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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The second day of the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) had two sessions on Urdu poetry in which new trends were explored besides having a deep look at the tradition of Urdu prose poems. In the session ...

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 ...

Dr Nuzhat Abbasi is one of Pakistan’s best-known contemporary women poet, who also has a most natural prowess and elegance with which she brings verse to life. A poet as well as a social curator 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 ...

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 ...

A host of poets from different parts of the state recited poetry in Odia, Hindi and Urdu languages in a unique mushaira held at the conference hall in Sanskruti Bhavan today. Mubaraq Hussein Salamat’s ...