LAKEER

Credits

The end roll: the people on this record who did the work and were left off the sleeve, then the sources, then the tools.

With

People on this record whose work outlasted their names. Where the album names someone, they're named here. Where it doesn't, they're here anyway.

The builders of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa the drains UNREAD
The reciters of the Rigveda a thousand years without a wrong word SEVEN RIVERS
The stonecutters of Ashoka's edicts the first words we can read DEVANAMPIYA
The qawwals of Nizamuddin every Thursday since CHISHTIAN
Everyone who kept singing Kabir, Lal Ded, Nanak, Mirabai, Tukaram and Bulleh Shah the reason the poems survived MAA BOLI
The weavers of Dhaka the muslin DIWAN
The Indian soldiers of 1914–18 the letters home, in code ENFIELD
The labourers of the Uganda Railway 660 miles of metre gauge GIRMIT
The Goan clerks at every station the accounts GIRMIT
The settlers and the herders of the Sutlej colonies the squares, and the land before them ABADKAR
The medical students of Dhaka, and Pearu Sardar a monument in one night EKUSHE
Abul Barkat, Abdul Jabbar, Rafiq Uddin Ahmed, Abdus Salam, Shafiur Rahman and Ohiullah 21 and 22 February 1952 EKUSHE
Munier Chowdhury Kabar; a Bengali keyboard; his students EKATTUR
Sebastian D'Souza, Reis Magos arranger THE ARRANGER
Chic Chocolate (Antonio Xavier Vaz), Aldona trumpet THE ARRANGER
Chris Perry, Margão conductor, uncredited THE ARRANGER
Anthony Gonsalves, Majorda violin, and his students THE ARRANGER
And the rest of the string section THE ARRANGER
Jayaben Desai and the Grunwick strikers two years on a picket line RIVERS
Everyone who queued at eleven for the daytimers Wednesday afternoons DAYTIMER

Sources

The books this record leaned on. Every link on the site goes to the institution or reference that holds the real thing.

Antoinette Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Duke University Press, 2005).
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Oxford University Press, 1998).
Andrew Robinson, The Indus: Lost Civilizations (Reaktion, 2015).
Gregory L. Possehl, The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective (AltaMira, 2002).
Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton (trans.), The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Wendy Doniger (trans.), The Rig Veda (Penguin Classics, 1981).
Frits Staal, Discovering the Vedas (Penguin, 2008).
Charles Allen, Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (Little, Brown, 2012).
Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashoka in Ancient India (Harvard University Press, 2015).
Romila Thapar, Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (Oxford University Press, 1961).
William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean (Pen & Sword, 2014).
Sebastian R. Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Bruce B. Lawrence (trans.), Nizam ad-din Awliya: Morals for the Heart (Paulist Press, 1992), a translation of Fawa'id al-Fu'ad.
Ranjit Hoskote (trans.), I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Děd (Penguin Classics, 2011).
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (trans.), Songs of Kabir (NYRB Classics, 2011).
Dilip Chitre (trans.), Says Tuka (Penguin, 1991).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Roger Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire (Faber, 2015).
A. K. Priolkar, The Goa Inquisition (Bombay, 1961).
Délio de Mendonça, Conversions and Citizenry: Goa under Portugal 1510–1610 (Concept, 2002).
Paul Axelrod and Michelle A. Fuerch, "Flight of the Deities: Hindu Resistance in Portuguese Goa", Modern Asian Studies 30.2 (1996).
Supriya Gandhi, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Harvard University Press, 2020).
Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth (Penguin, 2017).
Wheeler M. Thackston (trans.), The Baburnama (Modern Library, 2002).
William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Nick Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World (Pluto Press, 2nd edn 2012).
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf, 2014).
William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Christy Campbell, The Maharajah's Box (HarperCollins, 2000).
Anita Anand, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary (Bloomsbury, 2015).
David Omissi (ed.), Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers' Letters, 1914–18 (Macmillan, 1999).
Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (Yale, 2019).
Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State (Sage, 2005).
Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Hurst / University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Brij V. Lal, Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (1983; new edn 2004).
Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism (Macmillan, 1971).
Imran Ali, The Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Princeton University Press, 1988).
David Gilmartin, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (University of California Press, 2015).
Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War: A People's History of India's Second World War (Bodley Head, 2015).
B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936; annotated critical edition, Verso, 2014).
Srinath Raghavan, India's War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–1945 (Allen Lane, 2016).
Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, new edn 2017).
Lucy P. Chester, Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester University Press, 2009).
Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Penguin, 1998).
Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition (Kali for Women, 1998).
Amrita Pritam, Pinjar (1950); English translation by Khushwant Singh as The Skeleton.
Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn 2020).
Badruddin Umar, The Emergence of Bangladesh, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 2004).
Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Harvard University Press, 2013).
Jahanara Imam, Of Blood and Fire: The Untold Story of Bangladesh's War of Independence, trans. Mustafizur Rahman (1989).
Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram (Knopf, 2013).
Naresh Fernandes, Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay's Jazz Age (Roli Books, 2012).
Gregory D. Booth, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai's Film Studios (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Margret Frenz, Community, Memory, and Migration in a Globalizing World: The Goan Experience, c. 1890–1980 (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Mahmood Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain (Frances Pinter, 1973).
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, No Place Like Home (Virago, 1995).
Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson, Striking Women: Struggles and Strategies of South Asian Women Workers from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet (Lawrence & Wishart, 2018).
Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Rajinder Dudrah, Bhangra: Birmingham and Beyond (Punch, 2007).
Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk and Ashwani Sharma (eds), Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (Zed Books, 1996).

Thanks

The museums, libraries and archives linked from every chapter, for keeping the real things.
Everyone who writes in with a correction.

Made with

Music generated with Suno, from lyrics and prompts written for this record.
Lyrics, research and site content drafted with Claude (Anthropic).
Illustrations made with AI image generation, each labelled on the page. None of them is a historical image.
Type set in Eczar, Kalam, Source Serif 4 and Inter, with Noto Nastaliq Urdu, Noto Naskh Arabic, Noto Sans Gurmukhi, Noto Serif Bengali, Noto Sans Gujarati and Noto Sans Malayalam for the other scripts (all under the SIL Open Font License).

How it was made explains what each tool did, and what it got wrong.

LAKEER. A record by Tariq Fernandes.