AFTER the inaugural session, the first day of LLF kicked off with a session in tribute to the literary contributions of Intizar Husain. Ikramullah Khan shared the fact that though Husain was a staunch fan of Pakistan, he criticised leftists, but still participated in their literary gatherings. Nasir Abbas Nayyar analysed the works of Husain in the light of postcolonialism and called him the first postcolonial writer in Urdu. He stated that Husain addressed all the big questions of his era in his writings.

The session that focused on another literary giant of Urdu fiction was ‘Aag ka Darya: Partition’s River of Fire’. The session was energised by the sharp and witty remarks of Arfa Syeda Zehra. She said that Aag ka Darya starts from the prehistoric era coming up to recent times, while addressing the most fundamental questions of what is freedom, and its limits. The central theme of this novel is time. Moreover, she stated that Pakistan, as a society, has lost civility and ethics. Instead, we issue orders and fatwas. Qurratulain Hyder, on the other hand, does not issue any orders or fatwas. She gives an individual the right to live.

Asif Farrukhi clarified that a campaign was engineered against Hyder by some male critics. They maligned her because they could not tolerate a strong and independent woman who denied their demands and proposals. Furthermore, he stated that this is a novel in which the language also changes with the changing times. The session ended on the note that Aag ka Darya is both a tragedy and an epic.

After holding two sessions on legendary figures Husain and Hyder, there was a session on ‘Emerging Trends in Urdu Fiction’. It was moderated by Farrukhi and the panel comprised three young fiction writers of Urdu: Bilal Minto, Irfan Ahmed Urfi, and Mubashir Ali Zaidi. Instead of focusing on the academic debate on the origin or the merits and demerits of contemporary Urdu fiction, the discussion was focused on the imagination, inspiration, and aspiration of the three panellists.

All three agreed that writing short stories is a way of expressing their response to what they observe around them. They also agreed that initially they had thought that readers of Urdu fiction are decreasing in number, however, after getting published they realised that there are still many people who want to read Urdu fiction. Farrukhi cited how Zaidi’s experimentation of writing 100-word stories and publishing them on Facebook attracted thousands of readers to this creative expression.

Zaidi further elaborated that there is a need to reach out to the audience and attract them towards whatever is being written in Urdu. Minto said that although it is true that the urban middle class prefers English literature, there is still a vast majority in rural areas that wants to read Urdu. The question, however, is how to give them access to good quality and affordable books.

Two sessions were solely conducted by C.M. Naim, a renowned scholar of Urdu language and literature. The first of these sessions was titled ‘Old Urdu Journals: a Disappearing Heritage’. He showed slides of dozens of scanned copies of old Urdu journals and discussed their origins, history, importance, and social impact. He also described in detail the missing issues of these journals that are not to be found in any library in Pakistan, India, Britain, or the US. He elaborated on how these journals shaped the linguistic and political identity among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs as all of them read these journals. According to him we can also analyse the environment in which these realities manifested and evolved.

The images in these journals are also a true reflection of the middle-class aesthetics of that era. The advertisements can be used to study the psychology of the social set-up of those times. Naim shared several interesting anecdotes including an opinion quoted from one of the journals that more women in Gujranwala and Amritsar are educated than in Delhi and Lahore.

He lamented the quality of research being conducted in the Urdu literature departments of our universities. To a question of how these old copies can be preserved, he responded that if no one is ready to read these old journals or books then the question of preserving them is irrelevant.

The second session conducted by Naim was dedicated to the first 60 years of Urdu spy literature, that is, from the 1890s onward. He started his talk by differentiating between two types of spy literature: mysteries and thrillers. While the Sherlock Holmes series of Arthur Conan Doyle and novels of Agatha Christie can be categorised as mystery, the majority of Urdu spy fiction falls under the category of thrillers.

Naim stated that after the destruction of Delhi, Lahore became the hub of all literary productions in India. The earliest spy fiction was either literal translations or creative adaptations of the popular English and French spy literature of the time. Zafar Umar and Tirath Ram Ferozepuri became highly popular by translating the works of George W.M. Reynolds, Eugène Sue, Maurice Leblanc, and Edgar Wallace, among others. This era ended with the arrival of Ibn Safi on the horizon of Urdu thriller novels.