Muhammad Naeem

University of the Punjab | PU · Department of Urdu

Binary thinking is a way of understanding the world around. It is used to oversimplify the complex situations and reality. Dichotomous way of thinking usually uses an innate hierarchy of the tow objects or situations it makes binary of Urdu Novel since its inception used binary opposites to foreground the characters it likes or dislikes. In this ar...

The cultural relations of Turks and Subcontinent are centuries old. These relations got expression in literature. Early works of Urdu prose presents Turkey as country of fantasy. During the second half of nineteenth century, with the spread of print and colonial regime, Urdu prose incorporated this worldly matters in it. The newspapers and serial f...

Novel has created as many forms as the novels have been written so for. Starting from realism it has went through a lot of transformations and adopted or invented generic techniques to narrate almost everything human. In Urdu, novel usually concerned more about the social life and social change it depicted. By maintaining a liquidating equilibrium...

Urdu fiction went through a substantial change during the colonial period. The colonial discourse narrated and disseminated through different technologies of educational subjugation and epistemological usurpation in official and historical works brought forth some serious changes in the world view of Urdu fiction writers. They discovered and presen...

The parallel world of words is called fiction. The imagination of writer uses her/his everyday experience and language to create this world. Rafique Hussain, an Urdu Short story writer, had spent decades in Terai's Jungles of northern India. He uses his wildlife experience to construct his fictional world. This makes his short stories a world of wo...

Colonial predicament made the life and its understanding complex in the Subcontinent. To represent this complexity, Urdu writers found the polyphonic genre, i.e. the novel helpful. They used different techniques of characterization to narrate the social hierarchy of characters. The novel also provided the space for them to attract the people with e...

Colonial predicament brought forth new social possibilities and challenges for Indian subjects. To accommodate, assimilate or resist these changes they used printed word. This technology provided them the space to understand, interpret and construct the situation and disseminate their thoughts and reactions in forms of literary genres. They introdu...

Urdu Scholarship, which depends heavily on positivist paradigm, usually does not consider the social variables in interpreting the literary works. The social hierarchy prevalent in North India has strong imprints on Urdu literati of 19th century. In this article Sharar's Ghaib Daan Dulhan has been analyzed from a social perspective. Representationa...

To determine the social status of a person, Sorokin coined the idea ofsocial space. This theme is useful in analyzing the relative position of aperson in her/his group and her/his horizontal or vertical movementwithin and to other groups. Novel is a symbolic space, which makespossible for writers to construct the relative social status of character...

This article explores the normalization of Ashraf Culture and Colonizers in Majalis un-Nisa. It is argued that the colonial authorities tried at their capacity to keep themselves at length from the colonized physically and disseminated the discourse of colonial difference to present themselves as role models symbolically. While preparing the curric...

Identity is the construction of the cultural process of a people, i.e. the social milieu in turn defines and shapes humans into the kinds of individuals they are. This shaping of identity is carried further and represented through the literature of a culture as well. It is the characters which come to stand for certain traits and the kinds of indiv...

To determine the social status of a person, Sorokin coined the idea of Social space. This theme is useful in analyzing the relative position of a person in one's group and one's horizontal or vertical movement within and to other groups. Novel is a symbolic space, which makes possible for writers to construct the relative social status of character...

New forms of knowledge structured by the British colonizers brought about epistemological shifts and helped creating new genres in vernacular languages of India. Urdu novel of 19th century presents these shifts and also narrates the reformative pulls of Ashraf to re-invent, and, or, preserve the tradition. This article analyses the didactic Urdu no...

The article takes account of the colonial archives and analyses the strategies of colonizers, which brought about not only the new forms of knowledge in India but also restructured the society and statecraft here. I argue that the colonial administration developed the public instruction department to impart a new character to the natives and used t...