Urdu Literary Culture: Vernacular Modernity in the Writing of Muhammad Hasan Askari (Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World)

Urdu Literary Culture examines the impact of political circumstances on vernacular (Urdu) literary culture through an in-depth study of the writings of Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919-78), Urdu's first and finest literary critic. Askari's life was lived at the crossroads of early nation formation in South Asia—this study provides a detailed treatment of the intellectual world that Askari inhabited and complicates previously held notions about his life and work by looking at some of his writing through the lens of sexuality. Mehr Afshan Farooqi argues that Askari's work challenges the assumptions of rational Western thought and provides profound ways to think and reflect on the damages that colonial subjugation has imposed on selfhood, culture, and literature. Askari was a postcolonial before its time, writing in a language (Urdu) that has not drawn the attention of the Western academy. This book is an effort to address the problem.