Stories by Mehr Afshan Farooqi
Mehr Afshan Farooqi is an Associate Professor in the department of Middle Eastern And South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.
She is currently in India on a Fellowship to work on her book on the great Urdu poet, Asadullah Khan Ghalib.
Although the 18th century witnessed the crippling of the mighty Mughal empire, it was also the wonderful age of...
Updated 30 Aug, 2026 08:09am
There are two common derivatives from the word bazaar (itself from old Persian meaning market) in Urdu — bazaari...
Published 28 Jun, 2026 07:05am
On an unseasonably cold November night in 2022, a pain, a dull burn, gripped my chest in what felt like a constriction, an uneasy
Published 26 Apr, 2026 12:18pm
I grew up with Urdu poetry, learning to recite verses from ghazals as soon as I could talk. Words held only visual meanings for me
Published 22 Feb, 2026 06:45am
A hundred years ago, the poet Nasir Kazmi was born in Ambala on December 8, 1925; his contemporary, the fiction...
Updated 04 Jan, 2026 07:22am
In 1639, in the 11th year of his reign, the Mughal Emperor Shahjahan took the decision to build a new capital at...
Published 19 Oct, 2025 09:51am
Poets-writers do not function in a vacuum, they belong to a milieu, have a circle of friends and rivals and an audience of...
Published 17 Aug, 2025 08:51am
Although I have a large file of Naiyer Masud’s letters addressed to my father, I do not have the letters my father...
Published 15 Jun, 2025 06:04am
My father Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s archive of letters is vast. Before emails diminished the volume of handwritten...
Updated 13 Apr, 2025 01:42pm
The pronoun ‘hum’ or ‘we’ is added to many of Farsi-Urdu nouns to create poetic, evocative compounds such as...
Published 09 Feb, 2025 09:24am
The library spilled over to the adjacent verandah. Father’s most amazing collection, the complete set of 45 volumes
Published 08 Dec, 2024 08:12am
I grew up in a home lovingly filled with books; there were books in every room. Books defined who we were. My mother...
Published 06 Oct, 2024 09:30am
It is perplexing that Muhammad Husain Azad (1830-1910), author of the scintillating, so-called ‘first history of Urdu poetry’,
Updated 05 Aug, 2024 05:14pm
Seldom has a book of poems in English resonated with me as this slender volume, Yardstick of Life. Perhaps the...
Published 02 Jun, 2024 08:09am
On a recent visit to Iran, I was shocked at how little I could understand of spoken Persian. I could read and...
Published 31 Mar, 2024 08:52am
This past year I designed an undergraduate course that I called ‘The Poetry of Love’. One of the challenges of the course was how
Published 28 Jan, 2024 09:15am
The great 19th century Urdu and Farsi poet Ghalib was a master in creating neologisms. He excelled in pushing language to its...
Published 26 Nov, 2023 08:26am
The mushaira at Richmond, Virginia, in late August this year reminded me of gatherings from my childhood, when poets...
Published 24 Sep, 2023 05:25am
Kunwar Muhammad Jamilur Rahman Khan Jamil was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan. He served as Joint Secretary Halqa-i-Takhleeq
Published 23 Jul, 2023 05:25am
The hospital twinkles with lights, like a beacon dispelling the darkness of the winter morning. The lobby sparkles. A steady...
Published 21 May, 2023 07:58am
