Sponsored by NYU's Hindi and Urdu Programs, the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and the Institute for Public Knowledge.

$5 suggested donation (no one turned away!)
Light refreshments will be served.

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), Urdu's finest short-story writer, has left behind a rich and complicated legacy—one that we now seek to revisit in the centenary year of his birth. Pakistani activist Saadia Toor will lead a discussion on the contemporary relevance of the Manto's pithy and irreverent "Letters to Uncle Sam" (1951-1954), written from Lahore in the final years of the author's life, and in the shadow of the Cold War.

Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad will give a bilingual reading from Reeck's new English translations of Manto's Letters.

Bilal Hashmi will serve as moderator and discussant.

About the Speakers

Saadia Toor is Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is the author of The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (New York and London: Pluto Press, 2011).

Matt Reeck is a a widely published poet and translator based in Brooklyn. Along with co-translator Aftab Ahmad, he has prepared a manuscript of Manto's Bombay fiction titled, Bombay Stories.

Aftab Ahmad is Lecturer in Hindi-Urdu at Columbia University. He took his PhD in Urdu literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University and has served as the Director of the American Institute of Urdu Studies Program in Lucknow.

Bilal Hashmi is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University. He is the translator of Sajjad Zaheer's 1938 Urdu novella, A Night in London (New Delhi: Harper Perennial, 2011).


This event is the second in a two-day series of conversations around Manto's centenary in NYC:

http://www.facebook.com/MantoCentenaryInNyc
http://www.facebook.com/events/324856224245733/

Last updated: 2012-04-26 08:28:22