SHORT story is Urdu’s most popular prose genre. Its counterpart in Urdu poetry, ghazal, has faced many challenges and adversaries and, of late, ghazal’s reign is threatened by a steep rise of modern Urdu ‘nazm’, or poem.
But short story still reigns supreme in Urdu prose. Though in the west, novel is more popular than short story and in western literature fiction often means novel, in the context of Urdu literature short story, or short fiction, as it is alternatively called, is the most popular genre of prose.
Here a question rises naturally: how short, or long, should a piece of short fiction be? While the general definition says that a short story should be short enough to be read in one sitting, some critics, such as J.A. Cuddon, have stressed that classification of a short story on the basis of length is not much helpful. But length does count, as writes Cuddon in his Dictionary of literary terms and literary theory, “in athletic terms, if we take the novella as a ‘middle distance’ book/story, then the short story comes into the ‘100/200 meter class’ ”. And then he mentions some very ‘short’ short stories, as a ghost story by Kliest (800 words) and some very ‘long’ short stories, as D.H. Lawrence’s short story ‘The Fox’ (30,000 words). The fact is short story has developed into a form that is very flexible. In a nutshell, short story is shorter than novella and it concerns one major theme with fewer characters.
In Urdu too, we have had some very long short stories, such as ‘Zindagi ke mor par’ by Krishan Chandr (about 60 pages), and some very ‘brief’ short stories, as some pieces included in Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s Siyah haashiye (some of them hardly a page long). Latterly, Urdu short story has developed into a very short fiction: stories consisting of a few hundred words, or even 100 words. Such works of imaginative literature are often called flash fiction or even micro fiction.
The large-size, 1120-page, anthology of Urdu short story, published in the June-Dec 2017 issue of Lauh, has a few ‘very short’ short stories but none of them can be called flash fiction. However, the anthology offers a rare view of the entire history of Urdu short story through the pieces of short fiction written by some of Urdu’s well-known and some not-so-well-known authors.
Divided into six periods that Urdu short story has gone through, right from beginning to our times, the magazine proffers some 190 select short stories, many of them landmarks of our literary history. Not wanting to be entangled in the debate as to who Urdu’s first short story writer was — Premchand, Yildirim or Rashidul Khairi — and who Urdu’s greatest short story writer is or was, the editor has arranged all the short stories in alphabetical order, making divisions on the basis of chronology. He has shed some light on the eras and movements in his brief overview included as epilogue.
The first era includes short stories from the early years of 20th century, when Urdu short story was born, till the appearing of Angare, a collection of short stories dubbed as the precursor to the Progressive Movement in the subcontinent. The third portion marks the era between 1936, when the Progressive Movement began, and 1947. The section ends at 1947, since independence serves as watershed.
In our literature, Modernism made its presence felt in or around 1960, so the next section covers stories written between 1947 and early 1960s. Then 1960s, 1970s and 1980s brought their own issues and sensitivities. In the last section are short stories written during the last 25 years or so.
It is indeed a labour of love and a lot of tears and sweat must have gone into it. The editor, Mumtaz Ahmed Sheikh, has been bringing out bulky issues of his magazine and some previous issues too have been remarkable ones, but this one has surpassed them all. As he has mentioned in his editorial note, after the closing down of “giant literary Urdu magazines” such as Nuqoosh, Auraq and Funoon, a platform was needed where intellectuals and writers could express their views regardless of their political leanings or ideological affinities. Lauh is one such platform. It is indeed one of those literary journals that are successfully trying to fill the gap created due to the closure of some old and historic journals.
This issue of Lauh, a twice-a- year publication from Rawalpindi published under the aegis of Old Ravians, puts the fifth and sixth issues together, but makes up for what the readers had missed. It brings together the best of Urdu short stories of the last 115 years and one can see how Urdu short story originated, developed, flourished and conquered the minds and hearts of the readers.
Published in Dawn, November 27th, 2017
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.