Society and the bereaved : approaches to death in selected Urdu short stories

There is a longstanding tradition of socially conscious short story writing in the Urdu language beginning in the early 20th century. Many writers, including well-known authors like Premchand and Ismat Chughtai, sought to harness literature as a tool for social change by describing the inequalities of society in a realistic manner. In this thesis, I explore approaches to death in selected Urdu short stories by highlighting the interaction between society and the bereaved following familial death. I argue that death reveals the true nature relationships between society and the bereaved; sometimes leading survivors to transgressive intimacies but in other cases making exploitation of the bereaved and its effects more visible. Finally, I describe how application of this approach in the humanities and social sciences creates new opportunities to approach death as a topic of scholarly inquiry, especially in the context of ongoing the Covid-19 pandemic.