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FOREWORD
In the domain of modern Urdu short story,
Muhammad Mansha Yaad is a force to reckon with. He writes against the
backdrop of Pakistani culture with its synchronic expanse and
diachronic depth. There is no denying that a genuine artist is at
once the eye, the ear and the nostrils of his environment or, in
Ezra Pound’s words, the ‘invisible antennae of society, but he
cannot be a great artist unless he takes the intuitive step to delve
deep into the labyrinth of his culture, to feel its pulse and to
hear, Ophelia-like, ‘the snatches of its old times’. He has to keep
in mind the fact that culture is Janus-faced. It has within its
hierarchal folds a built-in scenario of binary opposites. That is
why it is more like a language. When a short story writer unfolds
the stratified stuff of the culture, he comes across not only the
prototypes of lag characters and the inherent codes encompassing
them but also the traces and the ‘traces of traces’, locked within
the matrix of his culture. Unless he does that, he cannot claim to
have touched the geological strata and the archaeological layers of
his characters and plots. It goes to the credit of Mansha Yaad that
his short stories are not mere collections of known facts and
‘types’ but are rather webs of relations vibrating and pulsating
with characters and events, structured in accordance with the
primedial hierarchies of human culture and its language. Therein
lies his importance. He is not the mouthpiece in any political or
ideological stance, nor a ruler wielding a rod of correction nor,
for that matter, a simple narrator of tales. He is, in fact, a
creator-one who plant-like sucks the ambrosia from the soil and the
radiance from the sky and then transforms the elements into petals
and flowers. His creative act is both syntagmatic and paradigmatic-a
rare synthesis,as it were, of binary opposites, That accounts for
his being a towering personality in modern Urdu fiction. Now that
some of his best short stories have been rendered into English and
presented to the English-speaking world, I hope that his talent will
be widely recognized and his creative skill will receive the
applause he most certainly deserves.
Wazir Agha
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