A Lament with a Hole at its Centre: Naming and the Shahr-āshob in Zaki Naqvi’s Diyār-o Dasht (Abodes and Wilderness)
Review article by
Ali Haider
DOI:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23585552
Works Cited
Ahmad, Na‘im, editor. Shahr-āshob. Maktaba Jamia, 1968.
Cilano, Cara. National Identities in Pakistan: The 1971 War in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction. Routledge, 2011.
Ibbetson, Denzil. Panjab Castes. Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1916.
Khan, Pasha Mohamad, translator. “The Lament for Delhi.” By Shahab al-Din Ahmad “Saqib” and Hakim Muhammad “Ahsan.” Nationalism in the Vernacular: Hindi, Urdu, and the Literature of Indian Freedom, edited by Shobna Nijhawan, Permanent Black, 2010, pp. 103–08.
Memon, Muhammad Umar. “Pakistani Urdu Creative Writing on National Disintegration: The Case of Bangladesh.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 1983, pp. 105–27, https://doi.org/10.2307/2054619.
Naqvi, Zaki. Diyār-o Dasht (Afsāne) [Abodes and Wilderness: Stories]. Ilqa Publications, 2025.
Pritchett, Frances W. “‘The World Turned Upside Down’: Shahr-āshob as a Genre.” Annual of Urdu Studies, vol. 4, 1984, pp. 37–41.
Rahman, Tariq. Language and Politics in Pakistan. Oxford UP, 1996.
Sharma, Sunil. “The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 24, no. 2, 2004, pp. 73–81, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-24-2-73.
Tignol, Eve. “Nostalgia and the City: Urdu Shahr Āshob Poetry in the Aftermath of 1857.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 27, no. 4, 2017, pp. 559–73, https://doi.org/10.1017
Ali Haider is Lecturer in English at Government Graduate Islamia College, Chiniot, Punjab, Pakistan. His research interests include South Asian literature, Urdu literary studies, postcolonial studies, narrative studies, and translation. He writes scholarly essays and book reviews on South Asian literature and culture.
Email: xaidiali35@gmail.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8640-4167
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
