Gurmani Center
The Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature (GCLL) was established in 2010 with the generous support of the Gurmani Foundation to promote the study and research of Pakistani languages, including Arabic and Persian. Since its inception, the Center has grown into a leading hub for academic and cultural activities. It has hosted international conferences, published groundbreaking scholarship in the field of vernacular humanities, and offered a diverse range of courses in Pakistani languages.
One of the Center's flagship initiatives is the annual publication of Bunyad, a research journal recognized by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) as one of the top-ranked journals in Urdu studies. Beyond publishing, the GCLL regularly invites artists, poets, calligraphers, and fiction writers to showcase their work and conduct workshops on creative writing, research methodologies, and related themes.
Due to its extensive contributions, the Gurmani Center has become a cornerstone of the vibrant intellectual and artistic life not only on the LUMS campus but also in the broader cultural landscape of Lahore.
International Worker's Day Session on
Labour and Litereary Histories
The Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature invites you to a special session regarding International Workers’ Day, focusing on the literary and poetic histories of labour.
May Day provides a critical occasion to examine how labour, its histories, struggles, and lived experiences have been represented, remembered, and archived within literary and cultural traditions. Literature, particularly poetry, has long served as a medium through which the voices of laboring classes are articulated, preserved, and transmitted across generations. This session explores how creative expression can function as an archive of labour, documenting material hardship, resistance, and collective memory.
The discussion will focus on two significant works. Abid Hussain Abid’s poetry collection Rāt ke Ḥisār Mein engages with themes of enclosure, endurance, and social experience. Muhammad Nasir will discuss the book he edited, Jāñ Phullāñ Tāñ Lāl by Manzoor Niazi, in relation to labour poetry and workers’ literary expression. Niazi may be read as a poet of the laboring classes whose diction remains closer to everyday speech and workers lived idiom. In this sense, his poetry offers a distinct mode of revolutionary expression, different from Faiz’s more refined and literary register, while remaining deeply connected to questions of class, labour, and collective struggle.
Speakers
Abid Hussain Abid
Muhammad Nasir
Moderator
Sasha Sofia Javed
Date: Thursday, 30th April 2026
Time: 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Venue: A-11, Academic Block, LUMS
Registration Link: https://forms.gle/cHkmVpqXKLPCAKTv7
Deadline to register is Wednesday, April 29, 2026, Till 11:00 pm.
Abid Hussain Abid is a poet and a progressive intellectual associated with Progressive Writer’s Association. He has been actively involved with Progressive Writers and played a foundational role in organizing and sustaining writer’s movements alongside his colleagues in Lahore, 1997. His poetry emerges from lived experience and reflects a deep engagement with social realities articulating a consciousness, shaped by labour, struggle, and collective life.
Muhammad Nasir is a Lecturer at Government Graduate College, Chunian, and is currently pursuing his PhD in Pakistan Studies at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. His research focuses on the history of bonded labour in Pakistan and the struggles for freedom and rights by bonded labour communities.
Sasha Sofia Javed, a journalist, researcher, and activist focusing on human rights, labor, and gender justice in South Asia. Her writings have appeared in Arab News, The News International, and The Friday Times. Identifying as a “labor and people’s journalist,” she works at the intersections of scholarship, activism, and resistance, amplifying marginalized voices through her storytelling
Conversation Series on
Contemporary Urdu Fiction
