اردو افسانے میں غرب شناسی کا ارتقا: استغرابی و مابعد نوآبادیاتی تناظر

In the Urdu short story tradition, the West emerges as a complex intellectual and cultural theme shaped by colonial experience, modernity, migration, and crises of identity. Its representation oscillates between images of power and progress on the one hand, and moral disintegration, alienation, and existential anxiety on the other. This multiplicity transforms the West from a mere external civilization into a sustained intellectual problem and a symbolic structure within Urdu fiction. The central question, therefore, concerns the perspective from which Urdu short story writers engage with the West: whether it appears as a postcolonial reaction, an orientalist counter-discourse; Occidentalism, or a site of cultural dialogue. This article examines selected short stories by selective celebrated authors; Manto, Qurratulain Hyder, Abdullah Hussein and Mirza Athar Baig etc to address this question. Through close textual and comparative analysis, the study demonstrates that the representation of the West in Urdu fiction is neither imitative nor uniformly oppositional. Rather, it constitutes a self-reflexive, critical, and dialogic engagement that negotiates power, identity, and historical memory. Consequently, Urdu short fiction articulates a distinctive postcolonial and Occidentalist consciousness that positions it meaningfully within global debates on culture, modernity, and literary representation.