Description:

About the book

This dictionary is mainly for English-speaking learners of Urdu: it aims to give concise definitions of the vocabulary an English-speaking person would need to communicate effectively with Urdu speakers. However, Hindi-speakers wishing to improve their Urdu vocabulary will also find this dictionary useful.

Guest Speaker: Professor Walter N. Hakala, University at Buffalo
Professor Hakala is interested in the Literature and languages of North India and Central Asia; lexicography; Mughal and early colonial South Asian history; South Asian Islam and Sufism. Professor Hakala will give a lecture “The Right to Define: A Tale of Two Dictionaries”. In this lecture he speaks about Chiranji Lal, the author of an important 19th-century Urdu dictionary. Today, however, Chiranji’s useful dictionary has been all but forgotten while the contemporaneous Farhang-i Asafiyah of Sayyid Ahmad Dihlavi is celebrated. In the midst of the increasingly communalized linguistic environment of late-nineteenth-century northern India, Hindu lexicographers like Chiranji could no longer fit neatly into the emerging Urdu literary culture.

Sponsored by Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Asian Studies Program.