A Japanese brush master and a Lahore qalam compare notes
Hamza sits with a shodo teacher visiting Karachi and compares brush and reed, breath and angle, and the moment in each tradition when a student is allowed to stop copying.
Cutting your first reed pen
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Show notes
Cutting your first reed pen
Before a student of Nastaliq writes a word, they learn to cut a pen. Hamza describes the reed, the knife, the angle of the nib, and the year his Lahore teacher made him practise strokes and nothing else.
- Choosing a reed: where it grows, how it dries, why some are useless
- The cut, the slit and the angle that decides the whole script
- Walnut ink, soot ink and the recipe his teacher never wrote down
- A year of single strokes before the first letter
- What a badly cut pen does to your hand after an hour
Hamza will post a short video of the cut on the show page. Go slowly, the knife is sharp.
Transcript
Assalamu alaikum, and welcome. I am Hamza Siddiqui and this is Reed Pen and Walnut Ink, a show about calligraphy and the people who still make letters by hand. I want to start at the very beginning, before any letter, with the pen. When I arrived at my teacher's house in Lahore, I expected to write. Instead he handed me a dried reed and a knife, and for a week I cut pens. Then for a year I made single strokes with them. Not one word. Today I will take you through that cut, the slit, and the angle that makes Nastaliq possible at all. I will talk about walnut ink and soot ink and the recipe my teacher kept in his head. And I will tell you why that year of strokes was the kindest thing he ever did for me. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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