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.” ...

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 ...

Every day, I call my grandparents, Nani and Nana, in Pakistan to offer some solace during their increasingly isolated situation. With all their kids and grandkids living abroad and the fear of disease ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

IT was Ram Babu Saksena (1896-1957) who first carried out extensive research on European poets of Urdu. It took him some 10 years to sift through all the relevant works and manuscripts and his book ...

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 ...

Back to the city of poets after a three-year break, the annual festival—it commenced on Friday and will continue till Sunday at the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium near India Gate—is a feast for ...