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 ...

It is 2pm, and a seven-year-old boy sits in an after-school Urdu remedial class, his fingers tracing the unfamiliar curves of the words before him. The sentence on the page seems simple enough: “Yeh ...

JEDDAH, 11 June 2008 -- For those who believed Urdu would die a natural death in India, this week's World Urdu Conference and grand mushaira must have come as a pleasant surprise. Not only is Urdu ...

India is a country whose wonderful diversity stems from the richness of its past. That includes the Urdu script. Sitting in my university office in Paris, I was recently visited by a young French ...

Growing up, reading Urdu storybooks wasn’t my cup of tea. I was in an ‘English medium school’, and talking in Urdu or reading Urdu storybooks was frowned upon. Outside the classroom, even Urdu ...