Ather Farouqui is a pioneering scholar of Urdu language and education. He was conferred the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 2012 for his Urdu and Hindi translations of Sons of Babur (Babur ki Aulad), an English play by Salman Khurshid. Farouqui’s academic focus lies on aspects of Urdu, Urdu-related politics, as well as Muslims in contemporary India. One of his notable publications include the translation of The Life and Poetry of Bahadur Shah Zafar. He also edited Muslims and Media Im...

The fascinating and chequered history of Delhi through the centuries has been a popular subject among authors. Yet, only a few other than K.A. Nizami record in rich detail the cultural, social, economic, and spiritual fabric of the city—the ‘gorgeous blaze of glory’ that was Delhi—between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. He presents his accounts of the periods of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, and the poet Ghalib through the analyses of wide-ranging sources: original literary, t...