivek Shanbhag and Tamil writer B. Jeyamohan have also been there.
“I announce every event in advance on my Facebook page,” says Pedayangode. The events generally last three hours and the audience is free to express views on the book under discussion and interact with the author. For non-Malayalam writers, Pedayangode gets friends who speak the language to act as moderators.
A bookworm from childhood, Pedayangode used to devour anything he found in print. “I read Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s Mucheettukalikkarante Makal (Card Sharper’s Daughter) when I was in Class V,” he says. He hated Maths, and after Class V, he started skipping classes since he dreaded his teacher’s wrath. Eventually, he stopped school altogether.
One of 12 siblings, Pedayangode started odd jobs to help the family along. He worked in quarries, sold fish. “I earned some money selling fish; that’s when I started buying books both to read and to sell,” says Pedayangode.
In fact, even as a teenager he used to write poems for richer friends who would buy him books in exchange. His published poetry collections are quite a few: Onpathu Pennungal (Nine Women), Nilavilikalude Bhasha (Language of Screams), Mazhappollal (Rain Burn) Azhangalile Jeevitham (Life in the Depths).
Novel idea
He even wrote a novel called Veranda, which would later become the name of his teashop. It’s apt, given the idea of open space it connotes. Pedayangode envisaged his shop as a free space for discussions. “I wanted to encourage the reading habit and create an ambience for healthy discussions devoid of restrictions or posturing,” he says.
The monthly gatherings are open to all. “Around 30 to 50 people usually attend,” says Ashraf Macheri, Pedayangode’s neighbour and close friend. Macheri, who used to run a printing press before moving to the Gulf, recalls how Pedayangode would visit his press to collect waste paper to write poems on.
Publishing houses give copies of their books for sale at the teashop; books of the author under discussion are sold on the day. Pedayangode funds the literary meets from the commissions he gets from book sales.
He also organises book fests in Kannur schools to promote reading among students. Pedayangode misses no literary event in the area. These days, he is regularly invited to local colleges to inaugurate literary events. And he does all this while reworking a novel he had finished and left unpublished four years ago.
mohamed.nazeer@thehindu.co.in
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Books> Tea Time / by Mohamed Nazeer / September 07th, 2019
Surat , GUJARAT / Bombay (now Mumbai) MAHARASHTRA / London, ENGLAND :
Abdullah Yusuf Ali wrote perhaps the most famous translation of the Quran but he also supported the British against the Ottomans and died a lonely man.
On a frigid December morning in 1953, a policeman found a half-conscious old man slumped on a street bench in the Westminster area of London. He was in a delirious state and died a day later on December 10. Ali
That man was Abdullah Yusuf Ali, the famous 20th-century translator of the Quran. He died alone, homeless, and with no one by his side. When the news reached Pakistan’s embassy in London, it dispatched someone to pay for his last rites.
“It pains me to think that so able and eminent a gentleman should have met with so pathetic an end,” Mirza Abul Hassan Ispahani, Pakistan’s High Commissioner in London, wrote in a letter to his prime minister two days later.
Generations of Muslims in English-speaking countries have grown up reading Yusuf Ali’s interpretation of the Quran. More than 200 editions of it have been published so far, making it perhaps the most read commentary in any non-Arabic language.
“Ask any English-speaking Muslim what translation and commentary of the Quran they originally studied, and the chances are that it was the one by Abdullah Yusuf Ali,” writes a commentator.
Yusuf Ali’s work and affiliations solidify his place as a giant of his time. He was one of the most senior Muslim civil servants during the British Raj, rubbed shoulders with the likes of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Aga Khan, inaugurated the first mosque in Canada, represented India at the Paris Peace Talks in 1919, was a trustee of London’s oldest mosque, and a known educationist. He was also a prolific writer on Islam.
But how did a prominent Muslim like him meet such a terrible end? Why was he forgotten so quickly?
A child of his time
In 1915, during World War I, the British faced a dilemma. Nearly half a million soldiers were Muslims from the Indian Subcontinent — modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — which was then under colonial rule. Some refused to fight the Turkish Ottoman soldiers who had joined the war against the allied army.
A mutiny broke out in November of that year in Singapore where Indian Muslim soldiers turned their guns on officers and took control of the island. The uprising was quickly crushed and 70 Muslim men were lined up against a wall and executed.
The events shook British officials. Many Muslims considered the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed Reshad as their Caliph. Their personal affinity and strong connection led to the Khilafat Movement in India that called for boycotting the British.
Abdullah Yusuf Ali thought otherwise.
“Fight ye glorious soldiers, Gurkha, Sikh or Muslim, Rajput or Brahman!” he said in a November 1914 speech at a London event in front of top British military officials. “You have comrades in the British army whose fellowship and lead are a priceless possession to you.”
In his talks and articles throughout the war, he urged fellow Muslims to side with the British, at times doing it so effusively that his rhetoric appeared jingoistic.
“The Ottoman Caliph announces Jihad against the British and what does Yusuf Ali do? He goes around European countries asking Muslims to fight for the British,” Humayun Ansari, a professor of Islam at the University of London, told TRT World.
“He was consistently loyal to the British and considered the British Empire to be a blessing. In his understanding of Islam he was very liberal. He wanted a reconciliation between the Muslim and Western philosophy.”
Abdullah Yusuf Ali attended the all-important Paris Peace Conference in 1919. (Getty Images)
Yusuf Ali was born in 1871 in Surat, western India, during a period of great introspection for the Muslims of India as their rule over the region for centuries came to an end and they were at the mercy of the English and a more politically organised Hindu majority.
Among the Muslims there was a realisation that they would have to study English, attain a modern education and learn British ways to get government jobs and regain their lost social status.
Yusuf Ali, who came from a middle-class family, proved to be an exceptional student throughout his school years and after matriculating from a missionary school, he won a scholarship to study at Cambridge University in London. The scholarship was given to only nine Indian students each year.
“We have to look at him in the context of his times. That was a generation when the British claimed superiority over the natives. And then you have somebody who can emerge and beat them at their own game,” says Jamil Sherif, who wrote Yusuf Ali’s biography titled Searching for Solace.
“Yusuf Ali’s approach was to show through his writing that Islam had made major contributions through the ages. But I think his compromise was that he saw religion mainly in spiritual terms and he saw socio-political dimensions of Islam as not really relevant in the days of empire,” he told TRT World.
At Cambridge, Yusuf Ali excelled in English composition, Arabic and other subjects. He also cleared the intensely competitive exam for the elite Indian Civil Service (ICS). In subsequent years, he rose to become perhaps the highest-ranking Muslim civil servant in India when he worked under Cabinet’s member of finance.
He was a devout Muslim, making sure he offered daily prayers, attended religious congregations and led prayers at the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, a town near London.
At the same time, he was against political Islam and insisted that Muslims could do better under British rule and that they should focus on educating themselves as opposed to agitating for independence.
Over the years, he remained affiliated with different institutions and also served as the principal of Lahore’s Islamia College – he was invited to take the position by the venerated poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal.
But behind the veneer of his intellect, busy schedule and scholarly importance, he was a man suffering from internal conflicts.
When the east meets west
Yusuf Ali was a troubled man. He married twice and both relationships ended bitterly.
In 1900, just a few years into his role as a civil servant, he married Teresa Mary Shalders, in a ceremony at the St. Peter’s Church in England.
“It was a bold and uninhibited act by the young couple, who may have looked at the dawn of the new century and thought everything possible – including the harmony of races, religions, and continents,” Sherif, who uses M.A. Sherif as his pen name, writes in his book.
But any hope of making a statement with this marriage of two different cultures faded in a few short years. They had four kids over the years but Yusuf Ali spent most of this time in India as a government officer while Shalders, who was in England, fell in love with another man.
Their divorce in 1911 was particularly painful for Yusuf Ali and he might have hinted at that period in the preface of his Quranic commentary when he wrote: “A man’s life is subject to inner storms…which nearly unseated my reason and made life meaningless.”
He won custody of their children but became estranged from them over time.
“These children by their continued ill-will towards me have alienated my affection for them, so much that I confer no benefit on them by this will,” Yusuf Ali later wrote in his will.
As an ICS officer, he rose swiftly from an assistant magistrate to more important positions, and the British government increasingly relied on him as its key propagandist.
Yusuf Ali was not entirely oblivious to the systematic discrimination that Muslims faced under British rule.
“He wrote about how Britain was using Indian revenue in the Great War. That’s a very subtle way of criticism. He also made references to discrimination suffered [by locals] on the basis of colour,” says Sherif.
In the early 1920s, Yusuf Ali married Gertrude Anne Mawbey, who he liked to call Masuma (innocent). That marriage didn’t work out either.
(TRTWorld)
It was during this personal crisis that Ali began the monumental work of writing an English translation of the Quran, often working on solitary ocean liner journeys which he took at the behest of the British government.
“Yusuf Ali’s bond with the Quran was forged in these times of anguish when searching for solace,” writes Sherif.
Prominent scholars such as Marmaduke Picktall and others had already done a lot to introduce the West to Islam’s holiest book but Yusuf Ali did it with humility and open-mindedness which set his work apart.
“His interpretation is very balanced. It doesn’t force you to any particular corner, it can be read by all the schools of thought. It’s a very broadminded, compassionate approach to studying religion,” Sherif tells TRT World.
Yusuf Ali was a Dawoodi Bohra, a strain of Shia Islam, but he garnered enough respect across the spectrum to lead congregations at Sunni mosques.
“In his translation of the Quran, published between 1934 and 1937, Yusuf Ali expounded the spiritual side of Islam more than its worldly view,” writes A R Kidwai, a prominent researcher.
His excellent command over the English language lends a poetic touch to the thousands of footnotes and he didn’t shy away from using English poets such as Longfellow and Milton to explain the word of God.
Besides dealing with his matrimonial failures, he had a hard time coming to terms with what happened to Arab Muslims after World War I.
“Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not criticise the League of Nations when it dismembered the Ottoman empire,” says Sherif. “But what really shook him was the proposal to partition Palestine.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to live in camps in neighboring countries after Israel pushed them out of their homes. (TRTWorld)
For someone groomed to believe that the English people were true to their word, the haphazard division of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of Israel was unsettling for Yusuf Ali.
In 1937 he attended many meetings and conferences fighting the case of Palestinians and warned Western powers about creation of a Jewish state on Muslim land.
“One way alone can bring thee peace:
That ancient rights be not suppressed,
That aliens from encroachments cease,
And Quds be given its rightful rest,” he wrote in the poem Palestine published in January 1938.
However, Palestine’s tragedy wasn’t enough to deter his loyalty to the British as he travelled to India at the urging of England’s Ministry of Information to rally Muslim support after it declared war on Germany in 1939.
In Delhi, he met Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan and spoke to students about the need for India’s support for the British. That was a time of turmoil in India as both Muslims and Hindus had begun rallying for independence.
Upon his return, he wrote articles and gave speeches, asking Indians to unite in defence of the empire and drop their demand for political reforms. But his appearance as an important player in international events quickly faded after the war ended in 1944.
We might never know what broke him in the end. But as the British pulled out of the subcontinent in the days of its waning global status, so did Yusuf Ali slowly recede from the newspapers, his powerful friends no longer found a use for him.
Yusuf Ali spent his last years living in the National Liberal Club on a monthly pension that he received against his government job.
“How did the British treat him? There’s certainly a question mark there. They didn’t recognise his contribution as much as he probably expected,” says Humayun Ansari.
His powerful friends in the Muslim community including Pakistan’s then ambassador Ispahani had also lost track of Ali’s whereabouts, not bothering to check on him.
“That is an indictment of the Muslim society that we were not able to honour and care for someone of his stature,” says Jamil Sherif.
Source: TRT World
source: http://www.trtworld.com / TRT World / Home> News> Magazine / by Saad Hasan / September 04th, 2019
Despite a self-imposed limit on the Nadaprabhu Kempegowda Award 2019 to only 70 people, the BBMP announced 100 recipients of the same on Tuesday.
Senior Kannada writers Chandrashekhar Patil, Keshavareddy Handrala, Abdul Rasheed, Pratibha Nandakumar, actor-politician Mukhyamantri Chandru, singer Manjula Gururaj, educationist Gururaj Karjagi, Dalit activist Mavalli Shankar and senior advocate Ravi Verma Kumar are among the awardees.
IPS officer M.N. Anucheth, the chief investigation officer in the Gauri Lankesh murder case, and six members of his team, have also been given the award for the successful probe that eventually led to breakthroughs in three other murder cases.
Another IPS officer D. Roopa is also on the list of awardees.
While 10 women, including social activist and JD(S) leader Leeladevi R. Prasad, have been awarded the Nadaprabhu Kempegowda Sose Mahatyagi Lakshmidevi award, five organisations including Bosco Mane, that helps children, have been awarded the Paramapoojya Dr. Shivakumara Swamiji award.
Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa will present the awards on Wednesday, observed as the 508th Nadaprabhu Kempegowda Jayanti.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> States> Karnataka / by Staff Reporter / Bengaluru – September 04th, 2019
For decades, a book wrongly identified as ‘The Holy Koran’ was kept at a mosque in Broken Hill. Who was the unnamed traveller who brought Bengali stories of the prophets to the Australian desert?
The large book bearing a handwritten English label, ‘The Holy Koran’, was not a Quran, but a 500-page volume of Bengali Sufi poetry. Photo: Samia Khatun/The Conversation
Some 1,000 kilometres inland from Sydney, over the Blue Mountains, past the trees that drink the tributaries of the Darling River, there stands a little, red mosque. It marks where the desert begins.
The mosque was built from corrugated iron in around 1887 in the town of Broken Hill. Its green interiors feature simple arabesque and its shelves house stories once precious to people from across the Indian Ocean. Today it is a peaceful place of retreat from the gritty dust storms and brilliant sunlight that assault travellers at this gateway to Australia’s deserts.
The corrugated iron mosque in Broken Hill. Photo: Samia Khatun/The Conversation
By a rocky hill that winds had “polished black”, the town of Broken Hill was founded on the country of Wiljakali people. In June 1885, an Aboriginal man whom prospectors called “Harry” led them to a silver-streaked boulder of ironstone and Europeans declared the discovery of a “jeweller’s shop”.
Soon, leading strings of camels, South Asian merchants and drivers began arriving in greater numbers at the silver mines, camel transportation operating as a crucial adjunct to colonial industries throughout Australian deserts. The town grew with the fortunes of the nascent firm Broken Hill Propriety Limited (BHP) — a parent company of one of the largest mining conglomerates in the world today, BHP-Billiton.
As mining firms funnelled lead, iron ore and silver from Wiljakali lands to Indian Ocean ports and British markets, Broken Hill became a busy industrial node in the geography of the British Empire. The numbers of camel merchants and drivers fluctuated with the arrival and departure of goods, and by the turn of the 20th century an estimated 400 South Asians were living in Broken Hill. They built two mosques. Only one remains.
In the 1960s, long after the end of the era of camel transportation, when members of the Broken Hill Historical Society were restoring the mosque on the corner of William Street and Buck Street, they found a book in the yard, its “pages blowing in the red dust” in the words of historian Christine Stevens. Dusting the book free of sand, they placed it inside the mosque, labelling it as “The Holy Koran”. In 1989, Stevens reproduced a photo of the book in her history of the “Afghan cameldrivers”.
I travelled to Broken Hill in July 2009. As I searched the shelves of the mosque for the book, a winter dust storm was underway outside. Among letters, a peacock feather fan and bottles of scent from Delhi, the large book lay, bearing a handwritten English label: “The Holy Koran”.
Turning the first few pages revealed it was not a Quran, but a 500-page volume of Bengali Sufi poetry.
Sitting on the floor, I set out to decipher Bengali characters I had not read for years. The book was titled Kasasol Ambia (Stories of the Prophets). Printed in Calcutta, it was a compendium of eight volumes published separately between 1861 and 1895. It was a book of books. Every story began by naming the tempo at which it should be performed, for these poems were written to be sung out loud to audiences.
The mosque’s interior. Photo: Samia Khatun/The Conversation
As I strained to parse unfamiliar Persian, Hindi and Arabic words, woven into a tapestry of 19th-century Bengali grammar, I slowly started to glimpse the shimmering imagery of the poetry.
Creation began with a pen, wrote Munshi Rezaulla, the first of the three poets of Kasasol Ambia. As a concealed pen inscribed words onto a tablet, he narrates, seven heavens and seven lands came into being, and “Adam Sufi” was sculpted from clay. Over the 500 pages of verse that follow, Adam meets Purusha, Alexander the Great searches for immortal Khidr, and married Zulekha falls hopelessly in love with Yusuf.
As Rezaulla tells us, it was his Sufi guide who instructed him to translate Persian and Hindi stories into Bengali. Overwhelmed by the task, Rezaulla asked, “I am so ignorant, in what form will I write poetry?”
In search of answers, the poet wrote, “I leapt into the sea. Searching for pearls, I began threading a chain.” Here the imagery of the poet’s body immersed in a sea evokes a pen dipped in ink stringing together line after line of poetry. As Rezaulla wrote, “Stories of the Prophets (Kasasol Ambia) I name this chain.”
Its pages stringing together motif after motif from narratives that have long circulated the Indian Ocean, Kasasol Ambia described events spanning thousands of years, ending in the sixth year of the Muslim Hijri calendar. Cocooned from the winds raging outside, I realised I was reading a Bengali book of popular history.
Challenging Australian history
In the time since Broken Hill locals dusted Kasasol Ambia of sand in the 1960s, why had four Australian historians mislabelled the book? Why did the history books accompanying South Asian travellers to the West play no role in the histories that are written about them?
Moreover, as Christine Stevens writes, the people who built the mosque in North Broken Hill came from “Afghanistan and North-Western India”. How, then, did a book published in Bengal find its way to an inland Australian mining town?
Captivated by this last enigma, I began looking for clues. First, I turned to the records of the Broken Hill Historical Society. Looking for fragments of Bengali words in archival collections across Australia, I sought glimpses of a traveller who might be able to connect 19th-century Calcutta to Broken Hill.
As I searched for South Asian characters through a constellation of desert towns and Australian ports once linked by camels, I encountered a vast wealth of non-English-language sources that Australian historians systematically sidestep.
A seafarer’s travelogue narrated in Urdu in Lahore continues to circulate today in South Asia and in Australia, while Urdu, Persian and Arabic dream texts from across the Indian Ocean left ample traces in Australian newspapers.
One of the most surprising discoveries was that the richest accounts of South Asians were in some of the Aboriginal languages spoken in Australian desert parts. In histories that Aboriginal people told in Wangkangurru, Kuyani, Arabunna and Dhirari about the upheaval, violence and new encounters that occurred in the wake of British colonisation, there appear startlingly detailed accounts of South Asians.
Central to the history of encounter between South Asians and Aboriginal people in the era of British colonisation were a number of industries in which non-white labour was crucial: steam shipping industries, sugar farming, railway construction, pastoral industries, and camel transportation. Camels, in particular, loom large in the history of South Asians in Australia.
Camel harnesses at the mosque. Photo: Samia Khatun/The Conversation
From the 1860s, camel lines became central to transportation in Australian desert interiors, colonising many of the long-distance Indigenous trade routes that crisscross Aboriginal land. The animals arrived from British Indian ports accompanied by South Asian camel owners and drivers, who came to be known by the umbrella term of “Afghans” in settler nomenclature.
The so-called Afghans were so ubiquitous through Australian deserts that when the two ends of the transcontinental north-south railway met in Central Australia in 1929, settlers rejoiced in the arrival of the “Afghan Express”. Camels remained central to interior transportation until they were replaced by motor transportation from the 1920s. Today the transcontinental railway is still known as “the Ghan” .
As a circuitry of camel tracks interlocking with shipping lines and railways threaded together Aboriginal lives and families with those of Indian Ocean travellers, people moving through these networks storied their experiences in their own tongues. Foregrounding these fragments in languages other than English, this book tells a history of South Asian diaspora in Australia.
Asking new questions
I start by reading the copy of Kasasol Ambia that remains in Broken Hill, and interpret the many South Asian- and Aboriginal-language stories I encountered during my search for the reader who brought the Bengali book to the Australian interior. Entry points into rich imaginative landscapes, these are stories that ask us to take seriously the epistemologies of people colonised by the British Empire.
My aim is to challenge the suffocating monolingualism of the field of Australian history. In my new book, Australianama, I do not argue for the simple inclusion of non-English-language texts into existing Australian national history books, perhaps with updated or extended captions.
Instead, I show that non-English-language texts render visible historical storytelling strategies and larger architectures of knowledge that we can use to structure accounts of the past. These have the capacity to radically change the routes readers use to imaginatively travel to the past. Stories in colonised tongues can transform the very grounds from which we view the past, present and future.
In July 2009, when I first encountered Kasasol Ambia, the Bengali book long mislabelled as a Quran made front-page news in Broken Hill. With touching enthusiasm, the journalist announced that I would “begin work on a full translation shortly “.
Overwhelmed by such a task, I began trawling mosque records held by the Broken Hill Historical Society, soon beginning a search through port records, customs documents and government archives. I did not know how to decipher the difficult book, and so in these archival materials I hoped to glimpse, however fleetingly, the skilled 19th-century reader who had once performed its poetry.
Slowly, it dawned on me that I was following the logic that Rezaulla outlines in his schema for translation. For I too had stepped into the imaginative world of the poetry in search of answers to some hard questions: How do we write histories of South Asian diaspora which pay attention to the history books that travelled with them? Who was the unnamed traveller who brought Bengali stories of the prophets to Broken Hill? Can historical storytelling in English do more than simply induct readers into white subjectivities?
Threading together seven narrative motifs that appear in Kasasol Ambia, I began to piece together a history of South Asians in Australia.
Samia Khatun , Senior Lecturer, SOAS, University of London
Professor Sharib Rudaulvi was awarded the All India Bahadur Shah Zafar Award
[Manish Sisodia, who is also the Minister of Art, Culture and Languages, appealed to the writers to create more literature to inculcate the feelings of communal harmony and patriotism. (Photo: IANS/Twitter)]New Delhi:
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on Tuesday conferred the annual awards to Urdu scholars for their contribution to Urdu literature.
Sisodia, who is also the Minister of Art, Culture and Languages, appealed to the writers to create more literature to inculcate the feelings of communal harmony and patriotism.
He congratulated the Urdu scholars and said it is the writers and thinkers, who ensure change and bring about ‘inqlab’ in the society through their creative writings with the “power of the pen”.
Professor Sharib Rudaulvi was awarded the All India Bahadur Shah Zafar Award.
“Hailing from Lucknow, Rudaulvi is a prominent critic and poet. He started his career as an Urdu faculty member at Dayal Singh College of Delhi University. In 1990, he joined Jawaharlal Nehru University as a Reader in 1990 from where he retired in 2000. He started his career as a poet, but he later turned towards criticism with greater attention,” the government said in a statement.
Ghazal singer-brothers Ustad Ahmad Hussain and Mohammed Hussain were given All India Award for Promotion of Urdu Language and Literature.
“Ahmed and Mohammed Hussain are two brothers who sing classical ghazals. Born in Rajasthan as sons of the famous Ghazal and ‘Thumri’ singer Ustad Afzal Hussain, the two touch genres like Indian classical music and ‘Bhajan’ as well as ‘Ghazal’. They started their singing career in 1958. They have uniqueness as they always sing the ‘ghazals’ together,” the statement said.
The award for Urdu poetry was given to G.R. Kanwal, who has published five anthologies of self-composed Urdu poetry.
Professor Atiqullah was awarded Pt. Brij Mohan Dattaria Kaifi Award.
“Atiqullah is a noted Urdu Critic and author of numerous books. He was also a professor at Delhi Univerisity.”
Ghazal singer Radhika Chopra received the award for ‘ghazal’ singing, the statement added.
The Deputy Chief Minister released and uncovered a book of Urdu pronunciation “Talaffuz” written by Shakeel Hasan Shamshi.
Delhi’s Urdu Academy, since its inception in May, 1981, has been conducting various educational, cultural and literary activities for the promotion, propagation and development of Urdu language, literature and composite lingual culture.
source: http://www.ummid.com / Ummid.com / Home> India / by IANS / August 20th, 2019
A student from Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University (CSJMU), Kanpur created a world record for continuously reading books for 27 hours and five minutes.
Kanpur | Jagran Trending Desk:
A student from Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University (CSJMU), Kanpur created a world record for continuously reading books for 27 hours and five minutes. His feat was acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World Records on Monday.
The 22-year-old boy, Allauddin, broke the previous record of continuous reading for 24 hours which was held by Yatish Chandra Shukla of Lakhimpur Kheri, who achieved this feat two years back.
His teacher, Dilip Gangwar, who helped him achieving this milestone said that the executive officers of the Guinness Book told him that he could break the earlier record if he could read for 24 hours and five minutes, but Allauddin said he would continuously read for 27 hours.
The Gangwar coaching made subsequent arrangements for Allauddin and a judge Mahesh Vishnoi, from Guinness Book of World Record was assigned to monitor the reading feat.
According to the rules to set this record, Allauddin could only take breaks of 30 seconds to sip water or to take some edibles and he would not be allowed to go to the washroom during the reading time.
Allauddin, standing firm on his desire to break the record started reading at 10 am on Sunday and finished on Monday. He took less than three breaks of less than 30 seconds to sip small quantities of water, said Dilip Gangwar.
Several eminent people, including former union minister Sri Prakash Jaiswal, MLC Arun Pathak and Satish Nigam witnessed the challenging task.
source: http://www.english.jagran.com / Jagran English / Home> English News> Trending / posted by Talib Khan / August 27th, 2019
Cooking demo videos galore, but Khaja Moinuddin’s popular no-frills videos serve to fill hungry orphans as well
If you are able to look away from Khaja Moinuddin’s ear-to-ear grin, you will notice a 40 kilogram-capacity degcha or a handi that is either resting over a bed of embers or bubbling with food in the heat of a wood fire. His kitchen is always outdoors; Moinuddin is either cooking in the open under the sky or, during the summer months, under the shade of a tree. His smile remains intact, no matter where.
Moinuddin’s cooking is on a big scale, similar to his boundless smile. And if you are one of those who gets sucked into the web of cooking demo video feeds, then you are sure to have come across his.
If Moinuddin’s name doesn’t strike a bell, the YouTube channel Nawab’s Kitchen sure will. Popular as one of the viral content creators from Hyderabad, the chef is almost always cooking to be able to feed 40 people. The cooked food is distributed in orphanages and their staff, as well as among people who stop by and wait patiently to watch him cook.
“I always cook extra and never come back with leftovers. Once we are done cooking, everyone in and around the area where we cook is free to join us to eat. Initially we would pack the cooked food in boxes and distribute it, then we thought we would feel even better if we are able to serve the people directly,” says Moinuddin.
And who is the ‘we’ he is referring to? Moinuddin clarifies he might be the face of Nawab’s Kitchen, but there are two others who work equally hard to put every video on YouTube. “My colleagues-turned-friends Srinath Reddy and Bhagat Reddy are with me in this. We conceptualised Nawab’s Kitchen (NK) together,” smiles Moinuddin.
Moinuddin has over 10 years of working experience in regional TV channels as a producer. His friends and partners Srinath and Bhagat who prefer to work behind the scenes are experienced at working in the video editing department. Having known each other for a good number of years, the three decided to quit their jobs and start a YouTube channel that will engage, educate and be on a neutral topic like food. “There are very few people who don’t pause while scrolling, to watch a video on how a certain dish is being cooked. Especially if it is an dish Indian, and been shot to show the richness of rustic regional cuisine,” adds Moinuddin.
NK’s no-frill videos and a relaxed explanation of the ingredients and cooking process, wins him fans on his YouTube channel. His recipes are easy and simple to follow. “However, we choose a venue to cook that is close to some orphanage so that we can share the food with them. When we set out to put together NK we wanted to do social service through what we were gaining,” adds Moinuddin.
None of the three friends are trained chefs, they function with the knowledge and experience that comes with observing their families cook. Moinuddin adds, “My nani was an excellent cook, when I was in Tenali with her while doing my graduation, I learnt her style of cooking.”
For dishes like pizza and cakes, Moinuddin equips himself by learning online. “When we reach the gates of the orphanages, the smile and love with which the children greets us, banishes the day’s stress. The love and appreciation they show towards us makes us wonder where the children get their wisdom from,” says Moinuddin. NK regularly visits about 15 orphanages to share their food.
What is Nawab Kitchen’s signature dish? “My mutton biryani has a lot of fans,” he laughs.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Life & Style>Food / by Prabalika M. Borah / August 20th, 2019
With their presence in the city for over 200 years, more than 1,800 families have found a home here. A walk through George Town reveals the community’s rich cultural stories.
Photos: Ashwin Prasath
Chennai :
Their favourite food is not biryani and they wear burqas in hot pink, forest green, bright blue and every colour one can imagine, except black. Meet the Bohras, a sect of the Shia Muslims whose history in Chennai dates back to more than 200 years.
“The Bohra community originated in Yemen and later spread to India and Pakistan. In India, they primarily settled in Gujarat before spreading out to different cities. So, we have Gujarati influence on our food, language and traditions. We speak Gujarati with references from Persian and Arabic,” said Tasneem Kutubuddin dressed in a dark pink burqa or rida, their traditional costume. She was leading a heritage walk — Understanding the Bohras in the city — on Sunday at George Town.While women wear ridas that cover their head and body but not their faces, Bohra men wear a three-piece white outfit and white cap called a topi with gold embroidery.
Migrating to Chennai
Mulla Jafferji Ibne Mulla Ismailji was the first Bohra to come to Chennai. He travelled till Arcot in 1790 via the Malabar coast to join his uncle in the bangle business. He later migrated to Chennai in 1793 and set up a garment business in George Town.
“Whenever Bohras migrate to a city, if they are the first ones from their community there, they buy a land for cemetery and prayer. Also, each prayer area has a community hall attached to it where we all dine together. So, this was the first piece of land brought by a Bohra in Chennai,” said Tasneem pointing towards the Mohammedi Masjid in Angappa Naicken Street at George Town.
Chennai has three Dawoodi Bohra mosques — Mohammedi Masjid, Saifee mosque in Moore street, Mannady and the third one at Basin bridge. Today, more than 1,800 Bohra families are living in the city and are primarily settled in Madhavaram, Royapuram and George Town. The Dawoodi Bohras are followers of the 27th Dai or high priest and can be found in about 40 countries around the world. They have separate administration offices in each city.
The MSB Matriculation Higher Secondary School at Thiruvalluvar Nagar in George Town is set up especially for the children of Bohra community. According to Tasneem, the school follows the Tamil Nadu State Board syllabus along with a Siyat Islamia curriculum.
“About 800-odd children study in this school. For the kids from the community who are studying in other schools, MSB offers a weekend programme to educate them on the history of the community and Quran,” she said.
Communal dining
Food plays an integral part of a Bohra’s daily life. Eating from a thal is a tradition that still continues in many families. A thali is a large round metal plate, around which the family sits, helping themselves from the same plate, course-by-course, during every meal of the day. A lot of their dishes are influenced from the Gujarati cuisine.
Apart from non-vegetarian dishes like pulao and kebab, the cuisine boasts some unique vegetarian dishes including a cold baingan bharta made with curd and spring onion, sev ni tarkari in which bhel puri sev is cooked with onions, and their quintessential dal chawal palida, a combination of rice and dal served with a flavourful concoction of drumsticks, bottle gourd and kokum.
Unfortunately, the Bohra community does not have many restaurants serving the savoury dishes. But, to try their traditional sweets, head to Mannady Street to find sweet shops maintained by Bohris including Hatimy’s and Alambaradar.
Try some of their heady sweet treats like malida (a sweet made with wheat and jaggery), lacchka (a cracked wheat halwa, usually made on first day of the year of Bohra calendar), kalamro (a yogurt based rice pudding) and the famous malai khaja which is also called Bohri puff pastry.
An interesting concept among the Bohras are the community kitchens that are attached to the masjid. “The concept is similar to the dabbawalas in Mumbai. Food gets prepared early in the morning, packed in boxes and numbered. People collect their boxes and replace it with an empty box for the next meal. One needs to pay a nominal amount. Usually, the well-to-do families pay for four to five people, so that the poor can get food for free,” said Tasneem.
The concept of community kitchen began around five years ago when their religious head, Syedna Dr Mufaddal Saifuddin said that women must be freed from the kitchen. So, this kitchen makes lunch for the entire Dawoodi Bohra community across Chennai, every day. The rule is applied across every city and every country.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by K V Navya / Express News Service / August 26th, 2019
Hyderabad’s Ismail Sheriff only lensman to be invited to conference on snow leopards in Kazakhstan
For city-based wildlife photographer Ismail Sheriff, known for capturing the elusive snow leopards on camera, it was a rare honour to be invited as the only lensman to a recent conference on conservation of snow leopards in Kazakhstan.
The conference attended by delegates from 12 countries including Russia, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mongolia, focussed on initiating various measures to increase the population of snow leopards.
“It was indeed an honour to be there. I am glad that my adventure in Kibber (Himachal Pradesh) where I first sighted a snow leopard five years ago and subsequent sightings of the magnificent species helped me come thus far,” he tells The Hindu.
Rare captures of the elusive snow leopards by City-based wildlife photographer Ismail Sheriff. PHOTO: Special Arrangement
Mr. Sheriff, 39, started off on the big cat trail nine years ago, mostly photographing Royal Bengal Tigers and gradually moved on to snow leopards.
“India has about 250 snow leopards and interestingly, there are no territories for them like tigers. They often travel across about 150-200 square km, transgressing even borders of a few countries,” says Mr. Sheriff, who is into fine arts printing apart from pursuing his passion in wildlife photography.
“Unlike spotting tigers in a reserve forest, this is a different ball game altogether because the biggest challenge comes from the freezing conditions. Often, we have to brave life-threatening landslides and avalanches. It was a spine-chilling experience for me,” he explains. “But, still these factors don’t deter me as anything related to a snow leopard gives me joy,” he adds.
The maximum snow leopards, Mr. Sheriff says, are in China — about 2,000 — and it is Kazakhstan’s national animal and hence, that country’s concern for conservation is pretty much understandable.
“Groups of wild dogs pose serious threat to the leopards, especially the cubs. They also deny food to the leopards by taking away their kill. And, then there is climate change which is making the snow leopards come closer to the human habitat,” he points out.
What are the corrective measures being planned? “It has been decided to have a four km grid with trap cameras to understand their behavioural pattern, density and prey base, and educate the locals about the importance of protecting them. We generally travel to the mountain ranges during winter and by the time we have the second edition of the conference in January 2020, we should have more practical solutions to ensure an increase in their numbers,” he concludes.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Hyderabad / by V.V. Subrahmanyam / Hyderabad – August 26th, 2019
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