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This dissertation presents an ethnographic account of women fiction writers’ engagement with digest genre and the community (of readers and writers) formed around it. Digest genre is published in Urdu monthly magazines, usually known as women’s digests. These fictional stories are extremely popular and have the highest circulation of all fictional genres in Pakistan. However, they are socially perceived as “low brow” and disavowed as having no literary merit. In this context, this ethnography traces the specific forms attachment, articulation and agency take in the lives of women whose stories resonate with many, but who also face the critique of not being authentic writers. It does so by exploring questions such as: How do digest writers develop attachments and bonds of friendship in the absence of physical proximity (since writers rarely meet each other or their readers)? How do digest writers articulate lived realities—both of attachments in the digest community and the larger dynamics of living as a woman in Pakistan’s changing social milieu? How do they see fiction writing and what role do they see it playing in their individual lives? What challenges or opportunities do writers experience as they enter the arena of script writing for television, and how do they speak back to notions of their writing as inauthentic and frivolous? Methodologically, this research draws on twenty months of fieldwork, carried out in four urban cities (Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi) and villages in two provinces (Sindh and Punjab). Fieldwork took the form of archival work, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation. I closely followed the daily lives and work of digest writers of varying ages, ethnicities, and educational backgrounds. In addition, I conducted work with editors (who select and tailor digest narratives), admins (volunteers who manage readers’ groups through social media), readers and voluntary non-readers (individuals who are familiar with this genre but choose not to read it), television channel heads (who employ digest writers as script writers) and content managers at production houses (who select and tailor digest narratives for television audiences).

This report demonstrates how encounters between readers, writers and editors of a low-brow genre of Urdu fiction, create an affective space of belonging. This genre is published in commercial monthly magazines (commonly known as women’s digests) that contain narratives of feminine domesticity, primarily written by and for women, in Pakistan. Drawing on ethnographic work (archival and interviews) with authors, readers and editors of two monthlies, this study traces the contours of digest community as an affective space of belonging that provides a ‘complex of confirmation and consolation’ on how to be a woman in Pakistan’s changing social milieu. It further argues that recent proliferation of cell phones has led to a new sensibility in this community that has its own rhythm of sound. Previously readers would communicate through published letters mediated by editors. However, now there is direct contact between these two groups, through cell phones. Digest narratives are now also being drawn from experiences readers share with authors over cell phone conversations. This sharing is not factual as such, but rather an affective exchange of feelings about facts. Thus, these conversations can be seen as a shared emotional experience where the lack of visual cues regarding social class, age and ethnicity (since readers and writers rarely meet each other) leads to voices becoming just that – voices that share life stories and experiences. There is thus a transient coming together of women who are mostly unrelated by kinship or ethnicity; and a sociality is formed between strangers with its own sensory feel of rhythm and sound, through the medium of the cell phone. This work contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on how media and technology is a negotiation between material properties of technologies being introduced and the particular effects in forming new affects and sensibilities; and how dominant representations of Muslim women as a singular and stable category of analysis, can be spoken back to, by highlighting their myriad voices and understanding them beyond the usual tropes of victimhood and emancipation.