Khalid Jawed is now one of the most singular and incisive voices in contemporary Urdu fiction. His oeuvre is characterised by an unrelenting interrogation of violence, alienation, corporeality and the grotesque, through a narrative style that is at once unsettling and introspective.
His seminal novel, Nemat Khana (The Paradise of Food), which was awarded the JCB Prize for Literature in 2022 in its English translation by Baran Farooqi, epitomises this literary vision with great depth. The novel’s thematic architecture foregrounds the entanglement of the corporeal and the existential, situating the human body as both a site of suffering and a metaphor for broader socio-historical anxieties.
‘Nemat Khana,’ the Urdu edition, Khalid Jawed, Kitabdaar, 2023.
Through a prose style that is at once visceral and allegorical, Jawed constructs a literary universe where the grotesque serves not merely as an aesthetic device. It doubles as an epistemic framework for understanding the disquieting undercurrents of contemporary existence.
One of the most striking dimensions of Nemat Khana lies in its intricate and unsettling engagement with food – not merely as a vehicle of sustenance but as a metaphor for desire, violence and existential precarity.
The narrative unfolds through the consciousness of its protagonist, a lower-middle-class Muslim man, whose lived experiences are rendered through a prism of fragmentation, grotesquerie and an overarching sense of estrangement. In this epistemic framework, food assumes an ambivalent semiotic charge: it is simultaneously a locus of solace and a vector of horror, a liminal site where the primal imperatives of survival, sensuous gratification and visceral repulsion coalesce.
وہ اکیلا نہیں تھا،اُس کے ساتھ دو نفس اور بھی تھے ، ایک کن کٹا اور لنگڑاتا ہوا خرگوش کا سایہ جو اُس کے پیچھے پیچھے تھا اور ایک کاکروچ تھا جو اُس کی قمیض کے کالر پر تتلی کی طرح بیٹھا ہوا تھا(جاوید-38)
[He was not alone; he had two more beings with him—one was the shadow of a lop-eared and limping rabbit that followed him closely, and the other was a cockroach perched on his shirt collar like a butterfly.]
This above passage from the novel is imbued with profound complexity, and lives between the real and the phantasmagoric.
The lop-eared, limping rabbit stands for vulnerability, corporeal affliction and existential precarity. The deformity and impairment of the rabbit underscore a rupture in its autonomy, rendering it an emblem of suffering and spiritual debilitation. Yet, it is not the corporeal entity of the rabbit that assumes primacy in the narrative, but rather its shadow – an absence that signifies presence.
This spectral displacement problematises the notion of agency, gesturing towards a subjectivity haunted by the vestiges of an ineffable trauma.
The cockroach, universally associated with resilience and survival in harsh conditions, is reinterpreted through its placement on the protagonist’s collar. This contrasts sharply with the traditional symbolism of a butterfly, which represents beauty and transcendence. By replacing the butterfly with a cockroach – an insect often linked to filth and revulsion – the image creates a striking dissonance. This contrast challenges conventional meanings, blurring the lines between beauty and ugliness, truth and deception, and highlighting the struggle to endure in oppressive conditions.
The protagonist’s interactions with these liminal entities – neither wholly tangible nor entirely illusory – blur the line between reality and hallucination, creating a sense of psychological fragmentation. Their interstitial nature reinforces themes of isolation, existential alienation, and hidden trauma or guilt, which emerge as unsettling visions. This interplay between the physical and the ghostly, presence and absence, highlights the fragility of perception and the thin boundary between sanity and breakdown.
Khalid Jawed’s style eschews any banal conceptualisation of eating. Rather, alimentary acts surrounding food and consumption are tied to themes of decay, death, and corporeal limitations. The novel’s unrelenting preoccupation on the physical experience of eating places it within the grotesque literary tradition, wherein the ostensibly familiar is rendered disturbingly alien, and the mundane is imbued with an abject, almost sublime, materiality.
In Nemat Khana, violence is complex and layered, unfolding across the physical, psychological, and existential registers. The novel rejects a linear narrative, instead using a fragmented, episodic story-telling mode that reflects the protagonist’s fractured mind and struggles within an opaque and adversarial social order.
Also read: ‘The Paradise of Food’ Is a Sordid Saga of Onions and Garlic, Liver and Lungs, and Lust
This disjointed storytelling isn’t just an aesthetic device – it heightens the protagonist’s sense of disorientation and emphasises how personal suffering is deeply tied to broader social and political violence. Themes of family, community, and identity become battlegrounds where the protagonist faces oppression and marginalisation. Nemat Khana doesn’t just portray violence; it embeds it within its very form, language, and tone, forcing the reader to confront the fundamental precarity of human existence.
The book’s literary sensibility is at once bleak and profoundly poetic.
Khalid Jawed orchestrates a narrative universe where meaning is persistently deferred, survival is configured through absurdity, and the corporeal realm emerges as a site of perpetual conflict.
The novel does not merely depict alienation; rather, it enacts alienation as a formal principle. It is a singular intervention in contemporary Urdu fiction, exemplifying Jawed’s radical aesthetic vision – one that eschews facile categorisation.
Jawed’s prose is replete with intricate metaphorical constructions and disconcerting imagistic configurations. It oscillates between the registers of poetry and prose, and is thus at once hypnotic and profoundly unsettling.
By deploying a first-person narrative, he submerges the reader in an intimate yet deeply perturbing engagement with his existential crises, corporeal abjection, and metaphysical anguish. The immediacy amplifies the novel’s affective intensity.
The structural architecture of Nemat Khana constitutes a radical departure from conventional realist paradigms as well.
Jawed is thus aligned with modernist and postmodernist literary traditions, particularly in his dismantling of the illusion of narrative coherence. His prose resists syntactic and structural predictability. The novel thus unfolds not as a causally ordered sequence but as a series of encounters – each one amplifying the protagonist’s entrapment within a real and imagined world.
Critical discourse frequently positions Khalid Jawed’s oeuvre within the broader lineage of existential and avant-garde literature, drawing compelling parallels with Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, and Samuel Beckett. Much like Kafka, Jawed constructs a universe governed by an inscrutable logic, wherein the protagonist’s alienation is exacerbated by a terrain that offers neither clarity nor solace.
It is comparable to the aesthetic of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, wherein the body becomes a locus of simultaneous fascination and horror.
Within the broader corpus of Urdu fiction, Jawed’s literary praxis moves away from the social realism of the works of Premchand, Ismat Chughtai, and Rajinder Singh Bedi. While their concerns are indispensable, Jawed’s fiction eschews direct sociopolitical critique in favour of a deeper engagement. His oeuvre extends the experimental impulses of Naiyar Masud’s narrative structures and the psychological interiority of Qurratulain Hyder’s historiographic imagination. His world is one where corporeality, semiotics, and violence coalesce into meaning and negation.
In a contemporary Urdu literary milieu oscillating between nostalgic lamentations and overt political allegories, Nemat Khana emerges as rupture. It reinvents the Urdu novel.
At its core, Nemat Khana creates a literary style that is unsettling and intellectually complex. His work not only expands the themes of contemporary Urdu fiction but also challenges its usual storytelling methods. This commitment to challenging norms and pushing intellectual boundaries makes him one of the most important literary voices of the 21st century.
Meraj Rana is an Urdu poet and critic. He teaches Urdu literature in the Department of Urdu, Halim Muslim P.G. College, Kanpur. His first collection, Panahgah was published by the Sahitya Academy, New Delhi.
