Urdu Newspapers: The Archive is Still in Print

[Vasundhara Mathur] In this talk Abeera Kamran will discuss how the, how the design of contemporary Urdu newspapers keeps archival modes of reading and seeing alive and vibrant for the Urdu reader, and how inadequate digital technologies threaten this sophisticated design tradition. Abeera is a designer, web developer and researcher. She works between Birmingham, UK and Karachi, Pakistan. She is an AHRC-funded PhD student at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. Her research investigates the design and technological challenge associated with publishing Urdu in responsive web environments. She is also a lecturer in design at the University of Reading.

[Abeera Kamran] Thank you, Vasundhara, for inviting us today. I feel so humbled and also [very invigorated, especially after Aleema’s incredible presentation. So, really happy to be here today. Thank you all for making the time to come. So my presentation today is titled ‘Urdu Newspapers: The Archive is Still in Print’. It is an offshoot of my larger PhD research project, where I investigate the difficulties of reading and writing Urdu in web browsers. But today’s presentation is not about difficulty or precarity or threat. It is instead about how Urdu readers have safeguarded an aesthetic that you think you are more likely to encounter within a special book, in a special archive, but instead these incredible aesthetics are on the faces of ordinary Urdu newspapers in print today. And not just a special newspaper amongst many, but really all Urdu newspapers printed in Pakistan today.

Urdu is one of, I think it comes under the world top ten languages spoken in the world. So it’s like it has a lot of speakers, 230 million speakers speak it as a second language. Most of these speakers are in India and Pakistan, but we have hundreds and thousands in the diaspora. Urdu, which is, of course, a language, is written in the script, the Perso-Arabic script of Nastaliq. Interestingly, it is not the most spoken language in Pakistan, even though it is Pakistan’s national language, but it is the language most documents are printed in, so it is the most printed language. As a native Urdu reader who grew up in a house where everyone read Urdu newspapers I was absolutely shocked to discover that we were handwriting our newspapers until as late as 1981. Mechanical printing was invented in East Asia as early as the eighth century. And so it is a little bit shocking that we were handwriting. You can imagine that it is a laborious process. Going back to correcting mistakes is time intensive and slow.

And so, and I was thinking, like why is it that we were? And that’s one of the puzzles we will explore today. The very first time we use a font to print our newspapers in, we printed, this is scanned from the very first issue that uses the font from the newspaper Jang, and we printed side by side with a handwritten column, just to reassure readers, don’t panic, the font looks exactly as you want it to look. It looks very close to the handwritten version, and this kind of startling practice continues for a year, year and a half, where we just, like, gently reassure readers into this. It’s important to note that by the early-mid-20th century, most of the other geographies that use the Arabic script, so like Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, etc., were all printing the newspapers using mechanical type. But Urdu readers had aesthetic standards that needed to be met in other ways. A very important part of the aesthetic of the Urdu newspaper is the script style of Nastaliq. So I’ll give you a little 101 about some of the visual characteristics of it. The version, the version of Nastaliq that we use for writing Urdu is actually an adaptation of the Persian Nastaliq style, and we call it the Lahori Nastaliq style. It was invented in – Nastaliq is one of the many writing styles, one of the eight, nine Arabic writing styles invented, formalised in the, formalised in the 12th century by Mir Ali Tabrizi, no 14th century by master calligrapher Mir Ali Tabrizi, and the version that we use was adapted in 1928 by the calligrapher Abdul Majeed Parvin. He did two interesting things. The Persian Nastaliq style has a, like, a slant, like it kind of leans on the right-hand side, is a more relaxed, kind of more like sensual appearance. And this calligrapher made all of the, introduced a verticality into the letters. And it is said famously that he introduced that to echo the mindset of a forward-thinking Muslim and eventually Pakistani nation state. Most of you will know that the partition of India happened in 1947.

So that’s when Pakistan came into being. Several, a few decades before that there was a lot of political instability, and also Muslim identity was coalescing around the Urdu language. And so this specific adaptation is very much in service of that Muslim and then later Pakistani identity. Muhammad Iqbal, who is known as Pakistan’s national poet and beloved by Urdu readers, understood the potential of this like new indigenous script style and famously declared that he will stop writing poetry unless the calligrapher publishes all of his poetry in this style. So you can imagine now that Urdu readers were reading this ideologically charged poetry in this one style, further cementing the identity of Nastaliq as both a Pakistani, Muslim and then eventually Pakistani script style. And interestingly also that he made the strokes less, made the strokes a little bit thicker, which made it easier to print in low-cost printing presses in India, which meant that letters were more easily readable.

And so it was both like an ideological and practical nature to the adaptation. But for Urdu, language and script are entangled with each other. For example, you can see the same word, Nastaliq, on the right-hand side, on the right-hand side in a Lahori Nastaliq-style font, and the same word but in the Persian Naskh-style font. Persian Naskh is the most, another Arabic writing style, and is the one most commonly used by most of the Arabic writing and reading world. The incredible images Alia showed in the morning today of the Palestinian, the Arabic translation of Frantz Fanon was also in the Naskh style. And you can see so the Nastaliq has a very diagonally cascading character. The words start at the top, the first letter, and then the last letter is always at the lower end.

And while you can see the Persian Naskh has a very horizontal baseline, an Urdu reader, when encountering both of these exact same words, will recognise the Naskh style as Arabic, so strong is the identification of the Nastaliq style as Urdu, and so that’s quite interesting. Colloquially, Nastaliq is often known as the Urdu script, which is a misnomer because of course language and script are entirely different things. The second interesting thing about Nastaliq is that it changes shape a lot. So depending on whether it comes in the beginning, middle or end, or whether it comes, like, which word comes after the word, succeeding words. In the English, in the Latin script, of course, the alphabets look exactly the same, regardless of where they are in the word.

You can see ‘b’ looks exactly the same. And here I’ve only shown you three variations of the alphabet ‘b’ and highlighted in red, and you can see how dramatically different the shapes are. I mean, easily there’s like 14 or 15 variations of every single alphabet, sometimes more. And so it’s a very graphic and modulated script. And so these are some of the ways that give Urdu newspapers their very strong identity. This is a, this is an image of just a standard Urdu newspaper. And one of the incredible things about it is that you can see I’ve highlighted in red all of these diacritical marks. Usually diacritical marks represent some, some things like, like long vowel and things like that. But here their content is not at all semantic, purely ornamental. A lot of these diacritical marks echo the kind of diacritics you see in the Quranic text, so accenting newspaper with sacred undertones.

Newspapers are designed under such constraints of time and material, constraints of resources of time and materiality. But yet there’s a lot of that specialness that gets imbued in Urdu newspaper. This is just like, I think this is just one small section. I think at one point I counted 200 different ornamentations on just one side of a newspaper. So you can imagine how elaborate it is. This is a side-by-side comparison of a lithographed newspaper from 1915. At the top, newspaper Madinah, and at the bottom just one from 2022. And you can see it has that same lovely ornamentation filling up all the white spaces, balancing it out. And it’s kind of in front of these that the design tradition continues in this kind of persistent way. I’m going to show you a very small clip of how Urdu newspapers are designed. There’s the ornamentation that you just saw, but also after you type everything out, in a kind of horizontal baseline, every conjunct is then lifted.

It’s tightly spaced. Words are overlapped. And so, like the way that you imagine things that will make it difficult for you to read something. So, for example, ornamentation makes it difficult to read something that is, you know, long text. Tightly spaced, overlapping words. All of these things that you consider are counter-intuitive to a pleasant and efficient reading process are in fact quite neat and normal for a native Urdu reader. And so we have, our eyes are quite sophisticated in the way that they interpret both the, so I’m just going to play this for you to see.

So you can see there’s modification of the letter forms that’s happening as well. So not only the designer who does this work has to have a good grasp on how to balance all the white spaces out, but also to know which modifications will distort the letter form and which modifications will beautify it. Despite the time and expertise needed to accomplish this, and against the norms of most newspaper design workflows, this remains the way it is done for Urdu. This is a lithograph from 1875, from the Persian Maṭnawīye, Jalāl-al-Dīn Rūmī’s Maṭnawīye, and you can see it has that same overlapping words, the ornamentation, the type kerning and spacing. And I find it quite remarkable that these modes of design remain desirable and relevant.

Not just relevant and meaningful to the contemporary Urdu reader. I want to say quickly one thing, that a lot of the ways that this persevered is because the Urdu reader has made their aesthetic standards quite like, vocalised them. So, for example, in the Arabic speaking world, mechanical printing was in use because they accepted a simplification of their script. So all the contextual forms that I showed you, they accepted that we will minimise it so that we have efficient, our process and we can print our newspapers. But the same idea was pitched to the Urdu-reading public, so Pakistani printers and publishers, and they printed a similar simplified Urdu font for a week. And there was such uproar that the newspaper had to suspend operations for a whole week. And then nobody ever tried again for the next 20 years. And so I think that’s quite, so the poem that Vasundhara shared about safeguarding dreams against the rough fingers of the world, I was thinking, like, the safeguarding happens in so many unlikely spaces by so many unlikely people.

So invested are we in this specific aesthetic that the Urdu’s data economy online is entirely made of images. So if you go to any newspaper website, you will see a printed scan of the newspaper and then each of these is hyperlinked, and then you click on a section and then it leads you to another image. And of course that poses real challenges for researchers like me who then can’t use, for example, a keyword search to go through things. And there’s a whole hornet’s nest of how that complicates things when you’re trying to do any kind of knowledge production. The only newspaper that has, that doesn’t lead with a print version is the Jang newspaper, and you can see how depleted it is of all of that cultural meaning, of that history. It’s a kind of bare bones design, really.

And so my PhD research is very much involved in thinking about how difficult it is, for example, when you’re trying to read Urdu online. There are broken words, there are diacritics that clash against each other, there are cramped line heights. Often readers, to escape all of that, will romanise Urdu, so write Urdu in the Latin script. And, but I but I mean so usually I’m quite careful about the way that I speak about this, and I’m wary of being sentimental, but emboldened by today’s incredible line of speakers thinking through the archive in such poignant ways, I have to say that it is really remarkable, like the study of Urdu newspapers feels like a gift to me, to know that despite sometimes the seemingly totalising forces of imperialism and hostile Eurocentric technologies, Urdu newspapers maintain a sophistication and complexity that is both historical and modern and that the archival mode of designing is still in use because the community of readers refuse to accept anything less than what they consider to be beautiful and true. Thank you.