Ahmed Ali:

Ahmad Ali is known as the pioneer of English fiction and poetry among the Muslims of India. His literary career began during British rule over India and his significance as a writer is both historical and social. He moved from Urdu, his mother tongue and the literary language of Indian Muslims, to English. He was also the first to accept modernity, social-realism and then symbolism from Western sources among Indian Muslims writers. He is now remembered mostly for his historical significance. [ View Details ]

The Project of Respectability : Changes in Language Textbooks in British India:

It is well known how languages, and especially the discourses to which they give access, privilege a certain world view. School textbooks, especially those of history and social studies, but also those of languages and literature which are our focus, project a certain world view. We are not talking merely of those deliberately ‘ideological’ texts written by individuals, corporate bodies or groups in order to privilege and disseminate their views. [ View Details ]

Prudery in South Asian Muslim Literature : The British Legacy :

The British conquest revolutionised the curricula of all subjects, including those of languages, in South Asia. The revolution was no less than the change from a pre-modern, oriental world view to a modern, Western one. This article will consider only one aspect of this change how the medieval language texts of north Indian Muslims became puritanical i.e how their erotic aspects were bowdlerized and their oral, pre-modern world view was replaced by the modern, Victorian world view. The main argument presented in the following pages is that Muslim literature in India took certain forms of eroticism as natural and it was only after the British conquest, and because of British prudery and puritanism, that the Muslim reformers came to regard them as `shameful' and abandoned them. In short, contrary to the popular belief among South Asian Muslims that they (the Muslims) were `modest' while the British were not, this article argues that the sexual prudery so commonplace in Pakistan today is a consequence of the changes in world view brought about by the British. [View Details ]

TAUFIQ RAFAT (1927 – 2 August 1998):