Hyderabad: A teaching module designed by three literary connoisseurs has helped around 250 people to learn to read, write and speak Urdu in less than a month. Seven people managed to learn and appreciate the language in just four days.
The course not only introduced the learners to the letters, words and sounds but also helped them understand the usage of language in popular culture like songs and memes. Many participants had absolutely no background in Hindi or Urdu.
Khurram Murraad Siddiqui, Riyasat Ali Asrar and Sibghatullah Khan have been documenting and archiving history of Urdu, introducing citizens to classical literature, poetry and prose and chronograms found on monuments via workshops and heritage walks under the banner 'Gawan Academy'. The name takes after Persian statesman and scholar Khwaja Mahmud Gawan, who founded a distinguished madrasa in Bidar during the Bahmani era.
The four-day offline course was spread over two consecutive weekends, each session for two hours that included Urdu script course, sessions on Urdu ghazal and prosody, introduction to the world of Chronograms and collective listening sessions of Urdu classics from the likes of Iqbal Bano and Noor Jahan. "We ended the session reading letters of Ghalib and listening to Shah Rukh Khan songs," said Khurram.
Having started with his friends and then online in batches and one-on-one sessions, Khurram has helped people whose mother tongues were Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, French, English and Spanish learn Urdu in less than a month.
