Editor and translator Rakhshanda Jalil's new anthology begins with a story by one of the four pillars of the modern Urdu short story: Krishan Chander (right). (Images courtesy Rakhshanda Jalil and via ...

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 ...

URDU short story is now over 100 years old, though the reply to the question ‘When did it exactly begin?’ may be a bit disputed. Urdu’s three different short story writers are mentioned as ‘the real ...

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 ...

If someone thinks Urdu short stories are a thing of the past when writers such as Manto, Bedi, Krishan Chandar and Ismat Chughtai ruled supreme, they are mistaken. “Just in the past one year, 102 ...

TWO books published recently have some similarities, but they are different, too. Both of them are, in fact, PhD dissertations; both are on Pakistani Urdu short story and both have been written by ...

A bilingual book, Three Stories From Gulistan-e-Saadi, for children and adults will be launched today (Sunday) by Joy of Urdu — a volunteer-run, bilingual organisation working to promote Urdu language ...

If asked to name Urdu fiction writers, most English readers would list historical icons such as Manto and Chughtai — contemporary writers in the language do not have that kind of widespread ...

Urdu has come to be associated with the florid idioms of ‘ghazal’ and ‘shayari’. (iStockphoto) In early 2019, in the comparatively benign days before Twitter assumed its current avatar X, a viral ...

The National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) recently hosted the launch of the bilingual coffee table book, Three Tales from Gulistan-e-Saadi. The event, organised in collaboration with the Joy of ...

“What lies beyond the fog?” is a question that the characters in Qurattulain Haider’s short story in Muhammad Umar Memon’s lovingly selected volume of Urdu stories ask more than once. The answer to ...

In Urdu: The Best Stories of Our Times, edited and translated by Rakhshanda Jalil, we find stories from contemporary writers of Urdu fiction, on wide-ranging themes and tones, presenting a ...