Friday, March 18, 2005

The Ghost of Urdu?

A rather dated article from Chowk is making the rounds on discussion lists of South Asian writers. It is titled "The Ghost of Urdu" and was written in 2003. Here's a link to the original piece:

http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00002498&channel=gulberg&start=0&end=9&chapter=1&page=1


Anyone care to comment? I am working on a response myself; will post it when I can.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi folks!

Thanks for putting up the article here.

You may like to read another article on Urdu (by yours truly) here:

http://www.mainstreamweekly.com/issue6dec/content/general9.asp

Keep up the good work.

AJ said...

Also the language seems to be disappearing from the Indian and Pakistani diaspora also. Something to think about.

Qais Mujeeb said...

Wonderfully written. It really does evoke that sentimental and nostalgic reaction.

Another idea which came to my mind after reading the article was that it's not death of Urdu language which haunts us but it's the death of Urdu Khat (script) that is at stake. I've seen Urdu written in Roman script and Hindi script. To be very frank, I admit to be one of those culprits at some point of my life.