About

The Columbia Urdu Poetry Group is a circle of readers that started meeting in 2008 on Friday evenings at Cafe Layla near Columbia University in the City of New York at inspirational instigation of Tabinda M Khan, a Pakistani PhD student at Columbia’s Department of Political Science at the time. Tabinda requested Dr Frances W Pritchett, Professor of Urdu at Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), to kindly chair the reading group, devoted to Urdu poets in general and Mirza Ghalib in particular. Initially consisting of Dr Pritchett’s circle of undergraduate and graduate Urdu students enrolled in different departments at Columbia University, the circle soon extended to Urdu enthusiasts from all over Manhattan, New York in general, and beyond. Right from the beginning our group met as an informal group of friends, who never wanted any ‘baRe aadmii’ to lecture to us. What we have in common is a desire to enjoy Urdu poetry together, and to help each other understand it in more depth. Our readings have centered on the classical ghazal poets, above all Ghalib and Mir, but our scope has frequently been broad enough to include a wider range of poets, especially modern ones. Our weekly reading group has been growing strong thankfully for fourteen years now, and our shared enjoyment of Urdu poetry has resulted in many lasting friendships, especially during the pandemic years, when Zoom helped us continue to meet virtually and re-connect with new and old members from different parts of the United States, and the world. Most of us know Urdu script, but we also provide texts in Devanagari script. Our group includes native speakers from South Asia, diasporic ‘heritage learners’, and non-South-Asian students of Urdu at all levels. We all help each other, and we enjoy each other’s company, and there’s always that brilliant poetry to light up our Friday evenings.

At its core, this group has been drawn and held together by the desire to benefit from Dr Pritchett’s generous guidance and warm and lively company, and over the years, it has been grateful to some key members for their strenuous, dedicated, and devoted efforts at coordination. Tabinda Khan was the first coordinator of the group, and after that the task was taken up by Zahra Sabri, an MA student at MESAAS, Dalpat Rajpurohit, a Hindi lecturer at MESAAS, Adeeba Talukdar, a poet who completed her undergraduate at New York University, and for the past several years (and indeed most of the group’s existence!) by Mushtaq Fadra, a health care entrepreneur in New York who has taken the group’s outreach and coordination to new heights. We also owe thanks to Rupa Ranganathan, a multicultural marketing professional, for her generous aid in running the group, and to Vishal K. Kella, a data engineer, for his vision and efforts in putting together this website which archives all the poetry we have read in recent years, and links it to audio renditions that our group members have come together to find and share from time to time. We hope that visitors to the site will enjoy the texts and audios as much as we did when we encountered them.