constructing pathways to translation - Higher Education Commission

CHAPTER
8
ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL: ‘ODDAS NASLEIN’(THE
SOURCE TEXT)
8.1 THE AUTHOR: ABDULLAH HUSSEIN
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Abdullah Hussein was born in Rawalpind
in 1931, and raised
in Gujrat a small town near Lahore. Hussein shifted to England
in 1967 and worked as a chemical engineer in United Kingdom.
On retiring, he ran a liquor off-license in London, and lived in
The Hertfordshire countryside. Recently he has came back to
Lahore.
It was the publication of ‘Oddas Naslein’ that
brought Abdullah Hussein’s name to the forefront of Urdu and
Indo Pakistan literature. The novel won the prestigious
‘Adam Ji Award’. Later Abdullah Hussein also received the ‘Khawaja Hussain Award’
for life long achievement
and excellence in Urdu Language and Literature. In the years
that followed ‘Oddas Naslein’, he also wrote ‘Nasheb’, ‘Bagh’, ‘Nader Log’
In all the works, Hussein’s style, choice of subject and language are remarkably different
from any other work of Urdu novelists, who had been writing before him.
8.2 THE NOVEL ; MAIN THEMES : ‘ODDAS NASLEIN’
‘Oddas Naslein’ very conveniently introduces the reader to the roots of the
subcontinent’s ethos and culture that is woven into the lives of the rural folks. These are
the landless farmers, tillers enslaved by their destinies, whose world changed with the
shock of the partition of land that nourished them for centuries, regardless of communal
or religious differences.