Myths about Urdu

This lecture is on questioning and deconstructing some myths about Urdu. Though Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, the history of the language taught through our books is misleading, wrong and biased. This lecture is meant to correct these wrong assumptions we take for granted.

About the speaker

Tariq Rahman has two doctoral degrees: Ph.D (1985) and D.Litt (2014) from the University of Sheffield. He has published 8 books, over 60 articles and several book reviews. He was the first Pakistani to be honoured by one of Germany’s highest awards for academic research called the Humboldt Research Award. The President of Pakistan conferred upon him the Pride of Performance in 2004 and the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 2013. He is a Salzburg Seminar fellow (2017), a member of the Common Room at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, a visiting fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and has been the incumbent of the Pakistan Chair at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and the Peace University in Castellon, Spain. He retired as Director of the National Institute of Pakistan Studies at QAU and is now Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.