Two Names of Transcendentalism and Modernity in Urdu Short Story: Ahmed Hamish and Anwar Qamar

Abstract

Ahmed Hamish was born on July 1, 1940 in Banspar, a small village in Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh, India. In 1962, one of his poems was published in Nusrat, a journal edited by Hanif Ramay. He claimed about this poem that it is the first prose poem in Urdu.After moving to Karachi in the early seventies, he was associated with the Hindi service of Radio Pakistan Karachi for some time. At the same time, when prose poetry took shape under the leadership of Qamar Jameel, Ahmed Hamish was one of its pioneers. However, before that he had established himself as an abstract fiction writer and his first collection of fiction “Mukhi” was published in India in 1968 and created a sensation. Thirty years later, in 1998, his second collection of fiction was published under the name “Kahani Mujhy Lakhti Hai” Anwar Qamar was introduced to the literary world as a story writer in the seventeenth year of the twentieth century and in the twenty-ninth year of his age. His first fiction titled “Nirwan” was published in the magazine “Tehreek” in 1970. Eight years later, his first fictional collection “Chandni Ke Supard” was published in 1978. After that, three more stories collections were published till 2008, “Chopal Mein Suna Howa Qissa” in 1984, “Color Blind” in 1990 and “Jhaaz Par Kiya Howa” in 2008. These four collections include about 60 stories. The thematic diversity provides proof of the author's power of observation, maturity and intellectual maturity. In the fictions of Anwar Qamar, the diverse and multiple forms of human life reflect the differences of age, gender and social background and the demands associated with this difference. This article based on the Transcendentalism and Modernity in the above two major fiction writers.