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 ...

New Delhi: A collection of Urdu short stories which was banned in 1933 after it created a firestorm of public outrage for its bold attack on conservative Islam and British colonialism is now available ...

AFTER the Urdu short story completed a hundred years, a scholar conceived an ambitious project to write, in detail, an account of these years. After much research and an in-depth study of the short ...

IN ART and literature, realism means depicting things as they are, but a fiction writer is not a historian or sociologist and, therefore, realism does not mean that a writer has to write the “detailed ...

With almost similar trends and issues, techniques and styles, the tradition of Indian and Pakistani Urdu short stories are like two sides of the same coin, two faces of one literary institution in two ...

In my childhood, I used to stare at it for hours with bewildered eyes and surprised looks. For me, in those days, its presence was baffling and confusing. I would gaze at it for a long time amidst the ...

Mumtaz Shireen (1924–1973), born a hundred years ago this week on September 12, is a significant name in the landscapes of the Urdu short-story and criticism. As the first major female Urdu critic, ...

Tell us about your curatorial process for Urdu: The Best Stories of Our Times. This isn’t the first volume I have edited. I enjoy the process of editing a selection and curating a collection. For me, ...