The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) by Zulfikar Ghose was the first contemporary novel written in English by an author of Pakistani origin to focus on Pakistani people. With the burgeoning of Pakistani-English fiction in the twenty-first century, the novel not only maintained its relevance, but also proved to be a harbinger of the contemporary Pakistani-English novel, assuring its status as a classic in this expanding canon. The Murder of Aziz Khan was published one year after Ghose’s first novel The Contradictions (1966).
Ghose’s autobiography, Confessions of a Native-alien (1965), was written when he was barely thirty. The oxymoronic term “native-alien” provides a strong clue to an understanding of the writer’s concept of self. It bears upon Ghose’s relationship to the land of his birth, his physical distancing from it, and to the emergence of...
2362 words
Citation: Khawaja, Nusrat. "The Murder of Aziz Khan". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 September 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11862, accessed 09 June 2026.]
