The Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, LUMS, hosted an enlightening session titled “The Contemporary Indian Urdu Novel: A Literary Discussion” that explored the evolving genre of the Indian Urdu novel in the twenty-first century and tackled crucial questions regarding its wider socio-political implications. The subject was adequately addressed through critical commentary offered by three stellar Urdu critics and fiction writers from India who partook in the session virtually (in order of their presentations): Dr. Abdus Samad, author of eleven novels and several collections of short stories and winner of, among other prestigious awards, the Life Achievement Award from the Urdu Academy in Bihar; Dr. Sarwar-ul-Huda, Associate Professor at the Department of Urdu at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi; and Dr. Shafey Kidwai, Chairman of the Department of Mass Communications at Aligarh Muslim University.

Dr. Nasir Abbas Nayyar (LUMS), Pakistan’s eminent literary critic and an award-winning author of the Urdu language opened the session as the host. He provided a brief historical overview of factors shaping the contemporary form of the Urdu novel, especially in India, and the contribution of twenty-first century socio-political movements in this process. This prelude not only set the stage for the discussion that followed but also offered a context to the audience helping them keep pace with the scholarly exchange of ideas.                                                                                                                             

The first presenter was Dr. Abdus Samad who read an excerpt from his latest Urdu novel System. His narrative offered a glimpse of the shifting thematic concerns of the contemporary Indian Urdu novel, thus providing an apt prelude to the subsequent discussions by Dr. Muhammad Sarwarul Hoda and Dr. Shafey Kidwai. Dr. Hoda shed light on how the Indian Urdu novel illustrates a preoccupation with the personal human experience, often at the expense of the larger socio-political contexts that it occurs in. He argued that without creative engagement with historiography and culture, a novelist cannot be born and the tendency to let the personal subsume the political often yields little more than what he called “thinking in pieces, or small canvases.”

Dr. Shafay Kidwai added another dimension to the discussion by highlighting the influence of digital technology on the Indian Urdu novel. He argued that the construction of an immersive virtual reality in the modern age distorts the human perception of reality and consequently, of realism in the Indian Urdu novel, which is increasingly gravitating toward a postmodernist skepticism of reality and truth.

The session concluded with a note of thanks by Dr. Nadhra Shahbaz Khan, Director of the Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature. Drawing upon her experience as an art historian, Dr. Khan stated that the novel to her is no less than “sketching pictures with words” that carry all nuances of narrative paintings. The session was instrumental in opening up the debate not only on what the contemporary Indian Urdu novel is, but also what it offers to its readers across the border and beyond.