New Readings of the Urdu Novel: A Discourse Analysis

Friday, 14 November, 2025 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM | A-11 Auditorium, Academic Block, LUMS

The Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature organized a session titled “New Readings of the Urdu Novel: A Discourse Analysis”, featuring a discussion on Dr Muhammad Naeem Virk’s recent book, Urdu Novel: Kalāmiyah aur Istamārī Tamīriyat (2025). The session brought together distinguished scholars to reflect on the epistemic and historical questions raised by the book, particularly in relation to the Urdu novel’s evolution under colonial and postcolonial conditions.

Dr Sumaira Umar opened the session by situating the book within broader debates on colonial knowledge production and the ideological structures that shaped Urdu fiction in the nineteenth century. Drawing from the author’s analysis, she explained how novels such as Mirāt al-‘Urūs (1897) helped cultivate a colonial ethos by promoting moral, domestic, and behavioral norms aligned with the British administration. She highlighted how the book disrupts the didactic frameworks introduced during colonial rule, frameworks that continued to influence literary interpretation long after independence. In her remarks, she emphasized that understanding the Urdu novel requires us to read it not merely as a narrative form but as a cultural and intellectual site shaped by power, governance, and shifting civilizational anxieties.

Dr Naeem outlined the conceptual foundations of his work, explaining how postcolonial criticism, through the discourses of modernism and postmodernism, opened up new intellectual and aesthetic horizons for understanding the Urdu novel. He argued that the novel, unlike poetry, directly engages with the philosophical and political anxieties of its time. He reiterated that the colonial era produced not only administrative structures but also interpretive habits and critical frameworks that governed how literature was read, valued, and historicized. His study attempts to uncover these “epistemic residues” and to propose a more nuanced understanding of the novel as a process, shaped by society, history, and intellectual traditions.

Khalid Fayyaz commended the author’s scholarly rigor and the thoughtful selection of novels under analysis. He observed that many of the texts chosen by Dr Naeem are outside the mainstream corpus of Urdu novel studies and are seldom engaged in academic criticism. This choice, he noted, opens new avenues for rethinking marginalized literary works, an issue also raised in the Urdu text, which argues that colonial and postcolonial epistemic frameworks have long limited the scope of Urdu literary criticism. Dr Fayyaz stressed that such efforts are essential for expanding the field and for resisting the inherited intellectual boundaries set by earlier, often Eurocentric, modes of critique.

Tabassum Kashmiri emphasized the emergence of a new form of criticism that the book exemplifies. He noted that despite the extensive research, theoretical depth, and wide range of citations, the work does not lose the critic’s individual creative agency. He linked this shift with a broader transformation within Urdu literary studies: earlier, criticism focused predominantly on poetry, but contemporary scholarship, responding to modern intellectual challenges, is increasingly turning to the novel. This shift mirrors a deeper recognition, reflected in the Urdu passage, that the colonial era produced not only political domination but also intellectual crises, fractured subjectivities, and new forms of literary consciousness. Dr Kashmiri appreciated how the book navigates these complexities and contributes to evolving debates about authorship, narrative form, and the cultural function of the novel. The session concluded on an intellectually stimulating note, highlighting the vitality of new critical approaches to Urdu fiction.