Islampura is once again Krishan Nagar
Babri Masjid Chowk has reverted to Jain Mandir Chowk
Sunnat Nagar is now Sant Nagar.
Mustafaabad has become Dharampura again
The renaming acknowledges Lahore's Hindu, Sikh, Jain and colonial heritage that was gradually erased over eight decades
By Haseeblegal on insta
Indus Valley Civilization renaming debate..
Pakistani response to calls to rebrand the IVC as the "Indian Civilization"
c.3300–1300 BCE
Eqbal Ahmad is probably the most globally respected Pakistani intellectual most Pakistanis have never heard of.
Edward Said called him one of the two greatest influences on his own thinking.
Noam Chomsky considered him a close friend.
And the FBI once raided an office in Chicago to arrest him for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.
Born in 1933 in the village of Irki in Bihar, into a Muslim zamindar family when he was around 4 his father a Gandhian who had been redistributing parcels of family land to landless peasants was murdered in his presence by rival landowners at least one of them a relative.
Ahmad later said that moment taught him
*Class is more important than blood relationship and property is more dear to people than friendship or loyalties.
in 1947 he and his elder brother walked to lahore he carried a gun.
He fought in the 1948 Kashmir war as a second lieutenant and was wounded.
Then came Forman Christian College (economics 1951) an MA in modern history from Punjab University a Rotary fellowship at Occidental in California where he first read deeply about the genocide of Native Americans, and finally a PhD from Princeton on the Tunisian labour movement.
That research pulled him into north africa where he joined the Algerian National Liberation Front and worked directly with Frantz Fanon during the war against France.
He was even part of the FLN delegation at the Evian peace talks. He was offered a position in the first independent Algerian government and turned it down. He wanted to remain an independent intellectual not a state functionary.
Back in the US in the 60s he became one of the earliest and sharpest critics of the Vietnam War.
His public defence of Palestinian rights after 1967 cost him a job at Cornell.
In 1971 the FBI charged him along with the Berrigan brothers and others, the Harrisburg Seven with conspiring to kidnap Kissinger.
The case ended in a mistrial the plot was according to those involved an idea casually floated at one of his dinner parties about making a citizens arrest of the man bombing Cambodia.
What makes him worth remembering for us is what he said about Pakistan and the wider Muslim world:
He called nationalism and religious fanaticism a twin curse and spent the 90s campaigning against nuclear weapons in both India and Pakistan and his lectures inside Pakistan were regularly disrupted by shadow figures.
Pervez Hoodbhoy has noted that arrest warrants and death sentences were issued against him under successive martial law regimes.
His predictive record is uncomfortable to read now
He interviewed Osama bin Laden in Peshawar in 986 back when bin Laden was a us and Pakistani asset and warned in the early 90s that bin Laden's ideology would eventually turn him against both Washington and Islamabad.
In 1990 he warned the US that toppling Saddam would trigger sectarian violence and regional chaos, 13 years before the 2003 invasion.
He also warned that the Pakistani state's support for Islamist proxies in Afghanistan would blow back on Pakistan itself.
His dream in his final years was to build an independent liberal arts university in Islamabad called Khaldunia named after Ibn Khaldun, blending the Western university tradition with the older madrassa tradition.
Nawaz Sharif's government allotted land and asif Zardari lota reportedly seized the plot later allegedly for a golf course.
Ahmad died of heart failure in Islamabad on 11 May 1999 a week after being diagnosed with colon cancer. The university was never built.
He spoke Ur Eng Pern Arabic and Frh.
He advised revolutionaries and refused governments. and he remains in Shahid Alam words the most astute political thinker the Islamic world produced in the twentieth century which is true what do think about our unsong hero comment below thank you very much.
Azad Kashmir later became part of Pakistan army as Azad Kashmir regiment in 1972
Before this it was under Pakistani armed forces but not a part of Pakistan army
This is the story of a forgotten temple in Lyallpur,Panjab, built in 1906 near Jhang Bazaar. Before Partition, this area was home to Hindu and Sikh communities, and this temple remains one of the memories they left behind.
Today, shops surround it and families live inside, yet its original structure still stands quietly, carrying echoes of the past.
So since the past two days I have seen various posts of the Kathak Festival that took place in Lahore....A lot of Indian pages called it as a Cultural Theft .....Wanted your opinion on this matter
Made out of Leather, copper alloy, iron, hide.
A blend of Buddhism Zoroastrianism & Iranian Faith's and Hellenistic Beliefs
The British adopted word India as an administrative label for the entire subcontinent In 1947 the Republic of India inherited that label with Mountbatten's help.
Now they want to rename themselves Bharat. The Bharata tribe the one the name comes from was a Vedic tribe based on the River Ravi in Punjab, Pakistan... The Battle of the Ten Kings where the Bharatas won dominance was fought on the Ravi in Punjab.
What kind of inferiority complex is this? One day they are Aryan next day they wanna be Pakistani product why?
It is a common belief today that the Indus region is a crucial part of the Indian subcontinent and south Asia. This whole concept is heavily flawed, and I will explain why.
South asia is defined as a region that has shared history, culture, linguistics, geology and civilisational roots, and it is isolated from the rest of eurasia because of it being surrounded by mountain ranges and the monsoon rains are also a defining feature.
The Indus region has little shared history with South asia. It has a 6000 year history, and only 500 it has spent united with or under the same influences as South asia.
During our earliest period, the Indus Valley civilisation, we had urban cities, trade with mesopotamia, standardised weights and measures, a script, while India was just a forest of cavemen.
We remained a separate cultural zone after the fall of the Indus Valley civilisation and the beginning of the "vedic" period. The vedic religion practised in our land, sapta sindhu, was nothing like the religion that developed much later in India after some tribes from our region migrated there, became the ruling elite, and established a different religion with different values, gods, social structure and identity.
We remained isolated from south Asia by the thar desert, and the sutlej and beas rivers marked the end of our land, beyond which the terrain changed and farming was not possible until the Persian wheel was invented. We wore stitched clothes, footwear, headwear, had entirely different beard and hairstyles. The Indian subcontinent wore drapes, mostly barefoot and without headwear. We never practised the same religion as them, with the vedic religion first being dominant in our land and then maga saurism and mahayana Buddhism becoming dominant alongside zoroastrian presence, while hinduism and other types of Buddhism remained dominant in the ganges plains.
For most of our history we were ruled by empires expanding from the west, which heavily influenced our culture. Our gandharan art was much more similar to greco roman art than to Indian art, our clothing was more similar to the persians, bactrians and sogdians and even our languages were closer to Eastern Iranian languages because of having much more contact with them, while having a different ancestor from both Indian and iranian languages. Labels like Prakrit and apabhramsa and sanskrit literally couldn't apply to us because we didn't have different elite and spoken languages.
We were a tribal, pastoralist and semi nomadic and wheat farming society, while the ganges was an agrarian settled rice farming society dominated by the rigid varna caste system. We were heavy meat eaters and wine drinkers while both of these were absent in the ganges. The soma ritual which was a central part of our vedic religion ceased to exist in the Hinduism that developed in the ganges. Our terrain was dry, steppe like characterised by doabs, while the ganges plain was a dense humid jungle.
The ganges remained isolated from the rest of eurasia while we remained a crucial part of it, we dominated the silk road and spread mahayana Buddhism to central and east Asia. Our empires, the Kushan, indo scythian and indo Greek empires were eurasian superpowers. We saw continuous migrations from the Iranian plateau and Central asia. Our trade was concentrated with the west, not the east. Students from around eurasia came to taxila to study. We wrote in the kharosthi script, not brahmi. We remained genetically more similar to populations in Central and Eastern Iran and Central asia and still are. They say half of the Indus region lays on the Indian plate. Even though by area, most of it lays in the eurasian plate, the part that lays on the indian plate is increasingly recognised as a micro plate or a transition zone between the eurasian and Indian plates.
I have made a discord community for those who believe the Indus region was always it's own separate west facing civilisation, you can join from this link: