Nazia Akhtar 

Between Shore and Wave: Hyderabad and Partition in the Writings of Two Diasporic Authors  

The Partition of India saw the integration of approximately five hundred and sixty-five princely states into either India or Pakistan. Among these princely states was Hyderabad in south-central India, which was brought into the Indian Union through annexation in 1948. This presentation will concentrate on the work of two diasporic Hyderabadi writers, M.A. Seljouk and Aziz Ahmad, who wrote in English and Urdu respectively. Both Seljouk and Ahmad left Hyderabad for Pakistan and later made their way to the USA and Canada respectively. While Seljouk’s first-person account Corpses (1961) is deeply personal, provocative, and experiential, Ahmad’s third-person novels The Shore and the Wave (1947) and Shabnam (1950) offer detached, critical appraisals of a larger milieu. While graphic descriptions of violence and dislocation haunt Seljouk’s account, they figure unobtrusively in the background of Ahmad’s writings, which make broader claims in relation to history, society, and culture at this critical juncture. This article will examine these notably different texts and focus on the contrast in affective modes of representation, testimony, and memorialization. In the process, it will introduce new ways to imagine the question of Partition and decolonization through regional and diasporic perspectives that remain marginal but, in fact, offer the possibility to expand and renew our understanding of both these critical events as well as the crucial role played by literary culture in relation to them.   

Biography 

Nazia Akhtar is an Assistant Professor at the Human Sciences Research Centre, International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad (India), where she teaches courses in Indian and Russian literatures. In 2017, she was awarded a New India Foundation fellowship to write a book on Urdu prose by Hyderabadi women. Bibi’s Room: Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose was published in July 2022 by Orient BlackSwan and the New India Foundation. Nazia has received a commendation from the jury of the Jawad Memorial Prize (2021) for her translation of Zeenath Sajida’s Urdu short story “Chhotam Jaan.” Her second book, The Deccan Sun, which consists of translations of Urdu essays and stories by Zeenath Sajida, will be published by Penguin Random House in 2025. She is also researching the life and work of Sughra Humayun Mirza (1884-1958), a social worker, traveller, writer, and journalist from Hyderabad.