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p. 4). There was also no -group3 of serious readers to
demand good literature of the authors. 13 For the last
few years the only people reading books had been clerks,
students and young girls (~1954a, p. 3), and since
every man wanted only to get rich on the black market,
and every woman wanted only to marry someone with a big
car, the authors had been catering to this audience by
writing "school girl literature" (July, 1953, pp. 9-10).
When "stagnant" did not seem strong enough to describe
the sorry state of Urdu literature, Askari went further
and proclaimed a new slogan, the "death of Urdu
literature." So much did Askari yearn for a
"collectivity" of authors that h~ asserted, "If you ask
me if I am among the living or the dead [authors] I will
with great pride count myself among the dead, because at
least this will make me part of a group" (1955, p. 140).
l3Askari's description of reading habits in the
early fifties was often echoed by other critics of the
time who complained that detective stories, light
romances and film magazines were crowding out serious
literature. Zoe Ansari, for example, lamented that while
no one was reading the writings of the Progressives, the
market for obscene and sensationalist film magazines was
booming (Ansari, 1954, p. 13). This observation is
particularly interesting in view of the fact that one of
the charges frequently levied against the Modernists was
that the difficulty of their stories had forced the
common reader to turn away from literature to digests,
detective stories, and film magazines. Obviously this
trend existed at least a full decade before the start of
Modernism.