KARACHI: Noted fiction writer Shaukat Siddiqui was chief guest at a literary sitting at Irteqa on Sunday evening while Mustafa Karim, also a known fiction writer, was in the chair.

On a short visit to Karachi from England, MK was keen to know about the developments Urdu fiction has gone through during the past one hundred years.

It was not the same short story which was popular in Prem Chand’s time or even before, he said and read out a brief paper on the subject, which he had written being inspired by Saba Ikram’s recent publication ‘Jadeed Afsana.’

Defining the features of ‘Naya Afsana’, MK praised Dr Wazir Agha, Shamsur Rehman Farooqui and Dr Gopichand Narang for adequately introducing and popularizing it, the genre not known to even most critics and writers, because modern literary theories are not taught in universities.

Quoting Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simon de Beauvoir, the masters of existentialism, he said it was the very basis of modernism.

Shaukat Siddiqui emphasized the role of fiction in the development and change of a society. ‘Jadeediat’, he thought, meant a change from narrative to the new form of writing and is not opposed to Marxism. However, there are writers determined to create chaos in literature and such people should be discouraged in their efforts to propagate some misguided theories. He hinted to Gopichand Narang as one such person.

Rauf Niazi, a literary critic, talked about the developments found in the writings of the Progressives before and after 1949, when the Progressive Writers’ Association, under the influence of communist parties in India and Pakistan, was passing through drastic changes. Shaukat Siddiqui admitted the error in policy judgments but at the same time recalled the revolutionary changes brought about in Urdu literature through the efforts of the progressive writers.

Wahid Bashir and Saba Ikram also spoke. Later, Zaki Usm-ani recited his ghazals.—Hasan Abidi