POET and prose writer Insha Allah Khan Insha (1752-1817) was a genius: he knew Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Bengali and Marathi and wrote in five of these ...

Urdu, despite being perceived as the language of aristocratic culture, does not follow a single monistic grammatical structure and strait-laced vocabulary, and multiformity, both at syntax and diction ...

For a common reader, it may be both amazing and amusing to note that scholars across Pakistan have never believed that Urdu was swept into this part of the subcontinent with the waves of immigrants ...