VOLUME XLI NUMBER 10 OCTOBER 2017

As I googled Muhammad Khalid Akhtar to research his life and times, ¬¬the search engine showed up results for Che Guevara instead. Akhtar would probably have chuckled and found enough fodder there for yet another goofy story.

In his translated collection of short stories What Will You Give for This Beauty?, the Urdu poet, novelist and short story writer, Ali Akbar Natiq presents us with twelve stunning tales of lives shot through with heartrending cruelty, deprivation and injustice, but not without moments of genuine resistance and hope.

Nadeed (1989) by Joginder Paul is an unusual novel in Urdu in the sense that it has no defined plot or storyline but is held together by a metaphor and abstract, metaphysical reflections on this metaphor.

A handsome, new translation of Ismat Chughtai’s memoir, Kaghazi Hai Pairahan (KHP from henceforth), by OUP is cause for celebration in itself. To readers of Indian literature, Chughtai needs no introduction, given how lionized she is in multiple canons.

When Master Abdul Ghani praised Manto for his story ‘Hatak’ and cleared his debt as a mark of respect for the man who had written the story, Krishan Chandar notes that Manto became sad and furious.

Around the time of the centenary of Manto’s birth, a major seminar to commemorate the author’s writings was held at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. At this event, scholars and writers from across South Asia paid tribute to the enfant terrible of Urdu letters, including Intizar Husain from Lahore.

Qurratulain Hyder, fondly known as Annie Apa, seems to be so present in her different characters in the novel Chandni Begum that meeting them in the novel brings back fond memories of her.

‘Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?’ —John Updike

This is a collection of five long stories, rendered into English by the author himself, who first published it in Urdu in 2001 from Karachi, and, from Allahabad in 2003, with title, Savaar aur Doosray Afsanay (lit. The Rider and Other Stories).

When Jameel Akhtar took on the Herculean task of interviewing Qurratulain Hyder at length, her initial reaction was, ‘I don’t give interviews. I’m fed up with people. All those stupid boring questions, the same old stuff repeated over and over again, talking rot—No! No!’

For avid readers of Urdu who may not be its scholars, Urdu prose, especially,
genres such as short stories and novels mostly trigger the names of Prem Chand, Qurratulain Haider, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Rajender Singh Bedi, Krishan Chandar and the like.

The All India Progressive Writers’ Movement (AIPWM) has engendered much interest among scholars and academics. Most histories and critical estimations of Urdu literature dwell on the radicalization it brought about.