Uniquely Urdu: The language that is home to all our emotions

I am writing a book of 101 ghazals in Urdu, a language I grew up with and have carried, like an old fragrance, into every room of my life. I have written more than 135 already. Now comes the difficult, delicious labour: choosing the 101 ghazals that I love most. The arithmetic is cruel; the heart, naturally, has appealed.

What began this return was a nazm by Iqbal Ashhar, “Urdu Hai Mera Naam,” whose words have haunted me. Its final refrain asks why Urdu is made a target of prejudice, and laments that she sits alone in her own homeland. In April 2025, the Supreme Court of India cited Ashhar’s poem in a judgment affirming that Urdu, like Hindi and Marathi, is an Indo-Aryan language born and developed in India. A language had been made to plead for belonging; the highest court answered with history. But a judgment can affirm what the heart should never have been asked to doubt.

Urdu gave me the architecture of my soul: its shaded courtyards and secret staircases, its jharokhas opening on to longing. It furnished the interiors of my being, coloured its walls, and left the scent of rain on its books. I return to it not as a visitor but as someone coming home to a house whose doors have never been locked.

Here is a ghazal I offer you. Its couplets tell truths I live with now: “Jo ho na paaya kabhi, dil mein wohkahani ab bhi hai, Bujhe hue se charaghon mein roshni ab bhi hai”

What never came to pass remains a story in the heart; even in extinguished lamps, some light survives. There are loves that never acquire a name, yet keep their own grammar. Distance does not always erase intimacy. Sometimes another person can read us, even from afar, more completely than those sitting beside us. Sometimes we never meet, and never quite find the courage to part; between us, a bewildered current keeps moving.

A ghazal lets each couplet stand alone and still belong to a larger music. Perhaps that is why I love it: each small world holds its own ache, its own astonishment, while the refrain keeps calling us home. India, too, is made of many rooms and many voices; none should have to fall silent for the others to be heard.

A little touch, the ghazal says, might have made this love a life. Yet the body remembers its first knot. I know that hesitation: the tender, stubborn border between what the heart imagines and what the hand dares. This is no grand declaration of heartbreak. It is quieter, and perhaps more difficult: not all peace is complete, not all pain complete, and unfinished love can still exert its entire pull.

That is what Urdu permits me: not merely to name a feeling, but to sit inside it, turn it in the light, hear its silences. Its words travel through our homes and our Hindi cinema, through songs that become family heirlooms, dialogue that slips into daily speech, and the tenderness with which we tease, bless, grieve and desire. Urdu has never needed a border to enter an Indian heart. We have been speaking it, singing it, and borrowing its music for generations.

As I finish this book, I hope you find 101 reasons of your own to romance Urdu. Let its script be a window, not a wall; let its poetry be a lamp whose flame crosses rooms. This is my homage to a language that made a home in me—and to India, capacious enough to hold it, and all of us, as our own.