Majmooa
Mushtaq Ahmad Yousfi
It would’ve been too tough to place any one book by Mustaq Yousfi in this list but luckily, his four books Cheragh talay, Khakam-ba-dahan, Zarguzasht and Aab-e-gum have been compiled as one Majmooa and that saved the day for us. Yousfi is arguably the best satire writer of Urdu and in the words of Dr Zaheer Fatehpuri “We are living in the ‘Yousufi era’ of Urdu literary humour.” A tremendous contribution of Yousfi’s work is that he has documented the lifestyle of Muslim’s living in India before partition in manner that not many could have. Also, the social and cultural problem’s faced by the people who migrated to Pakistan have also been depicted in a manner which is unique to Yousfi.
Unfortunately, we could not include Yousfi’s book ‘Sham-e-Shair-e-Yaraan’ in our list which came out in 2014, after the Majmooa had been published!
