The four designated stages inside the crowded stadium complex in the heart of the busy capital weren’t enough. So poetry lovers also took to the footpaths and the spaces in between, turning them into ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A box set comprising two trilingual anthologies of the poetry of Jan Nisar Akhtar and Kaifi Azmi features works on everything from the human predicament to historical events One seldom comes across a ...

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 ...