Gulzar, the recipient of the Jnanpith Award, expresses optimism about the future of Urdu. He believes that despite the decline of the Urdu script, the language itself is alive and thriving, with Urdu ...

In post-independence India, Urdu has undergone a strange trajectory both in the language politics and in the socio-cultural realm. Born, flourished and having seen the heyday of its glory in this ...

The National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) recently hosted the launch of the bilingual coffee table book, Three Tales from Gulistan-e-Saadi. The event, organised in collaboration with the Joy of ...

rdu. The very word evokes a sense of nostalgia, a whisper of poetry, a connection to a rich cultural heritage. More than just a language, it’s an emotion, a shared history, a mother tongue that ...

Some myths are so deep-rooted that one has to work really hard to make people, especially students face facts. One such myth is about the origin of Urdu. Most of our students subscribe to the view ...

A few weeks ago, in a class on Urdu poetry in translation, I was asked a disconcerting question about the status of Urdu as a language. In light of the frequent controversies generated around the ...

Writer, translator and literary historian Rakhshanda Jalil’s critical work on Urdu progressives and other writers is well-recognised as are her translations from Urdu. In her latest book, Love in the ...

Gopi Chand Narang, the Urdu literary critic, thinker, and linguist, died in the United States on June 15 at the age of 91. He was a versatile scholar whose research work dominated the Urdu literary ...

Urdu scholar and translator Rakshanda Jalil’s new collection Whose Urdu is it Anyway? is linked by one theme: to challenge the notion that Urdu is the language of Muslim writers alone, especially in a ...

Deccan or Dakan, also spelt Dakkan and Dakhan, literally means south. The region lies in southern parts of the Indo-Pak subcontinent, hence the name. As opposed to Deccan, the north is called uttar or ...

Who does Urdu belong to? India's right-wing seems to think it's a foreign import, forced upon by so-called Islamic invaders. The latest fracas happened in April when a reporter from a far-right news ...