How Ibne Safi taught an entire generation to read

Karachi in the 1950s was not only a city under construction; it was a city learning how to read.

The years following Partition brought millions of migrants, anxieties and uncertainties to the port city. Together, they produced something: a wide public hungry for entertainment — gripping stories and dramatic narratives that could momentarily release readers from the grind of everyday survival.

Thus came about cheap print, serialised fiction, and an expanding entertainment economy, which created larger-than-life worlds for people struggling through daily precarity. It was in this environment that Asrar Ahmad — better known as Ibne Safi — emerged as one of the most widely read writers in the Urdu language.

His popularity is often described as a matter of talent alone. Certainly, he was a gifted stylist and storyteller. But literary brilliance does not, by itself, create a readership measured in the millions. Ibne Safi’s success partially rested on a deeper foundation: a whole publishing world that stretched back to colonial North India, reshaped in post-Partition Karachi, and oriented toward cultivating habits of regular reading, lawful conduct, and modern citizenship — ideals closely aligned with the nation’s aspirations at the time.

Seen this way, Ibne Safi was not merely writing spy stories; he was participating in the construction of a cultural market, and more importantly, a moral and civic imagination.

Building readers, not just writing books

One of the clearest signs that Ibne Safi wasn’t just spinning yarns comes from his paish lafz (prefaces). Addressing readers directly, he reassured newcomers that each novel in Jasusi Duniya was “complete” in itself, so that “new readers can start from any number without difficulty”. At the same time, he urged regular readers to place advance orders through local agents, warning that waiting until publication day might mean missing out altogether.

This was not an incidental authorial chatter, but rather a market discipline. By emphasising advance orders and serial continuity, Ibne Safi helped cultivate what economists would later call “repeat demand”. Readers learned to anticipate release dates, plan purchases, and treat fiction as a regular part of monthly life rather than an occasional indulgence.

These practices did not originate in Karachi. As literary historian Francesca Orsini argues, commercial Urdu publishing had already taken shape in late-colonial North India, where detective and mystery novels functioned as a full-fledged industry, complete with distribution networks, advertising strategies, and readers trained to expect regular instalments.

What Karachi inherited, then, was not simply a genre but a set of practices for producing readers on a large scale. What changed after Partition was the setting in which those practices now operated.

With a mass readership, the question was no longer just about selling books, but about what those books helped people see. Here, spy fiction drew on a much older literary move in Urdu popular writing: the transformation of everyday urban life into a spectacle.

Writing about the late nineteenth century, literary scholar C. M. Naim traces how mistriz (mystery) and asrār (secret) novels began attaching suspense to recognisable places — Mistriz of Rawalpindi, Mistriz of Peshawar, Mistriz of Multan — so that readers could experience the thrill of danger not in some distant fantasy world, but in streets and cities that sounded real. That........

© Dawn Prism