Proceedings of the annual Simorgh Conference, 2002. The papers included in this volume address the politics of cultural change and domination in the sub-continent as they appear in language and in issues relating to language. This is done in papers that examine the vocabularies of individual texts as well as of cultural discourses.

Hema Raza argues that the explicit and implicit presence of the mohajir in Shame allows Rushdie to engage with migration as a phenomenon that can re-imagine the nation. Niaz Zaman’s paper asks how we can avoid over-privileging English at the expense of other languages, while at the same time making English available to all so that the skills which are acquired through English may not be the preserve only of the rich, only of a few. Lala Rukh contends that a radical change took place in the arts with the displacement of the sub-continental languages and the disruption of Civilisational Thought; the new visual language of western art that replaced the old has become the means to gain access to the corridors of power in art, and to exclude the ‘other’ from the ‘high culture’ of the westernised elite. Najma Sadeque points out that virtually the entire world today has fallen victim to knowledge put to the wrong uses, or to ignorance or egocentric and fallacious ideas that are posited as knowledge; we see this in the heavy use of jargon to deliberately make the matter incomprehensible, and in the transfer into common usage of "buzzwords" referring to specific processes put deliberately into practice but made to seem as natural outcomes of economic behaviour. Shefali Chandra examines the manner in which the newly emerging female domain of upper class Bombay city was adapted to the requirements of the colonial language of power in the mid to late nineteenth century, and alternatively, how the English language was shaped to accommodate this newly defined female sphere. She discusses in depth the cases of the Alexandra Native Girls’ English Institution, founded in Bombay in 1863, and still in operation today, and the government supervised Female Normal – or teacher training school – founded in 1869. Shahid Nadeem focuses on some of the constraints of censorship under which the print media and the performing arts in Pakistan operate. Zahida Hina elaborates, with the aid of examples from history, poetry, literature, abusive language, proverbs and idioms, stories of women as unintelligent yet cunning and conniving beings that are continually repeated, so much so that these stories and perceptions have become fixed not only in men’s minds but also in women’s. Rubina Saigol, by unpacking the discourse of the Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper developed by the Pakistani Ministry of Finance and the Planning Commission, attempts to demonstrates how the dominant economic language of our times seeks to silence dissent by appropriating the language of opposition. Tariq Rehman’s paper analyses some of the connections between language and violence.