Degree
BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)
Faculty / School
School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)
Department
Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Date of Submission
2026-07-29
Advisor
Parmal Ahmed, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences
Committee
Dr. Abdul Haque Chang
Project Type
SSLA Culminating Experience
Access Type
Restricted Access
Keywords
Karachi, Urdu short fiction, Akhlaq Ahmad, city in literature, urban violence
Abstract
Karachi has been studied extensively by political scientists, urban planners and ethnographers. Laurent Gayer’s concept of “ordered disorder” has mapped the city’s patterned violence, Arif Hasan’s research has documented its infrastructural crisis and Oskar Verkaaik’s ethnography has traced its ethnic consolidation. Yet the lived experience of everyday life under these conditions, how it feels to inhabit this city on an ordinary afternoon, remains largely unaddressed.
This project argues that the short stories of Akhlaq Ahmad constitute a sensory and empirical archive of the city. Through a close reading, in the original Urdu, of three stories from Ahmad’s 2018 collection Jaanay Pehchaanay, “Karachi Naami Qatlgaah Men Ek Dopahar”, “Achchhe Mamoon Ka Chai Khana” and “Martin Quarters Ka Master”, it examines how Ahmad’s fiction registers violence, urban isolation and silence as conditions of everyday life in Karachi.
Drawing on Gayer’s political sociology, Anthony Vidler’s work on spatial anxiety, Veena Das’s account of violence’s descent into the ordinary and Linda Green’s work on fear and silence, the project demonstrates that fiction records dimensions of urban experience, among them atmosphere, tempo and the limits of expression, that enumerative and statistical modalities do not capture. It also argues that Karachi, absent from the canonical geography of modern Urdu literature, deserves sustained critical attention as a literary subject.
Pages
v, 53
Recommended Citation
Saqib, S. (2024). Reading Karachi through Fiction: Violence, Isolation and Silence in Akhlaq Ahmad’s Short Stories (Unpublished undergraduate project). Institute of Business Administration, Pakistan. Retrieved from https://ir.iba.edu.pk/sslace/434
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