{"product_id":"manra-balraj-compositiopb","title":"[11\/01\/26] Manra, Balraj: Compositions, 1946-71","description":"\u003cp\u003eUgly Duckling Presse, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTranslated by Haider Shahbaz\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: November 1, 2026\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Shaped by Marxism, the specific politics of South Asia in the late 1960s, and the rise of neocolonialism, Manra’s compositions are formally experimental and politically uncompromising. Their much belated arrival in English expands the maps of who wrote experimental literature and why.\" —Juliana Spahr\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBalraj Manra was an avant-garde modernist and Marxist writer who changed the course of Urdu literature with his \"compositions\": a handful of innovative, hybrid texts that use surrealist imagery and visual experimentation to challenge conventional prose form. Published in small, independent literary journals from 1964 to 1971, these texts were composed of commentary on left and Third World politics, dream imagery, song lyrics, notes on modernity, and overheard conversations. By merging avant-garde techniques with Marxist politics, Manra's \"compositions\" unsettled the authority of social realism over progressive politics in South Asia. Translated into English for the first time by Haider Shahbaz, these works invite readers to reimagine the relationship between aesthetics and politics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBalraj Manra (1935-2017) pioneered new forms of Urdu literature that merged avant-garde modernist experimentation with a political commitment to Marxism and anti-imperialism. Born in Lyallpur, British India (now Faisalabad, Pakistan) in 1935, Manra migrated to India after the partition of 1947 but continued to visit Pakistan and publish work in both countries. He worked as a lab assistant in a hospital, edited the literary and cultural journal, \u003cem\u003eShaoor\u003c\/em\u003e (Consciousness), and authored several short stories, a few critical essays, and a series of “compositions.” He stopped publishing literary writing at the age of 35.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaider Shahbaz is a writer and translator from Pakistan. His recent and forthcoming translations include works by Mirza Athar Baig, Fauzia Rafique, N.M. Danish, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Haider Shahbaz's courageous translations of the experimental writing of Balraj Manra show that a translator can be a socially engaged literary historian and critic as well as a wordsmith.\" —Matt Reeck\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"To partition is to bureaucratize the brutal act of fragmentation, or a kind of speak speak that sells shattering as disintegration's remedy. In response, Balraj Manra’s compositions arrange the shards attending fracture against the feel-good erasure of reconstructed wholeness. The high-speed, streamlined teleological drive of Capitalism, here, is a “westward…fast car” Manra represents as breaking when it should brake, or perhaps vice versa. Good messy, yes? Accordingly, translator Haider Shabhaz does not seek to restore Manra’s work, but underline its precise, recursively decaying syntax, frayed narrative, sudden violences, and scattered, textual accretions, all in the caustic irony of a colonizer’s tongue. This sardonic and jagged book is now, even as it was then.\" —Douglas Kearney\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Balraj Manra’s \u003cem\u003eCompositions\u003c\/em\u003e is a rare, acutely restored document that catalogs the spiritual void left in those—artists, workers, and children of the Partition of colonial India—who existed in opposition to both the emergent, virulent managerial classes and the despondent bourgeoisie. Manra's bracing and eccentric pages depart from realist post-war lyric, leaning back to Vorticist polemicism, and forward to the fragmented, materialist attentiveness of the British Poetry Revival and the Language School in North America. In Haider Shabaz’s translation, these unexpected missives from a marginal masculinity of the global south, wedged as it was into the festering escalation towards deregulated capitalism, becomes a \u003cem\u003ecri de coeur\u003c\/em\u003e for a generation’s luminous, insurgent discontent.\" —Divya Victor\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45630361042967,"sku":"9781946604545","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/1789514529-900.png?v=1790284804","url":"https:\/\/open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com\/products\/manra-balraj-compositiopb","provider":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","version":"1.0","type":"link"}