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Narendra Pachkhédé

is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.

37 articles published

This Threshold We Call Form: Reading No Man’s Land

“Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers... Live the questions now.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1934), p. 35 We met…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJuly 6, 20250Comments

A User’s Guide to Western Moral Clarity

“Every empire, however grandiose, is a fragile construction, not unlike a literary text, subject to interpretation, rewriting, and even dismantling.” —Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 331. Let us begin not with politics, but with a parable. On 13th October 2022, Josep Borrell, the European Union's chief diplomat,…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJune 21, 20250Comments

In the Shadow of Sovereignty

“The world has turned its order upside down; Time has traded one fate for another.” — Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ca. 1010 CE, trans. Dick Davis, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (Penguin Classics, 2006) Vali Nasr's Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History arrives not a moment too soon. With a nuclear…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJune 19, 20250Comments

The Cross-Examiner of Memory: Marcel Ophuls and the Documentary as Moral Reckoning

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men.” — Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1947) Marcel Ophuls died on May 24, 2025, at the age of 97. His death passed with quiet headlines, but the silence belies the magnitude of his…

ByNarendra PachkhédéJune 6, 20250Comments

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: A Liberator of the African Imagination

“Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it.” — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics: Essays (Heinemann, 1981), p. 72. As the sun sets on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's life, what vanishes is not just…

ByNarendra PachkhédéMay 29, 20250Comments

The Witness and the Wound: Seeing with Sebastião Salgado

“I photograph to testify, not to preserve.” - Sebastião Salgado, quoted in Lélia Wanick Salgado (ed.), Genesis (Cologne: Taschen, 2013), 14. It was Fall 2005, and I had made my way to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris to see Sebastião Salgado: Territories and Lives. More than an exhibition, it was a map…

ByNarendra PachkhédéMay 27, 20250Comments

Art History’s Unfinished Argument with Itself

"Which art history should I teach in Khartoum?” —Salah M. Hassan, an art historian, critic, and curator, Cornell University. Art history occupies a unique position in the longue durée of intellectual thought. It is a narrative of images and a history of ideas inscribed in pigment and stone, language, philosophy, and shifting regimes of visibility.…

ByNarendra PachkhédéMay 18, 20250Comments

Histories of the Ephemeral: The Qawwali Legacy of Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad

“ To be a qawwal is more than being a performer, more than being an artist, One must be willing to release one's mind and soul from one's body to achieve ecstasy through music. Qawwali is enlightenment itself.” — Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Gateway Theatre in Chicago, 1993 in an interview to Andy Carvin The…

ByNarendra PachkhédéMay 11, 20250Comments

Sacred, Seen, and Shifting: The New Language of Islamic Art

“What can ‘art’ mean in a culture where the primary organ of perception is not the eye or the ears, but the heart? It requires a shift from the visible to the sensible, in which attention is directed not outwardly toward the object, but inwardly, within the heart.” — Wendy M. K. Shaw, What…

ByNarendra PachkhédéMay 9, 20250Comments

Is Pluralism the New Orthodoxy in Global Art?

“What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased.” —Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham,…

ByNarendra PachkhédéMay 4, 20250Comments