Currently spoken by almost 250 million people in Pakistan and India and the second most widely spoken language in Britain, Urdu has one of the richest literatures of all south Asian languages. The modern Urdu poets presented in this book offer a fascinating range of forms and styles that grew out of that tradition, as well as a complex commentary on the experience--personal, religious, cultural, political--of the issues and dilemmas of the twentieth century. In his introduction, M. A. R. Habib outlines the history of Urdu literature, identifies the major poets associated with the classical...