Chaka Gali—the narrow alleys right opposite the mouth of Hashtnagri Police Station, beside Hashtnagri Gate, an insignia of the walled city of Peshawar—is a terrain of convoluted streets lined with shops offering second-hand books, showcasing the foregone uproarious bookish relationships, as well as new ones (mostly pirated, with a few originals). This scented literary bazaar is archaic, even more than the partition of the subcontinent itself.
On a random weekend, I visited to accrue some fiction for the novel year ahead; since I am trying to adorn my skillset in fiction writing, apart from the journalistic bland, in comparison to the ever-lively knots of fiction. Ergo, my target there was to coalesce some South Asian fiction writers, known for their eloquence, prestige, and evergreen writings, and ultimately, I bagged Mohammed Hanif, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Ahmed Ali.
Coming from an accounting background and having read mostly non-fiction, I envisage that these writers have much creativity to offer—a jubilant hue in the vast picture of the South Asian anglophone literary canon, one that I may even transcreate in op-eds in the forthcoming year.
While hunting for books, amidst my errand, I noticed something grim: the near non-existence of seekers of fiction. This is, in a way, perplexing, since once necessities (security, food, health, and so on) are met, what does a newborn Homo sapiens need? A story with a narrative that can entertain, most often coupled with an additional pedagogical function.
Notwithstanding this human modus operandi, Chaka Gali was an outlier wholly. When I asked the same question of Ukasha (a young boy) at this old shop, viz. Umer Iqbal Book Centre, aged thirty-three years or so, right at the outset of the bazaar, he asserted: “Nowadays, only students of engineering, medical sciences, or aspirants of CSS come here for their respective course books and guides. Nobody is interested in reading fiction.”
And of course, this is not something outlandish. Over time, as Iftikhar Arif lamented, despite rising literacy levels and a growing number of university graduates, there are fewer books in people’s homes—an indication of a declining taste for literature among the masses.
The stats suffice: according to the World Population Review, the top three countries in terms of books read annually and hours spent reading are the United States (17 books, 357 hours), India (16 books, 352 hours), and the United Kingdom (15 books, 343 hours). Pakistan, in contrast, ranks among the lowest three, with only 2.6 books read per person annually and 60 hours spent reading.
When I asked the reason for this dismal state of affairs, he (Ukasha) labelled two evils: first, the widespread digital piracy through PDFs; and second, the declining readership in general
Albeit, de facto, the stats look even more deflated, especially in Peshawar, which has produced some of the finest minds, inter alia: Syed Ahmad Shah Bokhari, aka Pitras Bokhari, and Daud Kamal, two luminaries of English literature upon whom national awards are named; Ahmad Ali Saayein, whom Iqbal called the Ghalib of Hindko; Farigh Bukhari, a multilingual poet and progressive writer; Sayed Amjad Hussain, an emeritus professor at the University of Toledo; and many more. Envisioning, from this historically decorated city, the situation at hand is quite depressing and alarming. One can easily gauge the prevailing state of other impoverished cities of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Economics 101 teaches that without muscular demand, a business cannot run in the long term, unless margins are astronomical, which, when asked, he asserted “averaging around 5%.” Add to this the neck-breaking inflation of recent years and other human development indicators: as per the latest Household Integrated Economic Survey 2024–25, people are even eating less, with the poorest urban citizens having lost 23 per cent of their real income. The very adventure of trading books seems a no-brainer, obsolete business.
When I asked the reason for this dismal state of affairs, he (Ukasha) labelled two evils: first, the widespread digital piracy through PDFs; and second, the declining readership in general. While I contended that the former does not lead to sustainable readership—PDFs, once acquired, often remain fossilised on hard disks without fruition at all—the latter remains the issue that needs repair before our cognitive abilities deteriorate cap-à-pie.
The government needs to support book readership, public libraries, old-book shops, and whatnot, without outright censorship, through innovative, out-of-the-box solutions. Unlike the legacy formula of fomenting and supporting state-owned entities like the National Book Foundation—eating billions over decades without much result—buildings have been allocated, staff hired, and an entire “book promotion bureaucracy” created.
Apart from the government, society at large should also play its part in giving life to this dying undertaking and reversing our drift towards a post-literate society. I hope the populace starts peopling these literary streets, rejuvenating the long tradition of experiencing the timeless (and chiseled) learnings in fiction, and, by extension, not letting the business of books die.