Sultan Nathani

Sultan Nathani devoted much of his life to popularising the Urdu language among non-Urdu speakers through the medium of ghazal. His anthology Urdu for Pleasure for Ghazal Lovers: Intekhab-o-Lughat, first published in 1974 and expanded across five editions under the imprint of the Nathani Trust, presents five hundred selected Urdu verses alongside a ten-thousand-word English-Hindi lexicon. Nathani's stated aim was to enable lovers of ghazal, mushaaira, and Hindi film song to access the original Urdu vocabulary, fostering national integration through a shared literary heritage. The fourth edition was compiled and published posthumously in 1992.