Remembering a Lost Presence: The Spectre of Partition in the Stories of Lahore-Based Punjabi-Language Author Zubair Ahmed

Abstract

This chapter considers the work of Punjabi-language Lahore-based short-story writer Professor Zubair Ahmed, in order to understand the configuration of pre-Partition memories that haunt the author’s present. Ahmed’s short stories are constructed around a creative and intimate reframing of the political, social and affective worlds of post-colonial Pakistan, in conversation with a larger internal and external world. Memories animate this affective landscape, as do the personal and the political, and the embrace of the fragments and hauntings of a pre-Partition past within a partitioned present. Ahmed’s work also provides a window into the activities of a little-known language movement that seeks to reconfigure language politics in the Pakistani Punjab and which connects to a broader transnational linguistic and literary movement that seeks to enliven and empower the Punjabi language across borders. Work in this arena suggests emergent possibilities for a new experience of the contentious border that separates the Pakistani Punjab from the Indian Punjab, built out of memory, within a fractured present.