It is 2pm, and a seven-year-old boy sits in an after-school Urdu remedial class, his fingers tracing the unfamiliar curves of the words before him. The sentence on the page seems simple enough: “Yeh ...

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 ...

POSTCOLONIAL discourse is not anything new: back in 1978 with the publication of Edward Said’s book Orientalism the postcolonial studies had emerged on the academic scene with a bang. But in Pakistan ...

India is a country whose wonderful diversity stems from the richness of its past. That includes the Urdu script. Sitting in my university office in Paris, I was recently visited by a young French ...