Who was he?
QUDRATULLAH SHAHAB was born in Gilgit in 1917 and spent his childhood in Jammu. He worked for some time in the civil service of India and later, after Partition, joined the civil service of Pakistan where he held numerous offices including that of Ambassador to the Netherlands. He is, however, best known to Urdu readers as a master short-story writer and the main architect of the Pakistan Writers’ Guild, a government-sponsored agency for the organization and aid of Pakistani writers. His published works include two collections of short stories and Ya Khuda!—a novella about the problem of rehabilitating the refugees made homeless in the wake of India’s Partition. He died in 1986 shortly after completing his voluminous autobiography Shahabnama.
Translations from Shahabnama:
Shahabnama is an autobiography of Qudratullah Shahab, which is widely read in Pakistan, due to the status of the author and also the literary quality of the work. Qudratullah Shahab was an Indian civil servant, who migrated to Pakistan after partition of the sub-continent. He was chosen by the Governor-General Ghulam Muhammad to be his Personal Secretary, and then he worked in the same capacity under Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan. He had first hand information about the events in the early days of the history of Pakistan. But the chapters of his voluminous work, which I am able to translate, mostly deal with his childhood, early education, first college life romance, and upto the time when he got admission in the Indian Civil Service.
http://www.geocities.com/m_naumansadiq/shahabnama/shahabnama
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