This chapter considers the work of Punjabi-language Lahore-based short-story writer Professor Zubair Ahmed, in order to understand the configuration of pre-Partition memories that haunt the author’s present. Ahmed’s short stories are constructed around a creative and intimate reframing of the political, social and affective worlds of post-colonial Pakistan, in conversation with a larger internal and external world. Memories animate this affective landscape, as do the personal and the political, and the embrace of the fragments and hauntings of a pre-Partition past within a partitioned present. Ahmed’s work also provides a window into the activities of a little-known language movement that seeks to reconfigure language politics in the Pakistani Punjab and which connects to a broader transnational linguistic and literary movement that seeks to enliven and empower the Punjabi language across borders. Work in this arena suggests emergent possibilities for a new experience of the contentious border that separates the Pakistani Punjab from the Indian Punjab, built out of memory, within a fractured present.
CITATION STYLE
Murphy, A. (2017). Remembering a lost presence: The spectre of partition in the stories of Lahore-based Punjabi-Language author Zubair Ahmed. In Partition and the Practice of Memory (pp. 231–254). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64516-2_11
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