Urdu
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RIP Fahmida Riaz
A note marking the death of the poet and scholar Fahmida Riaz, remembered for her fearlessness and an Indian exile under Zia, with Hasan Mujtaba’s tribute poem and a translation…
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Biryani Night
Reporting on a Cambridge South Asian Forum screening of the Kashmiri film Harud, the author describes a round table where he argued that India cannot understand its Muslim minority and…
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The Urdu-Speaking Inheritance
Shares a speech by Senator Faruqi, praising the Urdu-speaking inheritance as defiant, liberal, just and aristocratic.
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Urdu as an intra-provincial link language
Picking up a reader’s point that Urdu binds ethnically diverse provinces, the author notes three Pakistani provinces have large linguistic minorities, discusses Pashtun expansion, the origin of the word vatan…
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Suno Punjab
Watching the Pakistani drama Suno Chanda, the author hears Punjabi at length for the first time and asks why it is treated as a rustic Urdu, then explores the Lahnda-Eastern…
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Persian Vs. Punjabi Vs. Urdu
Shares clips in which a speaker follows Persian words better in Urdu than in Punjabi mode, taking them as a sign of the divide between Punjabi popular culture and Urdu…
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On ethnicity
The author, from a Bangladeshi Muslim family in the US, describes his parents’ 1980s social circle as mostly South Asian, mixing Bangladeshis, Indian Bengalis and other clusters across ethnolinguistic lines,…
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Muslims and Urdu in India
Razib Khan plots Census 2011 data on Urdu speakers against Muslim share by state, finding the core Urdu-identified region in the Deccan and Bihar, about 30 per cent of Tamil…
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Why not Persian for the pre-1971 Pakistan ?
Razib Khan asks why Pakistan took Urdu rather than Persian as its national language, arguing Persian would have reduced language conflict, tied Pakistan to the Iranic world, and offered a…
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The Rise of the RSS
X.T.M, in a provocative aside, says India needs the BJP to manage minorities, lists changes he thinks Indian Muslims should make, and wonders whether liberal democracy fails with large minority…
