KARACHI: Jadeed Afsana: Chand Sooraten, a critical study in modern Urdu fiction by poet Saba Ikram, published recently, was placed at a literary sitting to elicit opinion of other writers on the book.

Jamal Naqvi (Alig) of Irteqa Literary Forum read out a brief paper as he introduced the subject. He narrated the development of Urdu short story from the dawn of the 20th century with Sajjad Haider Yaldaram and Sultan Haider Josh on the literary scene, later followed by Prem Chand and a host of Progressive writers. The modernists took the thread from the Progressives around the Sixties (1960), with different themes and styles in prose.

Shafiq Ahmad Shafiq, A. Khayyam, Riaz Siddiqui, Ahmad Saghir Siddiqui and Mahmood Wajid were the evening’s speakers, with each of them defining modern fiction and its main contents such as alienation, loneliness, fear of the unknown, etc. It was entirely different from the Progressive writings stuffed with poverty of the working class people, class conflict and exploitation of the masses.

Shafiq Ahmed Shafiq thought the treatment in the book was not balanced, the weaknesses of the Modernists were not judiciously exposed and that the new fiction had failed to justify its existence.

A. Khayyam, without entering into a controversy, said that the modern story writer provided only a glimmer of light in complete darkness, leaving the inquisitive reader to find his own path.

Riaz Siddiqui found the book to be the best on the subject written so far, despite his reservations on the comments carried by the writer on the Progressives. He, as also Shafiq, found the Isharia (index) carrying the names of the story writers incomplete and ignoring some important names.

Mahmood Wajid said the book was not based on the controversy of Modernism verses Progressivism. It had rather a limited scope, reviewed modern fiction in incomplete form and was not based on ideological bias. Saba Ikram had made an attempt to introduce modern fiction to most readers and he was quite successful in the task, he added.

As the talk was over, the audience, finding noted poet Khalid Atiq in their midst, requested him to recite some verses and the poet was only too happy to oblige. He enthralled the audience with some new verses.

—HA