Introduction

Abstract

Muhammad Hasan Askari was Urdu’s first literary critic in the Western, practical sense of the term: that is, he chose to set up as a critic, an interpreter, and a judge of literature. He regarded the business of criticism as an important activity in itself, an activity that required special qualifications in both academic and intellectual terms. Although he occasionally translated and wrote short fiction, Askari’s primary endeavors concerned literary criticism. As a literary critic, he was passionately interested in the political and cultural issues of the day, and especially in literature as an expression or function of culture. He wrote dazzling essays on various aspects of literature. Askari speaks from the center of a crisis of culture—both as a leader of Urdu intellectual discourse and as a subject of the rupture inflicted on Indo-Muslim literary-cultural history. The milieu of this cultural crisis was the progression of events leading to independence, Partition, and the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947, which, in turn, precipitated in Askari an emotive effort to chart the parameters of Indo-Muslim identity within a “new” Pakistani culture. It was an exceptional prefiguration of a postcolonial critic—writing back not only to the empire, but also to the nation—decades before the academy recognized such voices and the cultural-literary phenomenon they embodied.