JCB Award-winning Urdu author Khaled Jawad will discuss his latest book The Book of Death (Westland) with translator Naseeb Khan at an event organized by Thinkers Collective, an initiative of the Institute of Development and Communication (IDC) and Chandigarh University.
“Why do we want everything to be linear and in plain sight? It is sometimes troubling when people insist that there must be complete clarity and that everything turns out well in the end, and aren’t shadows there even against bright light? Literature is not a soap opera. Contemporary audiences need to be trained in serious works and not expect authors to spoon-feed them to them. Life is rarely about clear directions and straight paths. What could literature be?” Jawad asks.
Talking about the state of Urdu language in the country, he says the entire ecosystem needs a reset. “Before blaming anyone, we have to look inward. How many good Urdu newspapers are there? Why are they mostly concerned with minority issues only? And why is the language only associated with poetry and not prose? There is much more to Urdu than ghazals,” says the author of 15 works of fiction and non-fiction, and a former professor of Urdu at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi.
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“It is interesting to observe how Khaled Jawad navigates different worlds,” says Dr. Pramod Kumar, Chairman, IDC. “His interests are in humans living on the margins, both physically and emotionally. At Thinkers Collective, it is crucial for us to bring to the region artists and authors whose works not only shed light on contemporary society, but also encompass different aspects of our existence.”
Jawad will be in conversation with poet Naseeb Khan at 6 pm on Saturday, November 15 at IDC, Sector 38 A, Chandigarh.
(tags for translation)Khalid Javed Event
