Pakistani Literature in English and Urdu

The process of digitization in libraries of Pakistan is at a very initial stage. Pakistan is lagging behind developed countries due to many reasons such as: funding, computer illiteracy and expertise in digitization. Anyhow, some institutions like Higher Education Commission, Punjab University Library, National Library of Pakistan and some private organizations are doing digitization. In social sciences, digitization is being done to preserve the cultural heritage like manuscripts and other old literature relating to history and culture of Pakistan. There are nearly 0.15 million manuscripts in Pakistan in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi and Sanskrit languages. Some are available in libraries of Pakistan while others are in Personal collections. Bibliographies of most of these manuscripts are available. Hence, there is a great need and opportunity to digitize this literature.
This paper presents a status report on digitization initiatives in Pakistan.

This research intends to deeply analyze the treatment of female characters by Bilal Tanweer in his novel The Scatter Here is too Great. It will serve as a reflection of the perception of men about women of Pakistan, living in the early 21st Century.

Abstract: The ideals of manhood have been celebrated in all cultures through interesting stories of adventure, warfare, and love. The concept of Sahibqiran as an ideal king and
world conqueror remained ingrained in the consciousness of the Muslim ruling elite as well as in the common reader’s sensibility throughout Islamic history and across the widespread Islamic territories from the Arabian Peninsula to the South Asian subcontinent.
This article analyzes the concept of Sahibqirani as illustrated by the compositional techniques and thematic devices employed by storytellers of an oral narrative titled
Dastan-e-Amir Hamza Sahibqiran (1855). It explores the historical, political, and cultural backdrop of the honorific Sahibqiran and its romanticization in popular Islamic literature. The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction (2007) is
an English translation of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza Sahibqiran. The work is the longest romance cycle in Urdu, comprising a forty-six-volume written record of an oral storytelling tradition. The stories in this work are centered on the heroics of Amir Hamza, a fictitious character with complex historical and religious affiliations. As a popular Indo-
Islamic romance, it combines history, religion, and culture. This article explores the ideals of manhood and kingship as depicted in this romance and introduces a non-native speaker of Urdu to a new world of collective imagination informed by history, religion, and culture.

Poverty is the root cause of exploitation of the poor at the hands of the rich in the root structure of the society that leads the poor towards the state of self-pity. This study is an interlink between the domains of World Englishes, Freudo-Marxist Literature, Trauma Literature and Postcolonial Literature. The postcolonial context of the subcontinent amidst language appropriation is the major theme that witnesses the phenomenon of exploitation and poverty through the canvas of Freudo-Marxist Literature. The current study attempts to find Marxist themes, predominantly exploitation and poverty, from a short story Death of an Insect by Zakia Mashhadi. The textual qualitative method of analysis proceeds under the operational theoretical lens of Edgar W. Schneider and Karl Marx. The former deals with textual analysis through language appropriation, while the latter deals with thematic analysis through the behaviour of the bourgeoisie towards the proletariat, respectively. The study has found that the upper class, for their vested interests, even for the satisfaction of their ego, brutally exploit the poor working class, who have to suffer and bear all inhuman behaviour without any resistance. Thus, this continuous Vicious Circle of exploitation and poverty cause difficulties and hardships for the poor class.

Review of thought provoking book by Carlo Coppola, which traces the history of the Progressive Writers Movement, the influences which forged it and its post-1947 struggles  in both India and Pakistan. The book is enriched with Coppola's translations of Urdu poetry and culminates with a chapter each on five important  poets inspired by "Progressivism".

This paper is a dialogic analysis of Saadat Hassan Manto's short stories based on partition of 1947. Manto is basically a marvelous and matchless writer in Urdu literature. He experienced partition and its horrors. His work is a true and realistic representation of partition 1947. The stories in the collection Mottled Dawn portray range of voices which is the hallmark of Bakhtine's concept of dialogism. Dialogue and its use is dialogism. A dialogic communication is in the form of dialogue. Mikhail Bakhtine's idea of dialogism explains that there is a range of voices in the text. The voice of the writer and the characters merge with each other. It is the skill of the writer to give vivid and clear picture which is painted not ny the voice of the author but by the voices of the characters.

Link to article here: https://representations.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/spip.php?article49
This paper explores how the mapping the Af-Pak borderland in Aslam's The Blind Man's Garden (2013) occurs through the characters’ displacement along, across and beyond the border, but also through a number of metonymic networks. I contend that the border can be read as a prism, allowing the story to reflect a poetic light on an area made dim by global discourse, and that it ultimately reveals Aslam’s poetics of confluence, inviting the reader to perceive borders as a place of spatial and historical continuity rather than a boundary.

The organisers are now accepting panel and paper submissions for this conference. They invite proposals for panels and papers from scholars and practitioners involved with but not limited to politics and international relations, history, culture, linguistics, economics and other aspects of South Asia. We are especially keen on having papers related to security this year. Proposals for panels should contain a title, a 300-word abstract and names of suggested panel members with their short bio, title, abstracts of their individual papers and email addresses. Each panel will have 4–5 papers pertaining to a common theme. We encourage panels to not limit themselves to the same organisation/university. Proposals for papers should include a title, abstract (300 words), author's name, email addresses, and a 150-word bio and has to be submitted to the conference organisers Arpita Chakraborty and Hari Krishnan at india.postgradconference@dcu.ie no later than 1 December 2017. When submitting a paper please indicate preferred theme(s) and/or up to 6 keywords. All authors will be contacted by the end of January.

the article is dealing with situation emerged after the lynching and murder of a student (Mashal Kan) at Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan, KP Pakistan at the hands of his fellow students for his alleged blasphemous online content. In this article I have dealt with with crisis emerged within ranks of nationalist Awami National Party(ANP). The Mardan case has split the ANP at a crucial time ahead of the elections.

This article is based on a study of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a novel by a Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid. The novel is based on the story of transformation of an expat Pakistani living in New York from a true cosmopolitan to a nationalist. The article will explore the crisis of identity suffered by the protagonist in a new land where he reached as an immigrant student and worker. However, he experienced a resurgence of nationalist and patriotic sentiments within him as 9/ 11 happened in 2001. The force of American nationalism that was imperial in nature, resulting in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iran, triggered resentment in the protagonist who decided to leave America and went back to the country of his origin, Pakistan. During his stay in America, the protagonist
redefined fundamentalism as an imperial tendency in the American system while rejecting the accusations hurled towards him of an Islamic fundamentalist. The article will explain that there is a loss of cosmopolitan virtue in the post 9/11 era and the dream of universal peace and harmony is shattered due to unbridled state ambitions to invade foreign territories. The article will conclude with the assertion that the loss of cosmopolitanism and reassertion of national identities give way to confrontation and intolerance destroying the prospects of peace and harmony in a globalized world.

The current qualitative study endeavoured to investigate the multi-layered meaning of billboard advertisements by elaboration, exploration and elucidation of intended meanings and cultural norms demonstrated in billboard advertisements. For this purpose, the content of eight (8) billboard advertisements was thematically analyzed utilizing Fairclough 3-Dimensional Model: Description interpretation and explanation. The obtained results showed that these billboards had underlying meanings in terms of gender objectification, female portrayal, and social stereotypes as prominent themes. Furthermore, all the selected advertisements were based on a fine designed semiotic study to motivate the users.

This study aims at exploring the element of political strain in the poems of Seamus Heaney and Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the light of post-colonial studies swiveling round Spivak’s Subaltern theory. Both the poets become a forceful voice of subalterns belonging to lower classes and the social groups who are at the margins of society. These universally acknowledged poets belong to two different continents, yet they have startling unity of political themes in their poetry. The research discusses Seamus Heaney’s those poems which highlight the ethnic violence and political exploitation in detail to present what was going around him in his times by his myth-making genius. By taking events from the past, he articulates the atrocities committed on the subalterns in the name of religious rituals and social rites to accomplish political interests in the present. He takes history as a human chain where oppression and suppression have always remained persistent. He takes his themes from his ancestry and pinpoints the problems of common man, the subaltern, whose voice is not heard in the domain of power and change. On the other hand, Faiz’s poetry is famous for its revolutionary themes portraying pitiable plight of the subaltern not only in Pakistan, but also in Africa and Palestine. He advocated for the common cause against oppressors. He being the veteran of undue suffering faced cruelties of the imperialist dictators. Hence his poetry does not confine to mere speculation rather assumes pragmatic and practical existence in venting and voicing the onrush violence over the subaltern. So a thorough analysis of the selected poems of both the poets reveals similarities of the political themes in thus marking them as the exponents of the suppression and atrocities committed in their respective countries. Their poems trace the patterns of violence through the pages of human history. Hence the study of their selected poems confirmed that both felt for humanity and devoted their lives to that cause.

The issue of violence has been a prominent theme in literature. The world we live in today is replete with conflicts that consequently generate aggression and violence. Thus violence finds its way in almost all genres of literature. This research intends to study the acts of violence in Arundhati Roy's debut novel The God of Small Things with special reference to the female characters. As a social and political activist, Roy has her own perception of violence that is reflected through her female characters especially through her chief protagonist Ammu, a divorced woman, who violates the social norms by having a secret love affair with an untouchable labourer. Her mother Mammachi violates the pre-colonial power structures by successfully establishing a pickle factory without the consent of her patriarchal husband. Ammu's aunt Baby kochamma violates against her religion, caste and community by converting to the faith of her beloved and leading a manless life. Finally, Ammu's daughter Rahel, expelled thrice from school for her rebellious behaviour, challenges the age-old love laws by consummating incestuous love for her twin brother. Thus all the four women in the novel, in one way or the other, evolve, adapt, resist and challenge the hegemonic powers and simultaneously modify the stereotypes about gender and violence. And by doing so, they confirm to the Darwinian approach that violence is innate in human nature, constrained by biology and concurrently embedded in culture. Hence, it paves the way for a new generation of researchers to study literature from Darwinian point of view. The most important contribution of this study is to suggest that violent behavior displayed by the female perpetrators has, like their male counterparts, gene-culture co-evolution roots.

Il romanzo Umrao Jaan Ada è considerato dalla critica il capolavoro di Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva (1857-1931), scrittore in lingua urdu originario di Lucknow, la cui attività letteraria si colloca tra la fine del diciannovesimo e l’inizio del ventesimo secolo. L’epoca descritta da Rusva è caratterizzata sia dall’apice del ruolo di Lucknow come città in cui le arti venivano coltivate con passione e apprezzate da un pubblico ampio e sia dalla lenta ed inesorabile decadenza seguita dalla perdita d’indipendenza del Sultanato di Oudh, di cui Lucknow era appunto capitale, conseguentemente al protettorato inglese e al fallimento della
rivolta passata alla storia come il Mutiny avvenuta nel 1956.
La storia raccontata in questo romanzo si snoda in circa trent’anni, dal 1840 al 1870, l’epoca dei regni rispettivamente di Amj ad Alì Shah e Vajid Alì Shah, che segnarono la fine stessa del Regno di Oudh come sultanato indipendente.
Spettatrice privilegiata dello splendore e della decadenza del sultanato e della sua capitale, Lucknow, è Umrao Jaan, cortigiana famosa per la sua abilità nella danza e nel canto, a cui si aggiungeva anche un innegabile talento per la poesia.
Attraverso la storia della sua vita viene descritta un’epoca affascinante e troppo poco conosciuta della storia indiana.

This paper explores six English language novels by writers of Pakistani origin - 'The Murder of Aziz Khan' by Zulfikar Ghose, "The Bride" by Bapsi Sidhwa, 'Season of the Rainbirds' by Nadeem Aslam, "Other Rooms Other Wonders' by Daniyal Mueenuddin, 'The Wandering Falcoln by Jamil Ahmad and 'Thinner Than Skin' by Uzma Aslam Khan.
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315696706.ch5#ref5_1

This chapter appears in "The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Pakistan" edited by Aparna Pande,
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Contemporary-Pakistan/Pande/p/book/9781138903715


https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315696706.ch5#ref5_1

To prevent Pakistan-India tensions from collapsing into a nightmarish Cuban Missile Crisis-type scenario in a South Asian no-man's land, both countries should not only cooperate but also compromise in a joint investigation into the Mumbai attacks, mediated by a third party. Pakistan's Interior Adviser Rehman Malik's official statement on February 12, 2009 about the Mumbai attacks represents a significant step in that direction.

This article examines how recent Pakistani literature in English negotiates the legacies of Partition and the 1971 civil war, focusing on Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002). I argue that Shamsie engages with Urdu literary culture to explore the complex dialectics of memory and forgetting, intimacy and estrangement that affect Pakistani subjectivities in the post‐Partition, post‐Bangladesh period. Shamsie fuses two non‐narrative forms, Urdu lyric poetry and maps, to produce what I call “lyric maps” of Karachi, to interrogate the multiply layered “cartographic anxiety” that affects contemporary Pakistani subjectivities, and to disrupt national narratives that censor – or seek to forget – the loss of Bangladesh. Drawing together questions of narrative form with those of national forgiveness, I end by exploring the novel’s “mapping” of Karachi as a conflicted, but potentially productive, site for processes of reconciliation structured by difference and discontinuity.