OF TABOOS AND SACREDNESS: SOCIAL REALISM IN PAKISTANI SHORT STORY GENRE

Literature is often conditioned by the socio-political conditions in a society. Consequently, in most cases, a bleak truth about society and history is exposed which is, sometimes, treated, owing to its apparent impropriety, as intolerable by many. This tradition of projecting social realism, in a fictionalized manner, about pre and post-independence Pakistan and Pakistani society has been kept intact, against all odds, by various short fiction writers – Ahmad Ali, Saadat Hassan Manto and Daniyal Mueenuddin being the most prominent of them. Ahmad Ali exposes, in many of his works, the social face of pre-independence Indian society, Manto X-rays, for most part, its post-independence body whereas Daniyal Mueenuddin gives a kind ofultrasonic analysis, predominantly, of its contemporary image, which, in many ways, is no different from pre-1947 era. The intended study assumes that Manto is the inheritor of the social realist tradition initiated by Ali, whereas Mueenuddin, in his short stories in Englsih, inherits it from Manto. They share the basic themes and thought but develop them according to the social milieu of their times and theirindividual idiosyncrasies. So, focusing on these three short fiction writers, the proposed study aims to explore tradition of social realism in indigenous short fiction.