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 ...

If you want to make high-brow small talk at one of President Barack Obama’s cocktail parties, don’t bother brushing up your Shakespeare. Try reading Urdu poetry. As POLITICO’s Ben Smith points out in ...

Ishrat Afreen is one of the five most influential writers of the feminist movement in Urdu literature and is counted amongst the most renowned poets in Pakistan. She has won numerous awards, and her ...

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 ...

Eminent Urdu writer Shamim Tariq on Wednesday said that Firaq Gorakhpuri is the Mir of modern Urdu poetry. Tariq was speaking at the opening session of the two-day national seminar “Firaq Gorakhpuri: ...

In the latter half of the 19th century, a movement to replace Urdu by so-called Hindi arose with the sole emphasis on replacing the Persian nastaliq script by Nagari. Therefore, institutions like ...