ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the horror fiction written by Mrs. Abdul Qadir to locate how her oft-used term māfaūq al-fitrat, or the supernatural, translates into a new generic aesthetic that provides a counterpoint to the push of modernity that one encounters in the dominant trends of early to mid-20th-century Urdu writings. I hope to locate the ways in which the complex intersection of a genre grounded in the visceral and authorial denial that one finds in Mrs. Abdul Qādir’s writing throws normative understanding of Muslim women’s writings into confusion. To this end, the essay looks at how the genre of horror fiction allows for an engagement, deconstruction, embracing, or rejection of modernity beyond the paradigm of life writing and self-narration that have been established as benchmark for Muslim women’s literary writings (both within the PWA and by contemporary scholarship, which demands constant narration of subjectivity from the texts labelled as ‘authored’ by Muslim women). What are the ways then in which Mrs. Abdul Qādir’s work can be thought of as a starting point to think of a genealogy of Urdu fiction by women outside the overarching strand of realist writing, as well as the critical strain that requires the proverbially ‘veiled’ subjects to speak of themselves.
