Prose (Nasr): Markazi Khayal, Khulasa and Kirdar
The Nasr section of the WBBSE Madhyamik Urdu First Language paper examines the prescribed prose lessons of the Board's Urdu textbook. It does not reward plot recall; it rewards the ability to state a lesson's markazi khayal, summarise a passage in your own Urdu, judge a kirdar with evidence, and explain a sentence or a muhawara in context.
Item types
Unwaan and markazi khayal; khulasa of a passage; kirdar ki shakhsiyat; tashreeh-e-jumla; muhawara and zarb-ul-misl; value questions of the 'is sabaq se kya milta hai' kind.
Rules that decide marks
- Khulasa: compress to about one-third, keep the third person, drop dialogue and direct quotation, add nothing from outside the passage, and keep the original tense.
- Shakhsiyat: pin every sift to a waqi'a. 'Woh bahadur tha' is an assertion; 'Woh bahadur tha kyunki us ne akela hi saamna kiya' is an answer.
- Tashreeh: paraphrase the sentence in simple Urdu first, then one line on how it carries the markazi khayal.
Worked example
Q. Is sabaq ka markazi khayal apne alfaz mein likhiye. (4) A weak draft retells the story in eight lines and scores 1, because it offers waqi'at, not a khayal. A strong draft makes three moves: a topic sentence naming the value the lesson is built on; one line on how the main incident carries that value; one line on what the writer wants the reader to accept. Forty to sixty words, no minor characters, no plot detail.
Traps
- khulasa slipping into the first person or padded back to full length;
- quoting the original sentence and calling it tashreeh;
- confusing muhawara (a figurative phrase) with zarb-ul-misl (a complete proverb-sentence);
- importing facts about the author instead of citing the text.