Review Article Muhammad Hasan Askari: The Postcolonial Mind

Abstract

The first sentence is disconcerting: ‘Muhammad Hasan Askari was Urdu’s first literary critic, in the Western, practical sense of the term; that is he chose to set up as a critic, an interpreter and a judge of literature’ (p.1). All these attributes, although they do not originate with even him, go back to Kalimuddin Ahmad. It was Kalimuddin Ahmad who was a critic in the western and practical sense of the term; and who startled the literary world with his opening sentence of A Look at Urdu Criticism: ‘The existence of literary criticism in Urdu is imaginary’, (1942) thus Kalimuddin Ahmad had chosen to set up as a critic, an interpreter and a judge of literature while Askari was yet a student. Mehr Afshan Farooqi next asserts: