When I began translating Urdu dastaan classics in the late 1990s, I learned very soon that popular dictionaries like Firoz-ul-Lughaat did not have many of the words encountered in classical texts. Neither did Syed Ahmad Dehlvi’s’s Farhang-i-Asifiya and Moulvi Noor-ul-Hassan Nayyar’s Noor-ul-Lughaat, generally referred to as aids for the study of classical texts, fare much better in this area. The most comprehensive Urdu dictionary, the 22-volume Qaumi Urdu Lughat, developed between 1977 and 2010, similarly, does not cover the entire world of our classical literature.

It was all very disconcerting and frustrating, until I discovered little-known dictionaries published in the 19th century and the work of Urdu scholars and lexicographers such as Dr Abdul Sattar Siddiqi, Rasheed Ahmed Khan, Jameel Jalibi, Professor Abdur Rasheed, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Salimur Rahman and others, who have spent their lives writing about and introducing little-known words.

A lot of their work is available in the form of specialised dictionaries, but some of it is still scattered in journals and magazines and should be collected and brought together as a body. I began collecting these dictionaries, and developed a specialised library, which I could use as my own personal reference. Amongst them, I could find almost 99 percent of the words I was looking for. But a small number of words remained a mystery, whose meaning either completely eluded one, or could only be guessed from the usage, as still remains the case.

During this search for words, however, I discovered something else. In Urdu, as in Persian, the usage authority for a word comes from poetry. Only when a headword cannot be found in a she’r, the usage authority from a prose work is used.

And here’s the thing: it is very rarely that the Urdu language’s poetry corpus comes up short in this regard. It is because our classical poets not only documented the deep recesses of their worlds of thought and emotion, they also catalogued their material universe in great detail.

The other important realisation from studying Urdu classics, turning the pages of dictionaries, and looking at the catalogues of 19th century Urdu publishers, was that the 10 or 12 Urdu master poets remembered by us today through their presence in Urdu textbooks are not all the classical poets we have in the Urdu language.

Their number, without any exaggeration, is in the hundreds. The classical texts are peppered with their verses, multiple tazkiras or biographical anthologies of poets mention them reverently, and the quoted samples from their work justify the high regard. Their continued obscurity is a loss to our language and literature, and a comment on our ability as a society to recognise and honour our heritage.

In the meanwhile, not only are the names of these masters becoming obscure in public consciousness, but the online proliferation of idiotic and distorted texts, masquerading as the work of celebrated poets, is further adulterating and corroding our collective memory.

It is only right that the works of our forgotten masters are recognised today as part of our poetic canon, and reintroduced at scale to make up for our negligence. So how does one determine who our classical poets are? And once it is determined, how does one reintroduce them effectively at scale?

The task of determining our classical poets is a rather simple one, because it can be delegated to the consensus of the past. As a first step, we can take into account the hundreds of divans and narrative works in the masnavi genre published in the 19th century.

Not a single work among them should be overlooked, because these works by established poets of the time were considered important enough to be published at a time of high literary consciousness in the society. Similarly, the tazkiras, written by connoisseurs of poetry, offer a reliable guide to the important poets from different periods.

The logistics of reintroducing these classical works at a large scale has two components: making the electronic text available following modern orthographic standards, and developing the framework in which they are introduced. The first part is easier, because it just requires a team of well-trained editors, and enough resources to prepare the free modern electronic edition.

But an electronic edition sitting on the web does not promote and market itself. I would like to quote the example of one of my favourite websites, the Urdu Gah (https://xn--mgbqf7g.com/), a volunteer-run project which should be much better known, offering edited unicode editions of some of the best known Urdu prose classics. Along with these classics, it also offers reference resources such as collections of idioms and proverbs. But Urdu Gah’s reach is limited to those who already have an interest or curiosity about Urdu classics.

To promote these texts, we need to have a different strategy. We have something so old that it is new to everyone. Why not build engagement for it from the single largest body of scholars in the society, the school children?

One can assume that the policy framework guiding these decisions, if it comes to fruition at all, would take ages. It is likely that the many tiers of consensus needed for the purpose, even before a policy framework can be developed, would not be reached. Restrictive ideas about education’s nature, and narrow interpretations of pedagogical knowledge, would triumph over the basic fact that literature is the foundation of all education.

So we need to create a vehicle that would bypass these hindrances and a process that would be both relevant and widely acceptable. I believe such a vehicle can be easily developed. And that a process already exists, although it has fallen into disuse in recent years, which is both widely acceptable and can be easily linked to the extracurricular life of young scholars who would happily take to it and shine!

This grand plan will be the subject of my next column.

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator. He can be reached on

X: microMAF or via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 18th, 2024