‘The written word is the corpse of the spoken word.’– Ismael Kadare, Albanian writerWestern literary concepts have limited applicability in the Indian context, yet the colonised Indian intelligentsia continues to invest them with undue authority. This uncritical deference has had the unfortunate effect of drying up the fecundity of literary creation in Indian languages, much of which draws sustenance from deeply embedded oral traditions. Urdu, in particular, evolved through multiple regional inflections across the subcontinent, assimilating the finest elements of local cultures. Its creative corpus cannot be meaningfully understood through frameworks imported from Western literature. Such frameworks are anyway effective in the domain of literary criticism rather than creative expression.One of the more insidious consequences of this intellectual orientation in Urdu has been the reduction of literature to the printed book. Such a shift marks a decisive departure from the older, more expansive understanding of literary experience embodied in the oral traditions of mushairas, qawwalis, dastaangoi and other performative forms. Unlike in the West, where mass literacy gradually accompanied the rise of print culture, written literature in India has remained, to a considerable extent, the preserve of relatively small pockets of educated elites. The question, therefore, is not merely whether literature was ever exclusively elite, but whether its oral forms allowed a broader, more diffused access. Qawwali, perhaps, achieved this more readily; yet even shaiyri, when heard rather than read, entered public circulation in ways that exceeded the confines of formal literacy. The problem arises when literature, especially in the case of Urdu, is equated solely with the written word, thereby narrowing both its audience and its interpretive horizon.The concept of the printed book is inextricably tied to script, and this relationship produces its own set of exclusions. Languages without a standardised script are automatically relegated to the inferior category of ‘dialects’, irrespective of their expressive richness. This hierarchy proves equally detrimental to the performing arts, which operate through languages of gesture, voice, and enactment, where performance has primacy over script if there is one at all. Many traditional theatre forms perform without a script. Even in cinema, where scripts often exist, they rarely circulate as independent literary productions. Thus the creative process itself cannot be reduced to textual reproduction. Literature, in any form, obeys its own internal logic.Also read: In Illustrations: Celebrating the Joys of UrduIn Urdu, this distinction is expressed in the phrase ‘sher kehna’ rather than ‘sher likhna’, suggesting that poetry is conceived as something spoken into being rather than merely read out. The institution of the mushaira exemplifies this orientation. Chahar Bait, for instance, is a genre which is all about extempore poetry. Two groups of poets sit side by side on stage. Each is headed by a master, Ustad Shayar. The competition between the two is initially with previously prepared poetry text but soon gives way to extempore answers. This goes on all night. One can imagine the calibre of the master poets on both sides. It was an Afghan tradition, mainly practised in Pathan localities in northern India. In Western Uttar Pradesh, these Pathan localities were along the Yamuna from Western Uttar Pradesh to Awadh. For some reason, a famous group of Chahar Bait practitioners was also settled in Tonk of Rajasthan. This tradition is nearing its end, but at the local level, the Chahar Bait, especially in Rampur and Tonk, is now a qawwali-like mehfil, where competition between the two parties is a matter of history. Urdu poets frequently composed verses extempore, responding to or competing with one another in real time. The creative act thus remained inseparable from performance, memory, and audience reception. Historically, very few poets sought publication in the modern sense. Literate poets often recorded their verses in a ‘bayaz’ or personal notebook, but the idea of compiling and publishing a formal collection was far from universal. A significant number of poets were not formally literate at all. Urdu poetry, therefore, is best understood as creative expression meant to be heard, internalised, and recalled. It is not uncommon for couplets to circulate for generations without secure attribution. At times, a fragment of a couplet becomes embedded in everyday speech, detached entirely from its original context. In such a tradition, authenticity does not depend solely upon printed authority. A word or idiom acquires legitimacy not through its presence in a dictionary but through its appearance in a recognised couplet. Dictionaries themselves rely only upon such citations of Urdu poetry for validation, and many of these derive from unpublished or orally transmitted material.A revealing measure of this orality lies in the disparity between print runs and circulation in memory. Poets such as Rafi Ahmad Khan and Mayal Dehlavi survive less through books than through recollection among devoted listeners. Print runs for Urdu poetry remained modest. The case of Meer Taqi Meer illustrates a paradox. The most authentic text of his poetry, compiled during his lifetime, was published in 1811 after his death in 1810 by Fort William College. It has never been reprinted. Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu has now undertaken the challenging task of its reprint. If one considers original authorial editions rather than commercially recycled ones, even canonical works reveal limited print circulation. Divan-i Ghalib has sold barely one lakh copies over a century of its existence. No single collection of Faiz in Urdu has exceeded a print run of 5,000. Popular poets such as Ahmad Faraz or John Elia have rarely sold more than 2,000 copies in Urdu in India. These figures pertain to the most celebrated names in the tradition.At the same time, the vitality of the poetry remains intact. Meer himself published verses that were considered risqué, and later poets often refrained from doing so. Yet such poetry continues to circulate in private gatherings, memorised and recited. In more recent times, Shan ul-Haq Haqqi, the distinguished lexicographer associated with the Oxford English-Urdu Dictionary, recorded a substantial portion of his ghazals as audio, reaffirming the primacy of voice over text. Urdu poetry, in this sense, does not centre the ‘reader’ in the modern literary sense. The category of reader is itself an elitist construct, one that confines literature within the boundaries of literacy. Even scholarly journals seldom exceed print runs of 1500 copies. Shabkhoon, the most influential journal associated with the Jadidiyat movement, rarely printed more than this number and often issued combined volumes. Also read: The Lost Soul: Qawwali’s Journey from Ecstasy to EntertainmentJadidiyat and the false sense of interiorityAt this juncture, a brief consideration of the Jadidiyat movement is necessary, as its rise in the 1970s coincides with the discourse of a declining readership of Urdu literature. It is necessary to recognise that, despite its self-description as ‘modernist’, this movement bore little substantive relation to modernism as understood in Western literary history. Nor did it reflect a genuinely modern sensibility in any coherent intellectual sense. Its origins may be traced to the period immediately following Partition, when it emerged, in part, within a broader geopolitical climate shaped by Cold War cultural strategies of anti-USSR forces. The monthly journal Tehreek, whose publication began immediately after Partition, played a formative role in the early articulation of such a creative endeavour that inspired an inwardness which was in the opposite of spiritual seeking. Central to Jadidiyat was an increasing emphasis on individual consciousness, psychological interiority, and existential isolation. These themes, often associated with Western literary developments under conditions of advanced capitalism, were transplanted into Urdu, with varying degrees of success. With economic liberalisation in India during the early 1990s, such preoccupations acquired wider currency, and literature began to mirror these shifts more visibly.Loneliness, no doubt, is an authentic human experience. It has always found expression in literature. Yet not every subjective state yields meaningful artistic form. Jadidiyat, however, elevated such interiority into a dominant aesthetic principle, encouraging a mode of writing centred excessively on private feeling. While this produced a body of experimental and occasionally compelling work, the larger output tended towards sterile replication, lacking both formal discipline and imaginative depth.The Urdu readerMuch before the onset of economic liberalisation, since the beginning of the Jadidiyat tradition, in fact, writers in quest of quick recognition had already advanced the claim that the reader was disappearing from Urdu literature. This lament, however, was confined largely to a specific circle of writers who, in one way or another, benefited from Western patronage and sought to align their writing with what they perceived as intellectually fashionable. Such fashions were at odds with the Indian tradition of sensibility, which has historically remained deeply responsive to poetry as a lived and shared experience rather than as an abstract literary exercise.The claim of a vanishing readership is contradicted empirically by the presence of numerous Urdu newspapers and popular magazines during that very period, many of which were printed in substantial numbers owing to a stable and engaged readership. It is necessary here to distinguish between the popular and the trivial, for the two are not synonymous. The Jadidiyat movement had already dismissed popular literature as insignificant, often treating it with open disdain. This hostility stemmed less from aesthetic principle than from the inability of their own writing to engage a broader readership. When confronted with the enduring popularity of poets such as Ghalib, Iqbal, or Meer, proponents of Jadidiyat frequently shifted their criteria, redefining literary value to suit their own limitations. The rhetoric of declining readership intensified after the 1970s, but by the early 21st century, the rise of social media had altered the landscape of reading altogether. The forms, modes, and contexts of reading transformed, and the book itself began to acquire new material and digital forms. While it is true that serious literature today faces challenges in attracting sustained readership, this decline cannot be attributed solely to external factors such as technology. In the case of Urdu, it reflects a broader stagnation in the language’s intellectual and creative development. When a writer claims that readers have disappeared, it often indicates not a general collapse of readership but a failure to find readers for their own work. Writing that adheres rigidly to a prescribed formula inevitably limits its audience to those already committed to that framework. Similarly, an excessive reliance on critical validation betrays a lack of confidence in one’s own creative instincts.Calligraphy artist Zubair writes “Ummeed” in Urdu on a keychain locket. Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortySome Urdu writers have even suggested that the presence of a handful of discerning readers would suffice. Such an attitude reverses the proper order of literary endeavour. The task of the writer is not to adjust expectations downwards but to produce work of such integrity and force that it compels attention. Writing that endures does not follow fashion, formula, or theoretical jargon. It emerges from clarity of expression and a sincerity of vision that allows it to reach readers across time.The age of social mediaIt is worth recalling that, not only in Urdu but across non-European linguistic traditions, and especially in Persian and Arabic, literature has long been a shared experience for listeners and viewers. Until as recently as three decades ago, radio and television served as principal channels for the dissemination of literature in the subcontinent. The listener of radio and the viewer of television were also, in a meaningful sense, participants in literary culture. Even established writers and poets sought the validation of having their work broadcast. Across the world, these media played a decisive role in sustaining literary circulation.The advent of social media has, however, altered this ecology. Radio and television, in their transformed forms, have largely withdrawn from literary engagement. Yet the older traditions have not disappeared. Mushairas, elegy recitations, and other performative practices continue to shape Urdu’s literary life. The greatest poets of Urdu participated in such gatherings and regarded them as integral to their craft. Marsiyas (elegiac verses) in poetry and daastaans (long oral narratives) in prose played a central role in cultivating a shared literary sensibility. Written literature addresses readers; oral and performative traditions address listeners and viewers. Even in modern media, written texts are often mediated through voice and performance.The tradition of daastaan offers a striking example. Historically, dastaans were not necessarily fixed in written form. Today, while they may be documented in writing, their primary life remains oral narration by the daastaango. Their written versions seldom attract sustained reading. Similarly, much of contemporary broadcast content, including news, originates in written scripts but reaches its audience through spoken delivery. Literary festivals represent a more recent development within a market-driven cultural economy. Initially conceived as forums for introducing new themes and broadening the scope of literary engagement, they have gradually assumed a commercial character. Yet Urdu retains a notable exception. A so-called non-commercial festival held annually in New Delhi continues to attract remarkable audience numbers, often exceeding one lakh visitors each day and, on occasion, reaching five lakh. Industry CSR funds also back it. This phenomenon alone calls into question the narrative of a disappearing readership.The disengagement of Urdu-speaking audiences from contemporary Urdu literature must therefore be understood differently. It reflects not an absence of readers but a growing dissatisfaction with the quality of writing produced in the name of modernity, experimentation, and emotional excess. Writers who lament the loss of readership would do well to turn the critical gaze inward. The very introspection they cultivate in their writing might serve them better if directed towards the substance and integrity of their own work. Only then might they begin to understand the reasons for their diminishing readership, and perhaps address them with seriousness. Urdu has not ceased to be heard. It continues to live in speech, memory, and performance, often outside the circuits that confer institutional legitimacy. The difficulty arises when literature withdraws from these living contexts and seeks validation within narrow critical frameworks that neither emerge from nor speak to its own conditions. In such a situation, the claim of a vanished reader becomes a convenient abstraction, masking a more immediate failure of connection. The question, therefore, is not whether Urdu possesses readers, but whether contemporary Urdu writing commands attention beyond its immediate circle. Literature that depends on fashion, formula, or borrowed intellectual postures has narrow appeal, limited to practitioners or followers of the same fashionable or formulaic writing. By contrast, writing grounded in linguistic confidence and cultural awareness does not require advocacy to sustain it. It enters circulation because it compels recognition. The history of Urdu bears ample witness to this. What endures does so without proclamation, and what fails cannot be rescued by complaint. The task before the writer is neither to chase the reader nor to invoke their absence, but to produce work that makes such anxieties irrelevant. Once that standard is restored, the question of readership ceases to demand explanation and resolves itself in practice.Ather Farouqui is the General Secretary of Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind) and may be reached at farouqui@yahoo.com.