British rule in the Indian subcontinent had started with the East India Company and became the destiny of the region after the British completely dominated the subcontinent in 1857. By taking the wealth of the region to their own countries, they made the people miserable and took away the country’s economic and spiritual power. The British assimilated the society in terms of language, religion, and culture.

Due to the rapid development of events in this process, poetry had been used as a common type of literature to activate emotions in the society. However, literary genres such as novels and stories from Western literature began to take the place of poetry in the 20th century. In these works of prose, the authors dealt with the stories specific to their own regions. The people who found sections about their own lives in these works began to show great interest in the prose genre.

The Aligarh Movement had started with the adaptation works of Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan that emerged in the classical period and was a large-scale movement that affected every aspect of life in the Muslim community, despite being generally thought of as a political and educational movement. After this movement, the first period of the short story genre in Urdu literature continued to be present between 1900-1930. The stories written during this period frequently revealed the problems of the oppressed people living under British exploitation, social collapse, and emotional and mental weariness. These stories are divided into two parts (i.e., romanticism and reformist literary movements), and their authors tried to protect their psychology by including entertaining elements instead of reflecting on their inner sadness.

Between 1930-1947, being the second period of the short story genre, progressive writers gave direction to this period, during which they dealt with issues such as poverty, unjust income distribution, political failure, and social regression as the main problems in the social and political life of the Indian people and displayed harsh attitudes toward the West’s expansionist policy.

When Pakistan and India separated in 1947, an event that has been transferred to Urdu literature as the Partition Period, writers left their common values aside and wrote down the values of the new country in which they stayed. This period was filled with terrible massacres, separations, and desperation for the people of the subcontinent and cannot be forgotten, as the effects of this period were intensely seen in literature until the 1970s. 

The subcontinent is a fascinating region with its cultural riches, one in which Urdu literature has had a deep-rooted literary tradition by being fed from Eastern and Western literatures. Qudrat Ullah Shahab lived between 1917-1986 and as the valuable bureaucrat and literary writer of this region had also adopted the method of the Partition period.

In most of his stories, there is a woman in the subject position, and this woman has an extraordinary individuality. Qudretullah Shahab presents reality mixed with imagination in his stories. The author deals with internal and emotional problems on the one hand, and on the other hand expresses the disorders in her mentality in his stories. Thus, it makes it possible to come to the focus of the problem and produce a solution. After the stories were published in various magazines and newspapers, he received positive feedback and established himself in the literary field. 

Qudrat Ullah Shahab is famous for his autobiography Shahabnama (1987). He also wrote a fictional work title Chandravati (1938) and stories such as Phulun ka Koyi Kiymat Nehiyn [Flower Has No Value], Çâk Garîbân [Run Collar], Uran Taştariyan [UFOs], Nafsane (1950) [Psyche], Surkh Fita (1963) [Red Ribbon] and Mâncî [My Mother].