Abstract
Introduction
2010 marked the birth centenary of Ahmed Ali (1910-1994), one of the great pioneers of South Asian English fiction and, for a long while, the only internationally known writer of Pakistani English fiction. The immense changes that have taken place since and the increasing interest in Pakistani English Literature were reflected by the publication of special issues on Pakistan of Granta and other international journals. There were also important critical works by Cara Cilano and Masood Raja, a debut poetry volume by Shadab Zeest Hashmi, new fiction by established writers Hanif Kureishi, Tariq Ali and Roopa Farooki and notable debuts by Anis Shivani, Maha Khan Philips and Haider Warraich. There were incisive political analyses by Khaled Ahmed and Zahid Hussain, a topical autobiography by Fatima Bhutto and English translations of early women’s memoirs – respectively, by a Princess of Pataudi and by Atiya Fyzee Rahamin. There were also accomplished translations by Musharraf Farooqi and Yasmeen Hameed.
Pakistani English fiction continued to gather awards. Daniyal Mueenuddin’s story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders won the regional (Eurasia) Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book, the O. Henry Award, The Story Prize and The Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. Aamer Hussein’s novella Another Gulmohar Tree was shortlisted for the regional (Eurasia) Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. Kamila Shamsie’s fifth novel Burnt Shadows received the Anisfield Wolf Award, the AOLA award and the Nord-Sud Award; Uzma Aslam Khan’s third novel Geometry of God received the IPPY Bronze Award; Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Story of A Widow and H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy were shortlisted for the inaugural DSC award which Naqvi won in 2011; Bina Shah’s fourth novel A Season For Martyrs, published first in an Italian edition, received the Il Mondo Di Bambini International Prize; Maniza fourth Naqvi’s novel A Matter of Detail received Pakistan’s Patras Bokhari Award.
The English short story in Pakistan has a long history (M. Shamsie Archiv, 135). Hanif Kureishi’s Collected Stories reproduce his three story collections in chronological order, together with new stories, including “Weddings and Beheadings”, consisting of a professional photographer’s chilling monologue, while the sophisticated “The Assault” portrays the debilitating power of words. Following Kureishi’s development as a writer, the book includes Kureishi classics such as “We’re Not Jews”, “My Son the Fanatic” and “The Body”. Another innate storyteller, the Pakistani American Anis Shivani makes an accomplished debut with Anatolia and Other Stories. The title story, set in Ottoman Turkey, revolves around the trial of Noah, a prosperous Jewish merchant falsely accused of tax evasion. The narrative moves seamlessly from the ambitions and dilemmas of the kadi (judge) to Noah’s discussions on western philosophy with Nasibeh, daughter of his Muslim patron. The story embodies Shivani’s ability to encapsulate entire worlds with brevity and to illuminate issues of identity and belonging across cultures and centuries. The only story with South Asian characters, “Independence”, tells of desire, ambition and duty in a pre-Partition India. Among several stories about the United States, “Manzanar” tells of a Japanese American businessman confined to camp in 1942; “Gypsy” looks at the lives of a Rom family from Hungary; “Texas” describes an American nanny working for a prosperous couple from Indonesia.
Roopa Farooki is the daughter of a Pakistani father and Bangladeshi mother. In her fourth novel Half Life, Dr. Aruna Ahmed Jones (Roony), a literature scholar of Singapore-Bangladeshi origin, impulsively walks out on her marriage with Patrick, her English husband in London. She flies back to Singapore to her childhood friend and onetime lover, Ejaz Ahsan (Jazz). She finds a letter by Hari Hassan, a respected but minor Bengali poet, addressed in 1971 to “my brother enemy” – Hari’s old friend Anwar, a Punjabi army officer. As family secrets unfold, it transpires that Hari Hassan is dying in Kuala Lumpur and he is Jazz’s estranged father. The manner in which Farooki treats the 1971 war, the relationship between Hari and Anwer and the quiet intertwining of their personal and family histories (as well as that of their two nations) also captures the story of the subcontinent and its divisions across two generations.
Tariq Ali’s fifth “Islam Quintet” novel The Night of the Golden Butterfly set in Pakistan over some fifty years, reflects a combination of polemic, anger and self-indulgence. The idealism and defiance of Dara (the narrator) during his left-wing student days in Lahore is juxtaposed with his exile in London in the jaded present while Pakistan has been overtaken by military rule, corruption and religious extremism. Dara, a writer, is contacted by Plato, an older friend from Dara’s Lahore past to write his biography. Plato – a fellow Punjabi, one-time maths teacher and now a distinguished Pakistani painter – is working on a political triptych which will set “Fatherland” (Pakistan) on fire. Dara owes Plato a favour: long ago, Plato had arranged a secret tryst for the student Dara with Dara’s great love, Jindie, a Chinese Pakistani girl. The beautiful and clever Jindie, known as sunheri titli – The Golden Butterfly – subsequently married Dara’s friend Zahid, a doctor. Thanks to Plato, their lives become intertwined again in London. The unhappily married Jindie presents Dara with a manuscript – the history of her family. The excavation of little known historical detail remains the great strength of Tariq Ali’s novels: Jindie’s trip to China and her manuscript about Chinese Muslims provide the book with some of its most interesting passages.
Bina Shah’s third novel Slum Child tells of Laila, a poor, orphaned Christian girl who struggles against the problems of belonging to a minority and the ravages of extreme poverty. She finds work as a maidservant with a benevolent employer, whose grownup children rescue her from the machinations of her stepfather. Haider Warraich’s first novel Auras of the Jinn looks at many different dimensions of Pakistani life, including poverty, superstition and police brutality. Set in Rawalpindi, the plot revolves around Imran, the son of a mechanic, Haji Hassan, and his religious wife, Khatoon. Punished brutally by his school teacher, Imran falls in with the pot-smoking Farhan and the Soota Boyz, a gang of petty criminals. Caught by the police, Imran suffers multiple fractures and neurological damage. Soon he begins to communicate with a “presence”, which he perceives as a wonderful female, but his family believes him to be possessed by a Jinn and subjects him to a maulvi’s brutal exorcisms. Imran’s horrified father decides to contact an old friend, a medical doctor, and entrusts Imran to his care. Imran is treated in hospital without a fee. In this new world of patients, doctors and nurses, the narrative does dissipate slightly, but it also highlights a different type of exploitation: instead of curing Imran, the doctor withdraws his medicines as an experiment for medical study.
Maha Khan Phillip’s first novel, Beautiful from This Angle, employs satire to make a telling comment on exploitation and iniquity in Pakistan and to lampoon the western media. The privileged young Amyna contributes a racy newspaper column about her giddy social whirl of sex and drugs while also writing a fictitious memoir, the Oppressed Muslim Woman’s story, for western audiences. Niilofar, a poor woman bullied by her husband, comes to Amynah’s landowning friend Henna for help. Together with Mumtaz, the high-minded daughter of a drug dealer (who turns out to be a CIA agent), they decide to make a film to help Niilofar. They embellish her story with details of their own, inspired by their friend Monte. He is making a reality show, “Who Wants to Be a Terrorist”, for a foreign channel, using foreign actors and a false training camp. But a real terrorist turns up in Niilofar’s sleepy village. Amid the media attention, Mumtaz evolves into a terrifying political and media opportunist, while Amynah is forced to consider her own integrity and confront a few home truths.
In an accomplished first collection consisting of spare, evocative poems, Pakistani American Shadab Zeest Hashmi commemorates Andalusia’s inspiring Euro-Arab culture in The Baker of Tarifa. The book, divided into three, includes prose poems and performance poetry and uses bread as the central metaphor for an enduring multicultural legacy. The first part celebrates Europe’s introduction to sugar cane, palm fronds and stringed musical instruments, among others. A sequence revolves around Yusuf (Joseph), “His name means/the interpreter of dreams”. The poem “Yusuf Sees the Ghost of the Last Queen of Andalus” conjures up images of empty cradles and war. The second part revolves around the 1492 expulsion of the Moors from Spain and includes references to historical figures such as Boabdil and Queen Isabella. The final section “Lambent” gathers up words, crafts and cultures which reflect to this day the Andalusian inheritance in Europe and far beyond.
The year also saw important translations of Urdu, Sindhi and Punjabi poetry including Songs of Freedom, translations of the great Sindhi poet Shaikh Ayaz, by Anwer Pirzado, J.M. Girglani, Saleem Noorhusain and others. This compilation of Ayaz’s volumes includes a valuable introduction to each collection and leads up to a tribute to Ayaz. Muzaffar A. Ghaffar continues his “Within Reach” series of Punjabi mystic poetry with his translation of Damodar Das Aurora’s great classic Heer Damodar based on the romantic folk legend of Heer Ranjha. The novelist, children’s writer and translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi brings his considerable linguistic and literary skills to Rococo and Other Worlds consisting of his translations of selected poems from Afzal Ahmed Syed’s three Urdu collections. The quality of translation is truly remarkable: each poem stands on its own in English. Afzal’s poems, merging the classical and the modern, range from the witty and ironic to the metaphorical and symbolic. He mingles a myriad of images, such as Goya and Napoleon in the title poem, references to chocolate chip cookies and Egyptian amulets in “It Could Never Be” and images of blind cheetahs, coloured fish and flying clouds in “If I Do Not Return”. In “Spring Shall Return to the City”, he writes:
By virtue of the prime minister’s
photogenic smile
Adonis-like
the murdered youth shall return from Hades
And other victims too.
The president shall clear his throat
And the terrorists will surrender arms
And get jobs at the Mehran Bank.
Yasmeen Hameed meets a different challenge with her rich, extensive collection, Pakistani Urdu Verse, consisting of her translations of the Urdu nazm by over 60 writers. The poets she has selected represent “the new stream of thought that emerged almost simultaneously with the new genre, that is free verse in the first half of the twentieth century” (xv–vi). The writers follow a chronological order by date of birth; each is accompanied by a nuanced, informed and valuable introduction. The many poets represented here include such luminaries as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, N.M. Rashid, Munir Niazi, Wazir Agha, Ada Jafarey, Ahmed Faraz, Iftikhar Arif, Parween Shakir, Kishwar Naheed, Sarmad Sehbai, Fahmida Riaz, Zeeshan Sahil as well as younger writers. Hameed’s book is indeed a labour of love and scholarship and her translations certainly bring Urdu poetry to an Anglophone audience
Bilal Tanweer is among the promising new short story writers included in Granta’s “New Voices”, but he has also translated Ibn-e Safi’s popular Urdu detective fiction House of Fear. Consisting of two novellas, the book features the wily Ali Imran who plays the buffoon but is in fact the head of the secret service and soon unmasks the criminal. Tanweer’s translation is fluid and lively but the slapstick is perhaps more effective in the original. S.M. Shahid has been much praised for his translations of two great Urdu humorists in Glimpses: Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi and Glimpses: Shafiqur Rahman. The unconventional marriage of the beautiful and lively Ruttie Petit to Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s future founder, against the wishes of her Parsee parents, and the subsequent tensions in her marriage as well as her untimely death are subjects of endless fascination in Pakistan but remain shrouded in silence. Unfortunately Khawaja Haider Razi’s slim book Ruttie Jinnah: The Story Told and Untold has very little to offer that is either new or insightful and focuses, instead, more on the public figure of Jinnah than on Ruttie herself. In contrast, Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma provides a well-documented biography which gives context to the co-authors’ English translation of Atiya Fyzee’s 1906 Urdu travelogue Zamana-i-Tahsil (A Time of Education). Her account of her trip to London to join a teachers training programme includes the many eminent public and literary figures she met, both British and Indian, and vividly captures London at the height of Empire. The authors also provide glimpses of Atiya’s marriage to artist Samuel Fyzee Rahamin and her subsequent travels to the United States as well as her interest in crafts, choreography, music and women’s rights. There is also an illuminating analysis of her famous correspondence/relationship with two great Urdu poets, Shibli Nomani and Muhammed Iqbal: the appendix includes extracts from Atiya’s slim but famous 1947 book Iqbal.
Biti Kahani: Autobiography of Princess Shahr Bano Begum of Pataudi, originally written in Urdu in the 1880s, is possibly the first memoir by an Indian Muslim woman. Translated by Dr. Tahera Aftab, it provides a valuable insight into women’s lives in the late nineteenth century and includes references to the 1857 conflict and its aftermath. Bilquis Nasiruddin Khan’s memoir, Song of Hyderabad, describes the author’s childhood in the princely state of Hyderabad amid traditional customs and court life. She goes on to relate the story of her migration to Pakistan in 1947 as the wife of a company executive in Pakistan Burmah Shell and her subsequent travels. Her account of changing times is filled with contrasts and includes the two-year incarceration of her son and her son-in-law, during the rule of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government, for alleged involvement in the Baluchistan uprising. Fatima Bhutto’s autobiography Songs of Blood and Sword tells a moving tale of family tragedy and political wrangling. There are some powerful passages in the book including the rivalry between Fatima’s father Murtaza and his sister Benazir, who both died violent deaths as did their brother Shahnawaz and their father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The problem arises when political actions and policies are judged and described through a personal bias and lead to distortions of history.
Other autobiographies of interest include those by two distinguished diplomats: South American Diaries: A Pakistani Ambassador’s Journal 1981–1995 by Raja Tridiv Roy and Quiet Diplomacy: Memoirs of an Ambassador of Pakistan by Jamsheed Marker. The Punjab Story, edited by Waheed Ahmad, consists of rare documents – Jinnah’s correspondence with Muslim League leaders during the 1940s – which were brought to Pakistan by Wajid Shamsul Hassan under dramatic circumstances during the Partition riots. Word for Word: Stories behind Everyday Words We Use by Khaled Ahmed is an immensely readable and fascinating book on etymology which draws on Ahmed’s famous newspaper columns of that title. He takes the reader on a learned journey across Arabic, Aramaic, English, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit and Urdu, among other languages.
The prolific and incisive Ahmed also published a two-volume political analysis The Musharraf Years 1998–2008 and a third book, Sectarian War: Pakistan’s Sunni Shia Violence and Its Links to the Middle East. Another distinguished journalist Zahid Husain also explores the traumatic story of growing extremism and sectarianism in Pakistan in his lucid account The Scorpions Tale; a new updated edition of Taliban by Ahmed Rashid celebrated the book’s tenth anniversary. It was good to see a new version of Zamir Niazi’s pioneering work The Press in Chains, edited by Zubeida Mustafa and detailing the long history of press censorship in Pakistan. The many dimensions of Karachi are revealed through three different books: the updated edition of Karachi: Megacity of Our Times, edited by Anwer Mooraj and Hamida Khuhro, with new colour illustrations; Karachiwala: A Subcontinent within a City, edited by Rumana Husain and filled with rare photographs and essays by Karachi citizens, celebrating the city’s history and multiculturalism; Look at the City from Here: Karachi Writings, edited by Asif Farrukhi, a compilation of fiction and non-fiction which tell the city’s story from colonial times to the present day.
In fact, there was a very diverse and rich offering of non-fiction, including Calling a Spade a Spade, a collection of articles by Minoo P. Bhandara, Bapsi Sidhwa’s brother. Art books included Marjorie Husain’s biography Iqbal Hussein: The Painter of Imprisoned Souls and the sumptuous Mazaar Bazaar: Design and Visual Culture in Pakistan, edited by Saima Zaidi, which includes informative articles on a wide range of subjects from calligraphy and contemporary painting to films, advertising and photography. Mehdi Hassan: The Man and His Music, edited by Asif Noorani, pays tribute to the unique singer and includes articles, photographs and CDs.
In Search of Sacred Spaces by Samina Quraeshi is filled with stunning photographs. The text describes Quraeshi’s personal spiritual journey and is supplemented by an informed chapter by Ali S. Asanai providing an overview of Sufism in South Asia; in another chapter, architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz discusses the design elements of Sufi shrines. Ibn Tamiyya and His Times, edited by Shahab Ahmed and Youssef Rappoport, consists of essays examining the influence and impact of the eponymous controversial and complex Islamic thinker who has influenced Wahabi, Salafi and other movements in Islam while Iqbal’s Concept of God by Salman Raschid looks at the philosophic legacy of the great poet.
The year saw some significant works of literary criticism. Dohra Ahmed’s Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America examines how the anti-colonial discourse of South Asian and African writers was shaped by their contact with American utopian literary texts. It was described as a book “with a lasting impact on American studies” by Francoise Lionnet (Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46(2): p. 226). Ambreen Hai’s important study, Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, looks at the connections between language, textuality and the body in the works of Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Salman Rushdie. Hai focuses on the self-conscious awareness of all three writers in “the agency of their words” (6). Central to this are profound issues of power, politics and censorship. In her reading, the human body becomes “the site of autonomy, instrumentality and subjection” (9). Hai looks at Kipling’s “compulsive fascination for childhood and children’s bodies” and argues that child deaths reflect British anxieties about the ambiguity of his stories as tales of empire: Kipling’s dead children embody, in her view, censorship, censure and subversion. She goes on to discuss hybridity and bilingualism in Kipling’s tales, where British children who are fostered by Indian ayahs and who learn Hindi, are endowed with creativity, inventiveness and the ability to mediate between cultures – skills lacking in Britons newly arrived in India. She provides a fascinating reading of Kim, locating Kim’s power in language and demonstrating the symbolic role of the amulet he wears on his chest and of his white skin as embodiments of text. She says that through the conflicts of Kim, the narrative makes an assertion of self-disguise and the difficulties/ambiguities of writing. In her discussion of Forster’s sexual politics and his awareness of the links between different forms of oppression – racial, gendered and sexual – Hai looks at the author’s prolonged struggle to write A Passage to India. She examines Forster’s concerns with language and the double meanings which run through the text, with particular attention to the mysterious cave scene and its echoes in the courtroom. In Dr. Aziz’s inability to write a poem for the future that transcends creed and culture, Hai reads Forster’s inability to imagine a postcolonial language – of the kind Salman Rushdie set out to invent in Midnight’s Children through this narrator Saleem Sinai – and argues that Midnight Children’s constant references to the body, its processes, ingestions, secretions and excretions present “the genesis of [the] human body as the genesis of the text” (205).
Constructing Pakistan: Foundational Texts and the Rise of Muslim National Identity (1857–1947) by Masood Ashraf Raja studies the ways in which pre-Partition literary texts in Urdu created transgeographic narratives of Muslim unity which contributed to the idea of Pakistan. He asserts that the growth of Muslim nationalism and concepts of Muslim exceptionalism were political and “a question of survival” (xvi) amid major political changes in the post-Mutiny era. He re-interprets the writings of Ghalib and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan as a means of negotiating an equitable relationship between the British Raj and the Indian Muslims (not one of patronage). He discusses the new movement in Urdu literary criticism pioneered by Azad and Hali and the reformist message in the fiction of Nazir Ahmed, who advocated Anglicization while neo-traditionals such as Shibli Nomani and Akbar Allahbadi searched for answers in Muslim history and pan-Islamism instead. Raja goes on to compare Iqbal and his modern, egalitarian universalist interpretation of Islam with Maulana Mawdudi’s concepts of an Islamic state governed by shariah.
Cara Cilano’s pioneering book National Identities in Pakistan: The 1971 War in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction explores the loss of East Pakistan which gained independence as Bangladesh. As the events of that traumatic year have passed into a virtual public amnesia in Pakistan, Cilano points out the many contradictions in the 1972 Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report and looks for answers in Pakistani fiction in English as well as in translated Urdu texts. She provides an excellent reading of Sorayya Y. Khan’s Noor, which excavates the 1971 genocide in East Pakistan, through the uncanny dream paintings, in 1990s Islamabad, by Noor the daughter of a Bengali woman orphaned in 1971 and adopted by a West Pakistani soldier. Cilano also discusses the importance of memory and remembering in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography and Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke. She interrogates issues of nationhood in Intizar Hussain’s metaphorical story “City of Sorrows”, about Biharis, the Urdu-speaking migrants from north-east India to East Pakistan, who are still confined to Bangladeshi concentration camps and denied entry into Pakistan. Cilano also examines short fiction by Umme Umara, Aamer Hussein, Asif Farrukhi and Hasan Manzar and the changing post-1971 political realities in Pakistan.
Cilano guest-edited the “Special Issue on 1971 Indo-Pakistan War” of Pakistaniaat: Journal of Pakistan Studies which has five essays that look at the national and international dimensions of the conflict. These include Philip Oldenberg’s discussion of the four different phases of the 1971 war including Kissinger’s visit to Peking; Luke A. Nichter and Richard A. Moss’s examination of the memoirs and policies of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and Mavra Farooq’s analysis of the relationship between Pakistan and China in 1971.
Now in its second year, Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, edited by Masood Raja at the University of New Texas, is an immensely important addition to Pakistan Studies. The journal is a peer-reviewed multi-disciplinary academic journal with online and print editions; its many literature-related writings include critical articles, reviews, bibliography and a much-needed platform for new poetry, fiction and translations by writers of Pakistani origin.
Pakistan’s recent flourish of art, literature and music has been overshadowed by increasing violence and extremism. This fact and the diversity of Pakistan emerge in Granta 112: Pakistan. Essays by Jane Perlez and Declan Walsh combine impressions of Pakistan with political observations, Fatima Bhutto writes of the Sheedis, a unique Pakistani community of African origin; Kamila Shamsie looks at Pakistan’s pop music revolution. There is some very fine fiction by Nadeem Aslam, Mohammed Hanif and Jamil Ahmed, poems by Yasmeen Hameed and Daniyal Mueenuddin and photographs of contemporary Pakistani art. This excellent issue is supplemented further by several online articles, including John Siddique’s six-part Partition memoir and the witty “How to Write about Pakistan” by four well known writers.
The bi-annual Pakistani Literature’s special issue Selections 1947–2010, compiled and edited by Khurram Khiraam Siddiqi, is divided by language and includes English translations of the country’s major literatures as well as a section on Pakistani English Literature. The work featured in this comprehensive volume ranges from major pre-Partition writers to contemporary voices such as Hasina Gul, Zeeshan Sahil, Attiya Dawood, Farkhanda Lodhi, Moniza Alvi and Kamila Shamsie.
There is, of course, a direct relationship between Pakistan and the wider Muslim world, including the diaspora. The thought-provoking Interventions special issue, Muslims in the Frame, guest-edited by Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, addresses the stereotyping of Muslims in the western media and related discriminatory social and political discourses. Tariq Modood explores minority identity and multiculturalism; Christoph Ramm examines Islamophobic attitudes in Germany; Amina Yaqin looks at media portrayals of Muslims, particularly women, as the oppressed Other; Ziauddin Sardar and Merry Wyn Davies comment on Hollywood’s portrayal of Muslims and Peter Morey analyses 24, the popular U.S. television thriller.
Overall, Pakistani English literature continues to be vital and varied, though there was a glaring paucity of drama. There was, however, a crucial increase in critical studies. Among Pakistan’s English language press, Dawn’s Books & Authors remains the only book supplement in a national daily, but literature-related issues are being discussed increasingly in op-ed, metropolitan and weekend pages. A new literary journal Life’s Too Short Literary tapped into new talent with an annual literary award for short fiction. The winner Sadaf Halai’s “Lucky People” and the two runners-up “Six Fingered Man” by Aziz A. Sheikh and “Settling Affairs” by Rayika Choudhri were all published in the journal’s inaugural issue as were other noteworthy entries. The high standard of the work surely indicates the enormous promise of Pakistani literature. The journal includes an extract from Musharraf Ali Farooqi and Michelle Farooqi’s forthcoming pictorial novel, Mohammed Hanif’s translation of the popular Urdu detective novel Chalawa, featuring a female sleuth, and brief jottings by Mohsin Hamid while composing thoughts for The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
The year saw several losses: Sultan Ahmed, renowned journalist and editor of the newspapers Morning News, The Leader and The Sun and posthumous recipient of the Pride of Performance award, and two distinguished Urdu writers, Wazir Agha (b.1922), poet, critic, essayist and intellectual, and Anis Nagi (b.1939), short story writer, poet and critic. They are greatly mourned.