Postcolonial Perspectives in Urdu Literature

Translations

Published: 2025

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Literature—originally published as مابعد نوآبادیات: اردو کے تناظر میں (Māba‘d Nawābādiyāt: Urdū ke Tanāzur Mein; also rendered as Mabad Nawabadiyat: Urdu ke Tanazur Mein)—by the eminent scholar and critic Nasir Abbas Nayyar, with admiration and respect. First published by Oxford University Press in 2013, the book has shaped contemporary debates in Urdu literary studies, bringing postcolonial questions of history, identity, and language into sustained conversation with Urdu’s critical traditions.

Translating a postcolonial critique into English—the very language once enlisted in colonial governance—carries an undeniable irony. Yet that tension is instructive. It reminds us that thought survives borders, and that rigorous scholarship must travel across languages if it is to participate in a genuinely global discourse. In bringing Nasir’s insights to Anglophone readers, this translation hopes to serve both as a bridge and a provocation, inviting renewed reflection on the afterlives of empire.

The work of translation here has been as much intellectual as linguistic. Nasir’s prose is precise and allusive; his arguments are finely layered. I have sought fidelity not only to his vocabulary and cadence but to the movement of his reasoning—preserving key terms and conceptual nuance while keeping the English readable and coherent. Where unavoidable, I have retained certain Urdu and Persian critical terms in transliteration, briefly glossed at first occurrence.

This rendering can only be an approximation of the original’s richness, but it is offered in the spirit of dialogue: with the author, with Urdu criticism, and with readers encountering these debates in a new idiom. If the text unsettles easy assumptions, prompts careful thought, and—now and then—elicits a wry smile at the paradoxes of language and power, it will have honored its source.

Omair Ahmed Khan