In recent decades, Pakistani literature has witnessed a significant surge in readership, particularly among young people. While this surge should be celebrated, a closer look at the prevailing literary trends reveals a stifling pattern of repetitive themes, characters, and moral perspectives. This intellectual limitation and literature stereotypes are perhaps most evident in the overwhelming dominance of writers like Nemrah Ahmed and Umera Ahmed, whose novels often remain confined to specific ideological frameworks.
Why These Authors Resonate with Readers
Authors like Nemrah Ahmed and Umera Ahmed have gained immense popularity among readers due to their ability to create stories and plotlines that closely reflect the cultural, societal, and emotional values of a huge bulk of the readership in Pakistan. Their writings, thus, offer comfort through the familiar themes of morality, spirituality, and personal development in a system where traditional values have meant a lot. These stories have a therapeutic quality and act like mental support for the readers, as they offer emotionally weak characters opportunities to solve their conundrums through faith and ethical choices. Such a technique and affirmation of cultural norms, together with the possibility of transcending transitory pain, serve as a substantial reason why these works still bathe in the rays of literary brightness in Pakistan.
The Dominance of Ideological Themes
The authors exemplify a common literary culture, which thrives on key themes like morality, religiosity, and romantic idealism. Their works are also intertwined, presenting Islamic spirituality alongside stories of personal development. These tales generally celebrate protagonists who turn to religion for redemption after suffering an emotional downfall or societal conflict.
The journey of acquiring spiritual awakening is treated as the pivotal and ultimate resolution that understatedly reinforces the symbiosis between self-development and complete submission to God. While these mega-narratives resonate with large constituency sections in a society heavily bolstered by religious fundamentalisms, they impart a didactic message that spiritual awakening is the only befitting answer to personal or societal dilemmas.
Romanticising the Virtuous Woman
In these narratives, female characters are usually shaped into representative moral virtue, and their basic conflict circulates how to be a virtuous lady or get back upright conduct from a fallen status in the world. Where the description upholds a few values associated with society, on the contrary, it also shrinks the scope of womanhood. These women, heavily encompassed around dilemmas, would rather be praised for their patience, modesty, and endurance than for their agency, ambition, or complexity.
The different struggles and strife are framed only within the narrow confines of society’s expectations, leaving little room for decent narrative pathways that would talk about the variety of personal growth or attending to individual aspirations outside the moral sphere. This picture tends towards the “ideal woman” trajectory only after being entrenched in cultural and religious values, pleasing to the conservative mindset but ultimately precise limitations on women for the literature to portray them.
The Overemphasis on Suffering and Redemption
Redemption through suffering is the most common theme in these books. Their characters endure great suffering, wherein they often rise and become stronger through a divine or religious understanding, whether through personal loss, social ostracisation, or romantic betrayal. Such articulation of suffering as a pathway towards spiritual enlightenment derives a major influence from the Sufi traditions within the South Asian cultures; the enduring of human pain to attain higher truths has a significant historical and cultural resonance. Reducing the question of human experience to the binary of suffering and redemption could stifle the other equally valid possibilities: rebellion, scepticism, or the desire for individual autonomy. These alternative facets, too, are definitive to the human experience and must find their place in literature dealing with the anguishes of life.
Unlike these, writers such as Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) and Saadat Hasan Manto (Toba Tek Singh) have a critical and satirical approach toward suffering and chaos endemic to society. They employ dark humour in their works, lacking the absolute ethical cloak to sustain their treatment of injustice, absurdity, and existential queries. Their works are liberating in essence, given that they manoeuvre through the complexities of human behaviour, conflict, and predicament in the face of disorder, thus allowing for reflection on the irrationality of humanity, the dichotomies wrought by societal norms, and the striking unpredictability that actual life bears.
The Disregard for Literary Innovation
The overwhelming success of such writers propagates a culture of squeezing business out of repetition rather than creative expression. Popular novels almost always follow certain archetypes in plotlines, themes, and character arcs, making it quite tough for the more experimental or avant-garde writer to catch on. Formative innovation, whether narrative structure, language, or theme, is usually sidelined in favour of formulaic narratives appealing to conservative tastes. The prioritisation of familiarity over creativity stunts artistic growth.
For example, Intizar Hussain’s work, which illustrates the author’s experimentation with narrative forms that draw on folk tales and allegories to comment on existential and political issues, has never been received with great commercial success, unlike such contemporary authors who touch the mass market sensibilities. His beautiful weaving of cultural memory and identity did not find the common reader platforms because of the populism of simpler and more accessible narratives.
The Need for a Broader Literary Canon
Pakistani readers, particularly the youth, should develop a diverse literary canon that reflects the full range of human experience. Readers must turn to tales that deviate from the common tropes of morality and redemption to go beyond this literary jacket. Writers like Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, and Intizar Hussain give life to characters and stories. Pakistani literature could be a vibrant, evolving field, yet this can only happen when readers and writers alike introduce complexity, originality, and diversity into the narrative.
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Momina Areej is currently pursuing an MPhil in Clinical Pharmacy Practice. With a passion for writing, she covers diverse topics including world issues, literature reviews, and poetry, bringing insightful perspectives to each subject. Her writing blends critical analysis with creative expression, reflecting her broad interests and academic background.