While Hindi literature and many other South Asian literatures are awash with bucolic elements, Urdu seems to be an exception in this regard. Phanishwar Nath Renu’s influential Hindi novel Mailā Ānchal broke the path for ānchalik literature in Hindi in the 1950s. Although Premchand had introduced the depiction of rural life to Hindi as well as to his Urdu stories much earlier, much of the Urdu writings since then have been stuck to the representation of urban settings. This paper attempts to reveal that Urdu writers of postcolonial era continued employing urban idiom of the language in their stories set in rural Punjab. Instances of rural aroma are hard to find among Pakistani Urdu writers. This paper seeks to find the reasons why regional literature failed to flourish in Urdu even after independence.