Beyond her celebrated image as the “Tragedy Queen” of Hindi cinema, Meena Kumari was an accomplished poet. She wrote under ...

You name it, I can cook it. And so I have a great affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.’ ‘You read Urdu poetry?’ ‘Absolutely.

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 ...

Shahid Alam and I go back a long way, though we had both half-forgotten it until recently. He was two years senior to me at ...

It is written from right to left like Arabic and Persian and in the same script. By the 18th century, Urdu became a well-developed language with a body of literature that consisted mainly of poetry.

In Urdu, prose poetry or ‘nasri nazm’ is purported to have begun with Sajjad Zaheer, and subsequently crafted, among others, by Meeraji, Ahmad Hamesh, Wazir Agha, Kishwar Naheed, M. Salim ur ...

Her male-sounding name notwithstanding, British writer George Eliot (1819-1880) was a woman. Born Mary Ann Evans, she was a novelist, poet, translator and one of the leading litterateurs of the ...

While many readers of Urdu poetry are familiar with the archetypal romance between the bulbul (nightingale) and the gul (rose or flower), the image of trees in this metaphorical garden has also ...

A few months ago, at the launch of a book of Urdu poems—Hukm E Safar Diya Tha Kyon by Shantiveer Kaul—a poet in his mid-60s said he rarely got a chance to attend such events now because “ab ...

Muslim poets have waxed eloquent not only on Hindu festivals but also on Hindu deities like Shiva, as their poetry is about communal harmony and co-mingling of cultures, writes Rakhshanda Jalil ...

Ghalib was the preeminent Indian Urdu and Persian-language poet during the last years of the Mughal Empire. He used his pen names of Ghalib (means "dominant") and Asad (means "lion"). Most notably ...