Urdu has played a major role in the success story of many an Indian film.
What is unfortunate now is how film producers are now biased against this otherwise sweet language which enables succinct dialogues, a flow to parlance and apt proverbs to embellish a film script. A key factor responsible for the diminution of Urdu is official apathy. There needs to be a way to encourage youngsters to look at Urdu again.
Back in the 1960s-70s, Yusuf Dehlvi’s Shama was a very popular Urdu film magazine which published a myriad articles and poetry from sought after littérateurs such as Krishan Chander, Sajjad Zaheer, Ismat Chughtai and Dildar Nasri Rampuri to name a few. In this age of digitalisation, the residue of a trove of Urdu can be recorded for the generations to come (Magazine section, Page 3, “Edited by Manto”, January 13).
Azhar A. Khan,
Rampur, Uttar Pradesh
