ONE is tempted to begin the review of Raza Mir’s The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry by quoting Gulzar, a versatile genius and a great lover of Urdu. While commending Mir in the ...

In his English rendering of select Urdu ghazals, short-stories and other genres, Ralph Russell opens up an appreciation of Urdu literature to a wide range of readers. When I was in primary school, ...

Toward the end of the late Indian writer Ismat Chughtai’s short story “Mutti Maalish,” Ratti Bai, a hospital maid, describes to an upper-class patient two methods of abortion used by poor women in ...

Urdu scholar and translator Rakshanda Jalil’s new collection Whose Urdu is it Anyway? is linked by one theme: to challenge the notion that Urdu is the language of Muslim writers alone, especially in a ...

PETER Trudgill is one of the world’s renowned authorities on sociolinguistics and dialects. Trudgill says in his book On dialect: Social and geographical perspectives that “one of the things that ...