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    Tariq Rehman As A Story Writer

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    Mukhzara
    Tariq Rahman is a well-known Pakistani academic and short story writer. His collection Work and Other Short Stories includes stories from his three previous collections. As a young writer, some of Rahman's early stories were curious as they did not depict Pakistan and used English names. However, they reveal the difficulty English-language writers from South Asia once faced in telling stories in English about their real world. Rahman's stories tackled this by exploring universal themes, and some were set in distant pasts where men battled life's odds. His "European" stories also highlight tensions between tradition and modernization that transcend East-West divides.

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    Tariq Rehman As A Story Writer

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    Mukhzara
    731 views1 page
    Tariq Rahman is a well-known Pakistani academic and short story writer. His collection Work and Other Short Stories includes stories from his three previous collections. As a young writer, some of Rahman's early stories were curious as they did not depict Pakistan and used English names. However, they reveal the difficulty English-language writers from South Asia once faced in telling stories in English about their real world. Rahman's stories tackled this by exploring universal themes, and some were set in distant pasts where men battled life's odds. His "European" stories also highlight tensions between tradition and modernization that transcend East-West divides.

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    Tariq Rehman as a story writer

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    Tariq Rahman is a well-known Pakistani academic and short story writer. His collection Work and Other Short Stories includes stories from his three previous collections. As a young writer, some of Rahman's early stories were curious as they did not depict Pakistan and used English names. However, they reveal the difficulty English-language writers from South Asia once faced in telling stories in English about their real world. Rahman's stories tackled this by exploring universal themes, and some were set in distant pasts where men battled life's odds. His "European" stories also highlight tensions between tradition and modernization that transcend East-West divides.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    731 views1 page

    Tariq Rehman As A Story Writer

    Uploaded by

    Mukhzara
    Tariq Rahman is a well-known Pakistani academic and short story writer. His collection Work and Other Short Stories includes stories from his three previous collections. As a young writer, some of Rahman's early stories were curious as they did not depict Pakistan and used English names. However, they reveal the difficulty English-language writers from South Asia once faced in telling stories in English about their real world. Rahman's stories tackled this by exploring universal themes, and some were set in distant pasts where men battled life's odds. His "European" stories also highlight tensions between tradition and modernization that transcend East-West divides.

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    Tariq Rahman is a well-known academic and critic. He is also a short story writer.

    His Work and Other


    Short Stories consists of a selection of stories which were published in his three previous collections. He
    has also written a short, but pertinent preface, which reveals that he wrote his first short story at the age of
    nineteen and which describes his gestation as an English language writer.
    Selected Stories follows Tariq Rahman’s development as a writer. Inevitably, the second half of the book
    is more assured and more rewarding. Many of the early stories are curious by today’s standards. Some
    have no sense of Pakistan as a location, employ English names and are set in the distant past or the distant
    future. But these are of academic interest for that very reason. They reveal the difficulty that so many
    English language writers of South Asian origin have faced, before South Asian English
    literature became as ubiquitous as it is today: How to tell stories in English, when all the English books
    you read neither described nor provided any space for the real world you inhabited?

    As a young man, Tariq Rahman clearly tried to tackle this by exploring universalist themes about the
    human condition. His stories, such as “The Work” shows the mechanical routine of money needy
    workers; while “Bingo” and “Moustache” are set in the distant past , where men battle for survival against
    the odds of life comic or tragic. Several stories, including
    about a corrupt priest, are written within the social and religious parameters of classical English literature
    and are set in a nameless European setting in a pre-industrial era.

    These stories dwell on themes of sexual repression, social hypocrisy and social iniquity and provide
    interesting parallels with the similar subjects that Tariq Rahman explores in his stories about Pakistan, in
    the rest of the book.

    Tariq Rahman’s “European” stories also serve as a reminder that many conflicts so often perceived today
    as a cultural clash between the East and the West are nothing of the kind. They mark the tensions between
    traditional rural societies and the advance of industrialization. At the same time, unlike Europe,
    South Asians have inherited an Anglicized ruling class created by their erstwhile colonial rulers, which
    has widened the social and communication gaps.

    An early story “Bingo”, written in the mid-1970’s, was the first work of fiction in Pakistani English
    Literature, to focus on the 1971 war. The tale revolves around the relationship between the West Pakistani
    narrator, Safeer, and his friend Tajassur, from East Pakistan. Both are in the military academy together
    and are posted as junior officers to Dhaka on the eve of the civil war, with tragic consequences. The story
    makes a telling comment on how a blinkered reading of colonial history has shaped the perceptions and
    institutions of Pakistan’s ruling elite.

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