Showing all 3 books
Intizar Husain is the finest writer of Urdu prose and the most brilliant story-teller of the post-partition generation. The two novellas, Day and Dastan (Din Aur Dastan), his favourite texts, show his versatility and fictional inventiveness. Day, a realistic story, is a meditation on the cruellest of events to have scarred our times – migrations. When people are forced to move to new homes or new geographies, they only recall a mix of uncanny facts, streets ...
This book is an edited and annotated translation of Tarikh-i-Yusufi by Yusuf Khan Kambalposh (c. 1830-90) who travelled to several places in north Africa and Europe. Translated for the first time from Urdu to English, it describes in detail the socio-economic conditions of Europe and contrasts it with the conditions in areas under European control. By highlighting this duality of approach with respect to the colonies, this translation reverses the gaze and ...
The nature of Muslim knowledge concerning the West through travel accounts makes for fascinating reading. The eighteenth-century encounters of Munshi Ihtisamuddin and Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, embedded in their travelogues, however, seem very distant and less urgent. With Syed Ahmed, however, begins an entirely new phase with his interplay between Muslims and the West, on the one hand, and between Islam and Christianity, on the other. Even though his portrait of ...