Archive for February, 2018
Kaifi Azmi’s “The Circle” Posted by Rachael on Feb 20, 2018
Kaifi Azmi (کیفی اعظمی, or Sayyid Akhtar Hussein Rizvi, as he was born) is one of Urdu’s greatest poets (شاعر/shaayar) and remains legendary to this day as a poet capable of expressing the subtlest of sentiments with uncanny astuteness and daring. You may recognize his name from that of Shabana Azmi, a famous Indian actress who…
A Short History of Urdu / اردو کی چھوٹی سی تاریخ Posted by Rachael on Feb 15, 2018
Urdu is widely known as the national language (قومی زبان/qaumi zabaan where “zabaan” is a fem. noun) of Pakistan, but it is also one of India’s 22 official languages (سرکاری زبان/sarkaari zabaan). Modern Standard Urdu, once commonly known as a variant of Hindustani (ہندوستانی), a colloquial language combining the modified Sanskrit words found in Hindi…