Difficult though it may be to believe, Urdu has had a presence on the Internet almost from the earliest days of the medium. In the days when Usenet groups were meeting places for people with very specific shared interests, individuals would swap poetry over groups such as soc.culture.india and soc.culture.pakistan, thereby providing long-distance “islaah”. And when Web pages became easily accessible to the public, people began to collect poetry and present their own work online. Although this was initially done in English, there were several individuals who began to use graphical versions of Urdu script as well. There was even a fairly serious effort, the proposed name for which was ‘Nurdu’, to standardise the different ways people rendered the language into a “Roman Urdu” script online.

Since InPage, a specialised piece of software for creating Urdu text turned up and bootleg copies of it became common around the globe, webpages in Urdu script have become quite common. The process of creating a GIF file containing Urdu text is simple and user-friendly, even for novices. The content itself has, until recently, usually been in the form of poetry, literature, or news and current affairs – items that were created in and for another medium and been “re-purposed” for the internet. Original content creation specifically for the internet has been marginal at best, even though there are a few poets and prose writers who use the Web as their primary outlet and there have been a handful of news sites established.

As Urdu blogging seems to have been triggered by the direct support for Urdu scripts that is available in Windows XP and the phonetic keyboard  developed by the Centre for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP)

The newest development in the usage of Urdu on the internet is actually quite standard and has to do with blogs. A phenomenon that took off in a massive way last year, blogging (which is a generic term for maintaining an online journal of sorts), is the latest means by which Urdu is making its presence on the internet felt. Urdu blogging seems to have been triggered by the direct support for Urdu scripts that is available in Windows XP and the phonetic keyboard developed by the Centre for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP) at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Pakistan.

The vanguard of this new movement are people like Asif Iqbal, virtual father of the Urdu Wiki, Zakaria Ajmal who goes by the online pseudonym of ‘Zack’, Danial, a blogger in Karachi, Umair Salaam, who claims to have started the first Urdu blog, Qais Mujeeb and Manzoor Khan, the founders of “Urdu Ke Naam” and Qadeer Ahmad Rana, a 19-year old student from Multan who ardently advocates the use of proper Urdu script and the best available fonts.

The genesis of Urdu’s presence the Web is as simple and personal as it is profound. “The current Urdu Blogging movement started,” says Danial, “when Asif suggested collaborative efforts to promote Urdu blogging. The idea was then discussed on Asif’s and Zack’s blogs. First we started the Urdu Blogging website and then we started the Urdu Wiki. The purpose of the Urdu Wiki was ... to develop a resource about maintaining and starting an Urdu blog. While discussing how to go about these things Zack proposed a list of goals and we all tried to achieve them. As a result, within a month we had more than a dozen Urdu blogs and are still counting.”

As “Hindi-speakers come to us thousands of times and say “Urdu is such a sweet language”. And everyone loves Urdu poetry. They ask for explanations  of poetry and words… As you can imagine, not many of them can read Urdu.”

The list of Urdu blogs resulting from that effort has since been expanded to include other efforts like “Urdu ke Naam”, a bilingual, but mainly “in English, but about Urdu” blog started out of Hyderabad, India. This blog explains the process of using Urdu scripts for blogging purposes. It also provides templates for setting up an Urdu blog. Zack also maintains a website called “Urdu Planet”, which aggregates the contents of Urdu and Urdu-related blogs.

Coming back to the Urdu Wiki, however, for readers not familiar with the concept, a wiki is a type of website designed for collaborative content creation. The Urdu Wiki has become a good place for the community forming around the phenomenon of Urdu on the Web and among other things it lists pages where the community is working on developing and translating English-based computer terminology into Urdu.

An essential aspect of this Urdu blogosphere is that the community of Urdu speakers, who potentially contribute to it, spans across India, Pakistan and several other nations around the world. The interesting thing of course is that the only tensions that seem to arise in this online community are rooted not in national differences but instead over issues such as whether the only appropriate language for discussion within the communities should be Urdu. This is, believe it or not, quite the hot topic and has been debated animatedly amongst the inhabitants of this space. When “Urdu Ke Naam” started out as an English-based blog about Urdu, readers commented as to why the posts were not made using the Urdu script.

“It isn’t that I don’t love or like writing in Urdu script,” says Qais Mujeeb, a technical writer based in India and one of the founders of “Urdu Ke Naam”, “but the fact is, I don’t have the skill of writing in it faster than I write in Hindi or English.” Manzoor Khan, another founder and Hyderabad-based business analyst added, “The thing is we are based in India and although Urdu is our mother-tongue, we grew up learning Hindi as our second language...[and] Urdu being an Indian language, the message has to be taken across to all Indians irrespective of their religion or beliefs. This is where English helps. Hindi-speakers come to us thousands of times and say ‘Urdu is such a sweet language’. And everyone loves Urdu poetry. They ask for explanations of poetry and words…As you can imagine, not many of them can read Urdu.”

As Since InPage, a specialised piece of software for creating Urdu text turned up and bootleg copies of it became common around the globe,  webpages in Urdu script have become quite common.

A few years ago there were serious discussions in major internet forums about whether Urdu is on its way out in India. That now seems as eccentric as the thesis that history ended with the end of the Cold War, what with some of the most passionate members of this community of online “Urdu-daans” based in Hyderabad, which happens to be one of the historical homes of the language.

Where does that leave the older generation of Urdu-speaking Internet users? Oddly enough, they seem a little behind in this regard. Even in Silicon Valley, conversations about the use of an Urdu script directly for blogging and such things start with a, “I can write Urdu online, I have InPage”. After a brief explanation that specialised software is now unnecessary and that the Urdu script can be readily deployed in day-to-day computer use, one can practically see light-bulbs illuminating over peoples’ heads. What follows are requests for a “How To” guide and so on. In such a situation, the old couplet comes to mind:

“Kal shub namaaz main mairee qibla’ koe peet thee

Main thaa Imaam-e-waqth aur waalidh thay muqthadhee”



Links

EnglishUrdu Translation
www.sovereign-renditions.info/urduwiki/EnglishUrduTranslation

Urdu Blogs Directory
www.sovereign-renditions.info/urduwiki/UrduBlogsDirectory

Urdu Planet
urdu.zackvision.com/urduplanet

Danial
danial.pixensndots.com

Umair Salaam
www.salambazar.com/urduBlog

Urdu Ke Naam
urdukenaam.blogspot.com

Zakaria Ajmal
www.zackvision.com