The National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) recently hosted the launch of the bilingual coffee table book, Three Tales from Gulistan-e-Saadi. The event, organised in collaboration with the Joy of ...

A few weeks ago, in a class on Urdu poetry in translation, I was asked a disconcerting question about the status of Urdu as a language. In light of the frequent controversies generated around the ...

At a London gathering a few nights ago, I heard a fellow-Karachiite complain: “There are so many books for children in English, but when I tried to find similar stories in Urdu for my daughter, there ...

A bilingual book, Three Stories From Gulistan-e-Saadi, for children and adults will be launched today (Sunday) by Joy of Urdu — a volunteer-run, bilingual organisation working to promote Urdu language ...

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 ...

If someone thinks Urdu short stories are a thing of the past when writers such as Manto, Bedi, Krishan Chandar and Ismat Chughtai ruled supreme, they are mistaken. “Just in the past one year, 102 ...

Edited by Shams Afif Siddiqi and Fuzail Asar Siddiqi and translated by the former, this collection gives English readers a hitherto unavailable glimpse into the city’s Urdu literature If asked to name ...

The Tribune, now published from Chandigarh, started publication on February 2, 1881, in Lahore (now in Pakistan). It was started by Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia, a public-spirited philanthropist, and is ...

“What lies beyond the fog?” is a question that the characters in Qurattulain Haider’s short story in Muhammad Umar Memon’s lovingly selected volume of Urdu stories ask more than once. The answer to ...

To tell and listen to tales seems to have been a universal desire through millennia. Folk literatures found in the languages of the world prove that in every era and in every region storytelling has ...

Indian partition left many indelible political, social, economic and emotional impacts on both states. Urdu literature took a new direction after partition with short stories or afsanay of ...

Urdu has come to be associated with the florid idioms of ‘ghazal’ and ‘shayari’. (iStockphoto) In early 2019, in the comparatively benign days before Twitter assumed its current avatar X, a viral ...