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 ...

The bard famously wrote: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact/ One sees more devils than vast hell can hold…” When it comes to the Middle East and Iran, South Asia and ...

Renowned literary figure Amjad Islam Amjad in a recent live session with Tajdar Zaidi of Qissa Khwaan fame discussed the schism in Urdu poetry following the partition of the Sub-Continent. According ...

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 ...

Prose poetry is a literary form that combines elements of prose and poetry to create a unique narrative voice and style. It appears as standard prose, without line breaks, but utilizes poetic devices ...

A few months ago, at the launch of a book of Urdu poems—Hukm E Safar Diya Tha Kyon by Shantiveer Kaul—a poet in his mid-60s said he rarely got a chance to attend such events now because “ab us peedhi ...

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.” ...

Every metropolis seems to have been enshrined into two images. The first one is created out of big city’s old, grandiose buildings, citadels, forts, tombs, mosques, churches, gardens, roads, rivers ...

That 300,000 people celebrated Urdu verse during a three-day festival was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India. The inaugural day of the Urdu poetry festival Jashn-e-Rekhta in ...