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Literary Journal as a Means to Break Out of Cultural Myopia

Presenter:

· Ajmal Kamal South Asian University, New Delhi (New Delhi, India)

Timeslot:

07/28 | 16:10-16:30 UTC+2/CEST

Abstract

When I started an Urdu literary journal, called “Aaj” (“Today”) from Pakistan in 1981, it was an attempt to break out of what I can now call cultural myopia of the Urdu literary world. An important literary column in the daily Pakistan Times, Lahore, took notice of the first issue in 1981 and found that the journal tries to see and present the contemporary world literature “as a unified manifestation.” The next issue could not be published before 1986. However, “Aaj” was launched as a quarterly in 1989 and it has completed its thirty years now. During this time 107 issues have been published (not counting the first two) and it has developed a small but worthwhile circle of readers, writers and - most importantly - translators. By putting this vision into elaborate practice, the journal has endeavoured to resist the cultural myopia that, in my view, plagues the vernacular literary activity in Pakistan - and indeed the entire region of South Asia. Using Urdu translations of fiction, poetry and non-fiction from various languages of South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, Africa and North America, the journal has been acknowledged to have helped construct a literary world encompassing the region and beyond.

When I came to New Delhi in 2016 to pursue PhD in Sociology at the South Asian University, I interacted with scholars from all South Asian countries and felt that people associated with literature in the various vernaculars of the region are more or less unaware of the development of literary traditions in other neighbouring vernaculars. So I started another literary journal, City: A Journal of South Asian Literature, and have edited and published 3 issues.