Critical Analysis of Selected Short Stories from Masood Ashar’s "Khat-e-Sartan"
خطِ سرطان"ازمسعود اشعرکے منتخب افسانوں کا تنقیدی جائزہ"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52015/daryaft.v17i02.438Keywords:
Urdu short story, Political consciousness, Symbolism, Modern alienation, Intellectual consciousness, Political oppressionAbstract
Masood Ashar is a significant late twentieth-century Urdu short story writer whose work reflects emerging intellectual, cultural, and political consciousness within Urdu literature. His fiction, shaped by his engagement with journalism, addresses political oppression, social conflict, class disparity, and the alienation of modern individuals in rapidly changing societies. Ashar’s second collection, ‘Khat-e-Sartan’ (1987), comprising seventeen stories, demonstrates thematic maturity through its nuanced exploration of individual–society tensions, moral ambiguity, and political instability. More than a collection of narratives, the work articulates the intellectual anxieties of its time through symbolic, restrained, and psychologically layered storytelling. The later compilation of Ashar’s collections, ‘Aankhon Par Dono Hath’ and ‘Khat-e-Sartan’, into ‘Kulliyat-e-Afsana (Saare Fasane)’ provides a cohesive perspective on his evolving creative vision and the broader socio-political realities shaping his fiction. This article offers a focused analysis of selected stories: ‘Bichhday Ka Geet’, ‘Khwab’, and ‘Ek Bohat Purani Kahani’ to examine narrative structure, thematic continuity, and symbolic strategies central to Ashar’s literary contribution, within postcolonial Urdu literary discourse and broader evolving modern sensibilities.
Conflict of Interest: The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest related to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article, and that the data presented have not been fabricated or falsified.
Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant or financial support from public, commercial, or not-for profit funding agencies.
Participant Consent: The author confirms that Informed consent was obtained from all participants, and confidentiality was duly maintained.
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Author Biography
DR. MUHAMMAD AFZAL BUTT, Chairperson, Department of Urdu, Government College Women University, Sialkot, Pakistan
Dr. Muhammad Afzal Butt serves as the Chairperson and Associate Professor in the Department of Urdu at Government College Women University, Sialkot, Pakistan. He received his PhD from the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad. An accomplished scholar, his research spans Urdu fiction and poetry. Dr. Butt has contributed forty-five scholarly articles to the field and is the author of two acclaimed books.
