Mushtaq Soofi

Neelum Ahmad Basheer is a well-known Urdu writer and has a visible presence on the literary landscape. She has a sizable number of publications to her credit. Her profile says that she is ‘a fiction writer, novelist, poet, travelogue writer, sketch writer, critic and researcher’. Her father, Ahmed Bashir, a respected figure, was an avant-garde filmmaker, journalist and writer. Creativity is in the family’s DNA. Her sisters are prominent in performing arts.

They have killed their language. Not just that. They celebrate it to show unabashedly to the world that it rightly deserved to be extinct as if it was an aberration. Who are they? They can’t be Pashtun, Baloch and Sindhi. All these people are normal human beings which simply means that each group has its language, the language that is natural to it and loves to use it.

Modern notion of nationalism or nation state came to the colonies with the arrival of Western occupation forces which, as is well-known, spiced up by their sense of superiority, were determined to mould the societies they subjugated into their own image. The result, however, was a little more than cheap replicas. Paradoxically, nationalism came handy to indigenous resistance forces. It fulfilled at least two vital functions.