Skip to content Skip to footer

Narendra Pachkhédé

is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva. His latest book is Form as History – When History No Longer Requires Us (Daraja Press, 2026).

65 articles published

The Banality of Watchability: Nuremberg and Western Moral Failure

Philosophy POLITICS

The Banality of Watchability: Nuremberg and Western Moral Failure

Nuremberg restages justice as heritage cinema—grand sets, solemn tones, clever repartee—yet in doing so, it reveals the deepest irony of accountability: law as theatre for a heritage conscience, hollow where it should confront. “The indeterminacy of legal argument means that international law is less a set of determinate rules than a practice of presenting claims…

ByNarendra PachkhédéSeptember 25, 20250Comments

A Crooked House in Paris

A Crooked House in Paris

From Rahbani’s aphorism to Mouawad’s absurd wedding, Lebanon’s stage insists on today when tomorrow never comes. “There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we…

ByNarendra PachkhédéSeptember 6, 20250Comments

No Morality as Such: Alasdair MacIntyre in the Age of Gaza

Philosophy POLITICS

No Morality as Such: Alasdair MacIntyre in the Age of Gaza

“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.” — Aimé Césaire. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 31. Why should an ordinary person, with no taste for philosophy and no patience for academic quarrels, care about a Scottish philosopher who…

ByNarendra PachkhédéAugust 30, 20250Comments

Sholay at Fifty: A Cinema Of Enchantment

Sholay at Fifty: A Cinema Of Enchantment

Sholay at Fifty: A Cinema Of Enchantment To understand why Sholay (1975) endures after fifty years, one must recall the late Jesuit scholar Father Gaston Roberge's pivotal insight that Indian cinema is best understood as anthropological. In The Theory of Indian Cinema (1985), Roberge emphasised that Indian films should not be judged merely by…

ByNarendra PachkhédéAugust 23, 20250Comments

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

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

Philosophy POLITICS

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

Philosophy POLITICS

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

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

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

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

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

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