short summary of therufugee by k.a abbas
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The Short Stories of K.A. Abbas: Depicting the Life of the Common Man
VISUAL AND MATERIAL ARTS, LITERATURE AND LANGUAGES

H.S. Chandalia
Prof. H.S. Chandalia is a Professor of English at Janardan Rai Nagar Rajasthan Vidhyapeeth University, Udaipur, and is the author of two books on K.A. Abbas, Ethos of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Script to Screen: The Progressive Vision of K.A. Abbas. He was awarded the Prestigious Nandkumar Lavande Academic Excellence Award in 2016.
KHWAJA AHMAD ABBASABABEELTHE BLACK SUNUNITED NATIONSJAWAHARLAL NEHRUINDIRA GANDHIURDU LITERATUREHINDI LITERATUREENGLISH LITERATURESHORT STORIES
The stories of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas focus on the much talked about ‘common man’. He is a writer who consciously depicts the tales of those ordinary people who accomplished heroic deeds simply by virtue of their undaunted spirit and the sheer will to survive. Abbas belongs to the tradition of Dr Mulk Raj Anand who created a hero like Bakha, a scavenger, in his classic novel Untouchable (1935). Anand was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and his movement against untouchability. He was equally touched by the ideas Marxist philosophy epitomised in the October Revolution of Russia in 1917. It was this ideological base which motivated K.A. Abbas to look for real life stories of poverty and hunger, exploitation and protest, alienation and hope, patriarchy and the rise of the woman’s voice. In fact, the fiction of Abbas, like his films and journalistic writings, brings the common man and his concerns centrestage.

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas is known as a film maker and a journalist all over the world. Not many people know that he wrote some 73 books in the genres of fiction and non-fiction prose in Urdu, English and Hindi. His fiction includes 15 novels and seven short story collections. These works reflect his deep-seated optimism and commitment to social transformation. He stood firmly for the values of democracy, secularism and socialism and proved himself to be an ambassador for the working and toiling masses of the world.
The short stories of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas have been published in a number of collections beginning with Blood and Stones and Other Stories (1947), Rice and Other Stories (1947), Cages of Freedom and Other Stories (1952), One Thousand Nights on a Bed of Stones and Other Stories (1957), The Black Sun and Other Stories (1963), Men and Women: Specially Selected Long and Short Stories (1977), The Gun and Other Stories (1985) and An Evening in Lucknow(2011). Of these the last collection An Evening in Lucknow has been published posthumously, with an editorial note by Suresh Kohli who as an editor has also compiled some very significant interviews of Abbas with reputed magazines of the country. His last story ‘Mother and Child’ based on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy was published after his death in The Illustrated Weekly of India in June, 1987. Mr S.A. Rehman who worked with Abbas for more than twenty-eight years as his secretary said that the title was initially different but was modified by the publishers.
Arguably, the most famous of Abbas’s stories is ‘Sparrows’ published initially in Urdu as ‘Ababeel’. Written when Abbas was 26, it was included in a West German anthology of the world's best stories. The story narrates the tale of a peasant boy Rahim Khan who has to suffer on account of the traditional and