Till now, at least 50 scholarly and authentic books on Urdu grammar have been written in Urdu, not to mention the hundreds of commercially and unscrupulously produced substandard grammars of Urdu.

For example, in almost every book on Urdu grammar two different terms are used for ‘adjective’ and an adjective is alternatively called ‘sifat’ and ‘ism-i-sifat’.

More than a century ago, in colonial Lahore, a different approach to language took shape. The Oriental College, founded in ...

Once India’s common language, Urdu is now boxed as Muslim identity. Dr Rakhshanda Jalil’s anthology reclaims it as India’s ...

That 300,000 people celebrated Urdu verse during a three-day festival was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.