Contextualizing Crime: Analyzing Anti-Social Characters through Urdu Short Stories

Abstract

This research explored public attitudes toward anti- social behavior in Urdu short stories. This research aimed at dissolving anti-social behavior as presented in Urdu short stories. This research work utilized a qualitative approach. The research is conducted from a critical sociological perspective focusing on the relation between agents’ behavior and structures. The data collection incorporated Saadat Hasan Manto, Qudrat Ullah Shahab, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, Krishan Chander and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Hayatullah Ansari, Shaukat Siddiqui, Ram Lal, Joginder Pal, Gelani Bano, Anwar Sajad, Khalid Hussain whose stories illustrated the social, economic and cultural factors affecting the characters, who are low-grade criminals or marginalized members of society. After critical evaluation and textual analysis, this research revealed motifs and stylistics applied for the expression of the anti-social personalities, as well as the factors that originated them. The presented narratives are analyzed using thematic analysis to identify motifs connected with social inequality and individual metamorphoses practically causing illicit behaviors and the hypocrisy of the society. These areas of concern are social abandonment, social-economic status, and psychological impact. The results suggest that the phenomenon of depicting anti-social behavior in Urdu short stories is not natural, but influenced by factors like poverty, social relegation and cultural dishonesty. Stories stress ‘rehabilitation of the offender is possible only through social reforms not through dire punishment.’ Consequently, this study fills a gap in the analysis of anti-social behavior in Urdu literary criticism and contributes to sociological thought by positing Urdu literature as a tool to generate a social critique of the conditions that breed criminality. It seeks a way to understand the possibility narrative brings to humanizing the ‘antisocial,’ and to disturb the moral blinders often assigned to the deviant categories of society.