Introduction: The Mumbai Novelist Who Writes About Forbidden Love and Politics
Rahman Abbas is one of the most decorated living Urdu novelists, and one of the least known to casual readers in Pakistan. Born in 1972 and based in Mumbai, he has spent two decades writing novels about love that breaks the rules and politics that refuses to stay in the background. His fourth novel, Rohzin, won India’s highest literary honour, the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 2018, and its English translation reached an international audience in 2022. Yet his books are rarely discussed in the digest-fiction conversations that dominate Urdu reading lists, which is exactly why he is worth discovering.
This guide introduces Abbas the way a new reader needs him: his life in brief, his six central novels in plain language, the awards and controversies that shaped his reputation, and a sensible order for reading him. Plot detail is kept at theme level throughout, so nothing here spoils a novel you have not read yet.
Life: A Mumbai Education, a Teaching Career Cut Short
Rahman Abbas was born on 30 January 1972. He studied at the University of Mumbai, where he took master’s degrees in both Urdu and English literature, and he grew up in the city that would become the setting and the soul of his fiction: Mumbai, with its crowded trains, its monsoon floods, and its sharply drawn religious and political divides.
He taught at a junior college in Mumbai, but his teaching career ended early. His first novel, published in 2004, drew an obscenity allegation, and the case that followed lasted a decade. Abbas was arrested, spent a few days in Arthur Road Jail, and resigned from his teaching post while the case ran its course. In 2016, a court acquitted him. He has spoken about those ten years as an experience of standing before a judge without knowing his crime, comparing himself to Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial. The episode is part of his public record, and it explains a great deal about his later fiction: his novels return again and again to people judged by societies that will not explain their verdicts.
Today, Abbas writes in Urdu, and his novels reach English readers through translation. The largest Urdu reading portal, Rekhta, has described him as one of the most read Urdu novelists of his time.
The Novels: Six Books, One City, Many Taboos
1. Nakhalistan Ki Talash — The Search for an Oasis (2004)
Abbas’s first novel follows a young, educated Muslim man in Mumbai after the 1992–93 riots. Increasingly alienated as right-wing politics hardens around him, he searches for a cultural identity he can recognise as his own, drifts toward a Kashmiri militant organisation, and meets a tragic and mysterious end. The novel’s subject matter — a young man’s radicalisation told from the inside — is what made it controversial on publication, and it remains the hardest of his books to read casually. It is also the clearest statement of his central theme: what happens to a person when the city he grew up in stops feeling like home.
2. Ek Mamnua Muhabbat Ki Kahani — A Forbidden Love Story (2009)
His second novel takes the theme its title promises: a love that the world around the lovers forbids. Where the first novel dealt with politics as identity, this one deals with love as defiance, and it sets the pattern for the rest of his work. Abbas’s novels, as one profile puts it, deal with themes of forbidden politics and love, and the two are rarely separate in his fiction. A forbidden love is never only personal in his books; it always runs up against family, faith, or the state.
3. Khuda Ke Saaye Mein Ankh Micholi — Hide and Seek in the Shadow of God (2011)
Abbas’s third novel won him his first Maharashtra State Urdu Sahitya Akademi Award in 2011. It is the most didactic of his early books, concerned with faith, doubt, and the games people play in God’s shadow — the hide and seek of the title. The book later reached English readers as On the Other Side, published by Penguin Random House India. The award itself became part of his story: in 2015, Abbas returned the state award in protest, joining other Indian writers who were protesting what they called a wave of intolerance in Indian society. The gesture cost him an honour and confirmed his reputation as a writer who does not separate his books from his beliefs.
4. Rohzin — The Melancholy of the Soul (2016)
Rohzin is the novel that made Abbas’s name. It opens on 26 July 2005, the day Mumbai was submerged by floods, and follows its characters through a city that is itself one of the novel’s main presences. The title is a word Abbas coined: it names the souls of people hurt by witnessing the betrayal of their parents, and the novel explores, at theme level, what such childhood witnessing does to adult lives. Mythology, legend, religion, magical realism, and sensuality all weave through the telling, and the floods become more than weather — they are the moment when private lives and a public disaster collide.
The praise for Rohzin was unusually strong. Pakistani novelist Mustansar Hussain Tarar called it a fearless creative narration, and Professor Gopichand Narang, a former president of the Sahitya Akademi, called it a turning point in the history of Urdu novels. It won the Maharashtra State Urdu Sahitya Akademi Award in 2017 and then the main Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018. Penguin Random House published the English translation in May 2022, and that translation was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature in 2022 and later shortlisted for the Muse India 2023 GSP Rao Translation Award. For most new readers, Rohzin is the obvious place to start.
5. Zindeeq — Heretic (2021)
Abbas’s fifth novel is a dystopian turn. Published by Arshia Publications, New Delhi, in November 2021, with a Pakistani edition from Aks Publications in January 2022, Zindeeq deals seriously with the rise of religious extremism across India and Pakistan. Where Rohzin used floods and family secrets, Zindeeq imagines a future shaped by the very forces his earlier novels warned about. It is his darkest book, and the one that shows most clearly how his fiction moved from personal alienation to a whole subcontinent’s anxieties.
6. Ek Tarha Ka Pagalpan — A Sort of Madness (later novel)
His later novel, Ek Tarha Ka Pagalpan (A Sort of Madness), continues his interest in minds under pressure — the same territory as the guilt-ridden narrator of his first book and the wounded souls of Rohzin, now examined through a different kind of unsettled consciousness. A further novel, Nixdaan, is listed as a 2024 work in his bibliography. Readers who finish the six central novels will find his later work a natural continuation, not a departure.
Why Rahman Abbas Matters
Abbas matters for three reasons. First, he is one of the few contemporary Urdu novelists whose work has been recognised at the highest level in India while remaining rooted in one city, Mumbai, the way the great Lahore and Karachi novelists are rooted in theirs. Second, his novels treat subjects — forbidden love, religious extremism, the aftermath of riots — that much popular Urdu fiction avoids, and they treat them as literary questions rather than as scandal. Third, his career itself is a story about the freedom to write: a decade-long trial, an acquitted author, and a returned award are not footnotes to his work. They are the reason his novels read as they do, with their stubborn belief that a person should be allowed to ask uncomfortable questions.
For a different kind of historical-rupture fiction, see our comparative guide to how four novels treat Partition differently, and for the wider honours landscape, our Urdu novel awards guide.
Where to Start: A Reading Order
Start with Rohzin. It is his most decorated novel, it is available in an acclaimed English translation, and its flood-opening gives even a first-time reader an immediate way in. Then read Khuda Ke Saaye Mein Ankh Micholi (or On the Other Side in English) for the faith-and-doubt novel that first won him a state award. Then go back to Nakhalistan Ki Talash to understand where he began and why his career took the shape it did. Then read Ek Mamnua Muhabbat Ki Kahani for his purest treatment of forbidden love. Finish with Zindeeq, which rewards readers who already know his themes by pushing them to their darkest conclusion.
If you enjoy literary Urdu fiction and want to see how a modern novelist handles a city, a flood, and a family secret in the same breath, Abbas will reward the effort. If you prefer fast-moving digest romance, his books will feel slow and demanding — and that, too, is useful information. If you are still deciding what to read next, our guide to choosing your next Urdu novel can help.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Rahman Abbas?
Rahman Abbas (born 30 January 1972) is an Indian fiction writer from Mumbai who writes in Urdu. He is best known for Rohzin, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018.
What is Rahman Abbas’s best-known novel?
Rohzin (2016), a novel that opens on the day of the 2005 Mumbai floods and explores the souls of people hurt by witnessing their parents’ betrayal. Its English translation was published by Penguin Random House in 2022.
What awards has Rahman Abbas won?
The Maharashtra State Urdu Sahitya Akademi Award in 2011 (for Khuda Ke Saaye Mein Ankh Micholi) and in 2017 (for Rohzin), and the main Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018 (for Rohzin). He returned the 2011 state award in 2015 in protest. The English Rohzin was longlisted for the JCB Prize in 2022.
Are Rahman Abbas’s novels available in English?
Two are: Rohzin in English (Penguin Random House, May 2022) and Khuda Ke Saaye Mein Ankh Micholi as On the Other Side. His other novels are best known in their Urdu originals.
Is Rahman Abbas’s work controversial?
His first novel, Nakhalistan Ki Talash (2004), drew an obscenity allegation that led to his arrest and a decade-long trial, ending in his acquittal in 2016. His later novels deal openly with religious extremism and forbidden love, subjects he has never avoided.
Where should a new reader start with Rahman Abbas?
With Rohzin. It is his most acclaimed novel, the easiest to find in English, and the best single example of what his fiction does.
Conclusion
Rahman Abbas writes novels for readers who want Urdu fiction to ask hard questions. His six central novels move from a young man’s alienation in post-riot Mumbai to a dystopian vision of the whole subcontinent, and they do it through love stories that break rules and politics that will not stay polite. Start with Rohzin, and you will understand why one of India’s highest literary honours went to a Mumbai novelist writing in Urdu about a flooded city and its wounded souls.