Hidden Histories of Pakistan

Censorship, Urdu literature, Islam, and progressive secular nationalisms in colonial India and Pakistan have a complex, intertwined history. Sarah Waheed offers a timely examination of the role of progressive Muslim intellectuals in the Pakistan movement. She delves into how these left-leaning intellectuals drew from long-standing literary traditions of Islam in a period of great duress and upheaval, complicating our understanding of the relationship between religion and secularism. Rather than seeing 'religion' and 'the secular' as distinct and oppositional phenomena, this book demonstrates how these concepts themselves were historically produced in South Asia and were deeply interconnected in the cultural politics of the left. Through a detailed analysis of trials for blasphemy, obscenity and sedition, and feminist writers, Waheed argues that Muslim intellectuals engaged with socialism and communism through their distinctive ethical and cultural past. In so doing, she provides a fresh perspective on the creation of Pakistan and South Asian modernity.

بابوعبدالرحمٰن کرد نا براہوئی شاعری ٹی ترقی پسندی نا جاچ

This research article describes the trend and tendency of progressivism in Brahui poetry of Babo Abdul Rahman Kurd and the sources through which the impacts of progressive thoughts took place in his poetry. The poet stands tall holding a great position in Brahui literature being one of the poets who have introduced several trends and thoughts in their poetic pieces to change the direction of Brahui poetry. Although he has been basically known as an epic poet, progressivism and many other poetic thoughts can also be found in his Brahui poetry. This article discusses how the trend and tendency of progressivism have both consciously and unconsciously found place in his poetry through different ways. The first one was the depiction of deplorable condition of his contemporary nation which, during his poetic period, was socially, politically and economically was facing miserable conditions. Such prevailing miserable conditions of his society seem to have influenced him to incorporate progressive thoughts in his poetry. The second one was the impacts of Marxism and the Progressive Movement of Urdu literature which also seems to have affected him to include the progressive thoughts in his poetry. The last one which brought and strengthened the progressive thoughts in his poetry was "Lat Khana", a political and literary progressive Movement in Balochistan, while Babo Abdul Rahman Kurd was also very closed attached to the movement.

براہوئی ادب اٹ غمخوار حیات نا مٹ وبدل نا جاچ

This research article discusses the translation works of Ghamkhawar Hayat in Brahui literature by closely and critically analyzing them. The article further elaborates the importance and role of fiction translation in promoting a language and literature and how the nature of translation has been considered a progressive step to strengthen the native education system. However, it is necessary that the translator should be well versed in the fundamental and practical components of the translation skills and be an efficient user the of target language as well as the translation language. This article focuses the qualities of good translation, particularly, it lays emphasis on fiction on which these translations are based. Thereby, it also critically analyzes the contribution of Ghamkhawar Hayat from Urdu fiction into Brahui literature and the coherence between the original text and the translated one. Ghamkhawar Hayat has translated a number of books in Brahui from Urdu literature having a huge contribution to familiarize the residents of the region to another literature.

Information Competencies and Information Seeking Behavior in Digital Paradigms: A Case of Urdu Literature

The study investigates the current state of information demands and the information-seeking behavior of Urdu literary students using digital technologies. Another purpose of the study was to determine the level of satisfaction with both the existing facilities and resources. A quantitative survey method of research is used to achieve the study’s objectives. Four major public universities of Lahore were the population. Containing the use of the convenience sample approach, data was obtained using a self-structured questionnaire with open-ended and closed-ended questions. Results show that Urdu literature students were not very familiar and comfortable with using research journals, research reports/theses, and reference works while finding information. There is a need to encourage students the use research journals, research reports/theses. The study focuses solely on Pakistani Urdu literature students. For generalizations, this survey should be reproduced on a larger scale. The findings of the research will contribute to knowledge about Urdu literature students’ information-seeking behavior at the university level in Pakistan, which may be beneficial to ultimately provide better services in the domain of Urdu literature. Universities and libraries need to provide more facilities and electronic resources for the Urdu language and literature students, keeping in mind their trends toward new technologies. University libraries should organize special training programs for literature students.

http://habibiaislamicus.com/index.php/hirj/article/view/184

The tradition and history of writing travelogues in Urdu language is not more than one hundred years old. There are also a large number of travelogues of Hajj and Umrah towards the Holy Hijaz in Urdu literature. Among these travelogues Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s two travelogues “Towards the Holy Kaaba” and “Night in the Cave of Hira” are quite famous, in which we see different colors of love of Allah and his Prophet. The purpose of this article is to give a brief overview of Mustansar’s both travelogues.

Urdu Travelogues and Fiction

As it is believed that all the genres are somehow connected because they all belong to the same entity; man’s imagination which is the birthplace of all the artful & thoughtful ideas ever emerged in human history. This research paper encompasses the whole tradition of travelogues in Urdu literature and figures the elements of fiction in the very genre. The researcher suggests that the travelogue is the mother of all genres and the same core belief is what lays base on the thought-expedition while writing the paper. This is quite evident that travelogue-writer focuses on the facts and the actual details of every journey and utilize them while working on his draft and the same is the very creative strategy for writing fiction, that the fiction writers also get to the actual situations from the society, analyze objectively and then utilize them masterfully for the fictional sequence of the happenings in the story i.e. plot. This research paper helps the readers to envision the creative going on processes regarding fiction writing & travelogue writing both, understand them to an extensive extent and find the similarities which seemingly reflect the other like organic twins. In this regard, it is considered that the genres of travelogue & novel, both explained with meaningful examples and no ambiguity remains.

The Double Mistaken Identity of Colonial Literature

Although postcolonial approaches in world literature and translation studies have produced much necessary scholarship, they have in general disregarded the historical ‘native’ author and translator working in colonial or semicolonial settings. Studies on Urdu literature in the 19th century, for instance, focus mostly on the role of British Orientalists. Drawing upon Allen’s trans-indigenous project, I propose to read the historical ‘native’ text approaching it with a concept drawn from Amerindian ethnohistory: ‘double mistaken identity’ (DMI). While ‘native’ intellectuals might have unwittingly contributed to furthering the cause of Western colonialists, DMI allows for two perspectives to coexist in the ‘native’ text, one of which is a ‘native’, non-hybrid perspective. I take the failed colonial project in 16th-century Japan as a model, focusing on a translation that both Urdu and Japanese intellectuals undertook: that of Aesop’s Fables. There is a case for considering ‘native’ literature fully colonial, fully ‘native’, and fully global.

A Holistic Approach to Urdu Language Word Recognition using Deep Neural Networks

Urdu is one of the most popular languages in the world. It is a Persianized standard register of the Hindi language with considerable and valuable literature. While digital libraries are constantly replacing conventional libraries, a vast amount of Urdu literature is still handwritten. Digitizing this handwritten literature is essential to preserve it and make it more accessible. Nevertheless, the scarcity of Urdu Optical Character Recognition (OCR) research limits a digital library's scope to a manual document search. The limited research work in this area is mainly due to the complexity of Urdu Script. Unlike the English language, the Urdu writing style is cursive, bidirectional, and character shapes and sizes highly vary depending on their position. Holistic word recognition is found to be a better solution among many other text segmentation techniques as it takes the complete word into account instead of segmenting it explicitly or implicitly. For this project, the data of five different Urdu words were collected for training and testing a convolutional neural network and 96% recognition accuracy was achieved.