The Dancing Peacock
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From India to Iran, via Bombay and its Parsis, Rabindranath Tagore and a forgotten book
Elements of Indian culture and pre-Islamic Persia that survive in India shape modern Iranian culture, even today.
Adhiraj Parthasarathy & Mohammad Dawood
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Clean chit, taluka, zilla: How Persian lingers on in India’s legal and revenue language
Persian ceased to be the language of the East India Company by 1837, but its vocabulary persists despite several attempts to purge these terms.
Adhiraj Parthasarathy & Mohammad Dawood
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How an unusual Persian ghazal links the music of Kundan Lal Saigal, Iqbal Bano and Coke Studio
Straddling generations, all three have adapted and performed ‘Ma ra Ba Ghamza Kusht’, attributed to a little-remembered poet Mirza ‘Qateel’ Lahori.
Adhiraj Parthasarathy & Mohammad Dawood
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‘Saffronisation of Doordarshan’: After DD News unveils new logo, social media users express alarm
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How Guwahati became the second-most polluted city in the world
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‘Do Aur Do Pyaar’ review: Adultery saga has a maths problem
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How Karnataka’s once-powerful Janata Dal Secular was reduced to a Hindutva offshoot
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Salman Rushdie’s new memoir un-wounds the ‘knife’ of language
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Jigar Moradabadi and the unmatched lyrical brilliance of his unfinished sarapa
While steeped in the Indian and Persian Classical tradition, the images he conjures up, of dancing peacocks, prancing gazelles, bend convention.
Adhiraj Parthasarathy & Mohammad Dawood
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How the modern Persian qawwali canon emerged from an Uttarakhand shrine 90 years ago
Inspired by a 13th-century Sufi saint, the anthology Naghmat-us-Sama’ by Syed Noorul Hasan has contributed to the persistence of Persian in modern-day music.
Adhiraj Parthasarathy & Mohammad Dawood
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How Indo-Persian, the language of cosmopolitan India for six centuries, fell into decline
The first of the six-part ‘Dancing Peacock’ series charts the literary tradition and indigenous roots of Indo-Persian as well as its enduring legacy today.
Adhiraj Parthasarathy & Mohammad Dawood
Video
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