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 ...

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 ...

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.” ...

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 ...

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 ...

Long confined in popular imagination to the delicate terrains of love and longing, Urdu poetry has often been misread as inward-looking, steeped in intimacy yet distant from the urgencies of the world ...