Qurratulain Hyder on the Move

In a career spanning seven decades, Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007) achieved distinction as a novelist, journalist, translator, and innovator in Urdu literature. To shed new light on this multilingual itinerant woman with a curatorial eye, the present study turns to Hyder’s genre-bending reportage writing, which has not yet garnered the same scholarly attention as her majestic novels and short stories. At once auto­biographical, admonitory, journalistic, and lyrical, these reportages offer glimpses of Hyder’s multigenerational erudition, artistry, and mastery of Perso-Urdu poetic aesthetics.

Syed Akbar Hyder, Ph.D. (2000), Harvard University, is the Director of South Asia Institute and is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Islamic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory