What’s your love language? For young people in India today, it’s literally a language: Urdu. It’s been around for at least 800 years; the 2011 census shows that India has well over 67 million Urdu ...

Urdu poetry, a mesmerising tapestry of intertwined and conflated emotions, leads into the captivating world of nonconformism, a rebellion that transcends the tantalising tale of unrequited love. Led ...

CHIEFLY known as one of the foremost Sufi saints of the Chishtiya order of mystics, Hazrat Baba Fareeduddin Masood Ganjshakar was a poet, too, and he wrote poetry in Urdu, Persian and Punjabi. Some ...

Note: This story was originally published in October 2022 as part of Outlook issue 'Recasting Shiva'. It is being replugged on World Poetry Day 2023 as Outlook revisits the power of poetry in a world ...

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 ...

There were several writers who grappled with these ideas in Urdu literature, however they were not formally conceptualised until Muhammad Hussain Azad, Altaf Hussain Hali and Shibli Nomani began to ...

Ramu Kharel in Karachi on his way for a tv interview about his emergency medicine work in Nepal in which he fluently recited Urdu poetry. Photos: ABDULLAH ZAHID/SAPAN NEWS On a usual bustling March ...

Bazm-e-Urdu Qatar (BUQ), established in 1959 to promote Urdu language and literature, hosted the launch of the poetry collection Arzoo ka dia by Doha-based poet Samreen Nadeem Samar. This is her ...

Urdu is a hybrid language that is based on the spoken languages of Northern India with a generous overlay of Arabic and Persian words. ‘Urdu’ is a Turkish word, which means a camp. When Muslims from ...

In the introduction to her new book, Love in the Time of Hate: In the Mirror of Urdu, Rakhshanda Jalil writes: “There are love jihads and there are love jihads. Mine turned into a labour of love.” ...