Discussions held on ghazal, literary criticism
In the session on Urdu criticism in the 21st century on the fourth day of the Aalmi Urdu Conference, Dr Tahseen Firaqi said it is generally believed that criticism is a mysterious process, which is difficult to understand, but a good creative writer can also be a good critic.
Firaqi said it is necessary for a critic to have a broad understanding of art literature and creative background.
Literary criticism is essentially an opinion, supported by evidence, relating to theme, style, setting or historical or political context. “We have a lot of discussion on post-colonialism in criticism, though we should go a little further and cover the contemporary situation too,” he said.
Dr Rauf Parekh claimed that it is an undeniable fact that there has always been a war between the West and the East. The East-West conflict exists in literature as well as criticism.
The session was moderated by Iqbal Khursheed in which Nasir Abbas Nayyer said that in the 21st century, more and more theoretical criticism has been done targeting plagiarism from the literature that has been writer in the West.
Hatred of the West increased after 9/11 and Islamophobia, however pure intellectuals express honest opinions about everything, in the twentieth century Modernism and traditionalism was made the subject of criticism, after 1970 this trend started to change, in the 21st century, criticism discusses the philosophy of literature, that is, seeing literature as philosophy, Shams-ur-Rahman Farooqi in his book of stories laid.
Regarding the criticism of Urdu Ghazal in the twenty-first century, Ziaul Hassan said that it is suspected that there is no criticism of Ghazal, although the history of criticism of Ghazal is equal to the history of Urdu criticism.
Yes, ghazal has been criticized for 125 years, our general mood has become that we consider only ghazal as poetry and other genres of poetry are ignored, the most important book of criticism on Ghazal in the 21st century has been written by Dr. Shamim Hanafi, which continues to descend into the reader’s existence and reveals the aspects of Ghazal and its foundations.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 5th, 2022.