The recent Karachi Literature Festival held a few book launches, providing visitors an introduction to significant literary works published during 2011. Of the Urdu publications let me refer to the two works of fiction launched on this occasion. The first was a novel, Maut ki Kitab, an Indian publication, whose author, Khalid Javaid, was present at the festival.

The second was a collection of short stories published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, under the title Qayam Deen. The author, Ali Akbar Natiq, is a young writer from a village in the vicinity of Okara. With his village roots, he brings with him a rich experience of rural life exuberantly expressed in these stories. In a brief introduction to the book Natiq tells his readers that he has remained engaged in the study of fiction without caring about the art of short story or the techniques employed. He is also sorry for not referring to any ideology or philosophy as his source of inspiration. His passion, according to him, has just been to portray life as he has experienced it.

Natiq stands true to his words. As we go through his stories we hardly find him involved in anything other then the life he has experienced.

Living in an age dominated by ideological concerns, it is hard to think of a writer who has no such concerns. We so often judge writers on the basis of their ideological commitment. But Natiq carries no such baggage with him.

If he is at all committed to anything, it is not any idea, or a philosophical thought, or an ideological mission. It is simply a phenomenon of life, the rural life as he has lived it.

Moreover, modernistic trends in our fiction seem to have no attraction for Natiq. Rooted deep in his soil he is not carried away by any such trend. His is a rural talent, pure and simple, engaged in trying to create what he calls “living scenes of actual life around him”. But here too he stands distinguished from contemporaries as well as predecessors who are known for their realistic mode of expression. That is because of his typical rural sensibility. No doubt the Urdu novel and short story have from the very start relied on the realistic mode of expression. But this has mainly been urban oriented. It is only off and on that the village makes its appearance in Urdu’s realistic fiction.

Rarer is the appearance of Punjab’s village. For this appearance we are deeply indebted to Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Balwant Singh. Natiq should perhaps feel more at home with Qasmi as his predecessor. But there is one impediment in the way. What lends charm to the rural life in Qasmi’s stories is the romantic touch imported to it by the writer. Natiq, on the other hand, is a realist. He likes to depict life as it actually is.

We see in the stories a return to realism, which had receded in the background because of the emergence of a new trend in our short story, a fondness for symbolic and abstract modes of expression. In the hands of this writer the realistic mode of expression is rid of elements foreign to it. Here we see Punjab’s rural life portrayed in a faithful way. The characters we find are steeped deep in their culture. They appear to be the true sons of the soil. They are possessed with vigour and rusticity that the soil has infused in them.

So Ali Akbar Natiq stands unrivalled in his experience of Punjab’s rural culture.

It is this experience which distinguishes him from his contemporaries. And it is this experience because of which his stories enjoy a distinctive place in the world of Urdu short story.