New Urdu Fiction – A Sitting with Sameena Nazeer

Friday, 5 December, 2025 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM | Auditorium A-11, Academic Block, LUMS

The Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature hosted a conversation with Samina Nazeer, inaugurating a new series on contemporary Urdu fiction. The session began with dramatic readings from her celebrated short stories, such as “Kallo” and “Chuha”, followed by an expressive monologue from her newly published book Jazzu Bhaiya. These performances immediately drew the audience into the emotional and thematic world of her writings. Moderated by Dr Khalid Sajrani, the session opened with a reflection on how Nazeer’s work distinguishes itself from canonical writers. While her concerns remain rooted in feminist critique, she extends the tradition by infusing her prose with Sufi metaphors and spiritual imagery, creating a narrative register that is simultaneously grounded in material realities and the complex inner spiritual realms. Dr Sajrani also highlighted her focus on women as central characters, not merely as subjects of suffering or rebellion, but as complex agents negotiating desire, dignity, labour, friendship, and selfhood.

Discussion around Kallo foregrounded Nazeer’s ability to weave humor, tenderness, and social commentary into intimate portrayals of women’s everyday lives. Participants noted how her stories engage with gender, caste, class, and domesticity without resorting to melodrama, and how her feminist sensibility reveals itself not through slogans but through the quiet assertion of women’s emotional and relational worlds. One of the striking aspects of the conversation was her distinctive use of Deccani and Hyderabadi Urdu, which preserves a linguistic and cultural memory often marginalised in post-Partition literary production in Pakistan. Her narratives gesture toward a broader South Asian imagination—one that resists homogenization and honours regional identities, dialects, and forms of storytelling.

The conversation also discussed the novel Siyah Heeray, Nazeer’s expansive debut novel, set across Pakistan and West Africa. Nazeer’s long residence in Guinea allows her to write with unusual familiarity and empathy, transforming Africa from a distant backdrop into an experiential and emotional geography. Themes such as colonial violence, the legacy of the slave trade, postcolonial corruption, displacement, class mobility, and moral ambiguity emerged as central points of interest. Her writing on Africa was widely recognized as a contribution that pushes Urdu fiction beyond its usual geographic and cultural boundaries.

Throughout the session, Dr Sajrani noted the coherence of Nazeer’s vision across genres, whether in short stories or in the novel; she foregrounds marginal voices, interrogates power structures, and complicates conventional moral binaries. Her narrative mode balances social realism with metaphor, colloquial speech with literary flourish, and political consciousness with emotional nuance. The event concluded with reflective comments from the audience, who expressed appreciation for the way Nazeer’s fiction opens up new conversations about gender, language, migration, cultural memory, and global belonging within Urdu literature.