Maqami Insan ky Mutannave Rang

Friday, 7 November, 2025 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM | A-11 Auditorium, Academic Block, LUMS

The Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature, LUMS, hosted a thought-provoking literary session titled Maqamī Insān ke Mutanavve’ Rang (مقامی انسان کے متنوّع رنگ): Literary Voices from the Margin. The session brought together three distinguished contemporary writers: Riffat Abbas, Khaleel Khumbar, and Ashu Lal, whose creative works embody the richness, resistance, and linguistic plurality of Pakistan’s peripheral regions. The conversation was moderated by Dr. Muhammad Naeem Virk.

The session explored how writers from the margins challenge the dominance of the linguistic and cultural center, offering alternative visions of humanity, history, and belonging.

The discussion began with Munir Ghani Sheikh, who read a short story from Abnārmal, a collection of short stories by Ashu Lal that he has translated into Urdu. Through his translation, Sheikh opened a dialogue between languages, Siraiki and Urdu, emphasizing how translation itself becomes a form of resistance and reclamation, allowing stories rooted in local realities to travel across linguistic borders without losing their philosophical depth.

Khaleel Khumbar followed with a powerful reflection on the history and literary imagination of Tharparkar, the region that shapes the essays and columns included in his book: Ab Achūt Bolē Gā. He traced the civilizational memory of Nagar Parkar back to over five thousand years ago, when Aryan invasions, guided by their sacred narratives, led to the destruction of the local city and culture. Situating his work within this historical continuum, Khumbar revisited the figure of the achūt (the untouchable), narrating how systemic hierarchies and caste-based exclusions dehumanized communities and, in particular, brutalized women who were denied even the dignity of clothing or speech. Through this lens, his work becomes not only a literary act but a decolonial intervention—restoring visibility and voice to those whose histories were erased from dominant narratives.

Riffat Abbas, celebrated Siraiki novelist and poet, offered a deeply philosophical engagement with questions of morality, indigeneity, and cultural rootedness. Drawing upon his novel Mashkharēyāṅ dā Mēlā, Abbas emphasized that wasaib— the Siraiki cultural, political, social, and literary landscape- remains central to his literary and ethical imagination. For him, writing in Siraiki is not merely a linguistic choice but an act of epistemic self-determination: a way of thinking and feeling beyond colonial and metropolitan frameworks. He reflected on how academic discourse in Pakistan must first interrogate the very categories and literary terms it has inherited from colonial epistemologies, arguing for a decolonial turn that allows indigenous vocabularies and sensibilities to shape literary criticism.

Ashu Lal, one of the most significant contemporary voices in Siraiki literature, concluded the discussion with profound reflections on space, both physical and imaginative, as a site of belonging and resistance. He discussed how occupying linguistic and cultural space in one’s own language becomes an act of reclaiming dignity and identity. For Lal, to write in Siraiki is to exist authentically, to inscribe the world from the vantage point of those who have long been excluded from canonical representation. His remarks beautifully intertwined poetics with politics, showing how literature can challenge hierarchies of normality, alienation, and truth.

Together, the three writers illuminated the plurality of human experience in Pakistan’s linguistic landscape. Their works, rooted in Siraiki and Sindhi, foregrounded how literature from the periphery resists homogenization and redefines the intellectual boundaries of the nation.