Umang, a Pakistani website dedicated to poetry was launched in January 2014.

This is the brainchild of founder and editor, Nosheen Ali. She describes Umang as a collaborative platform and a community for poetic dialogue. The Umang team includes creative director Ammar Aziz, producer-filmmaker Mohammad Ali Talpur, translations editor Zahra Sabri and community creator Mariam Paracha. Their objective was to create a community where people can share and translate their poetry pieces.

Nosheen Ali is an anthropologist and educator, who teaches at Habib University. While researching for her dissertation on Gilgit Baltistan, she came across some remarkable poetry in various regional languages. While her focus was political anthropology, she saw how poets of the region served as social reformers, using poetry to protest against authoritarianism and promote cultural harmony. Nosheen was truly fascinated by this cultural heritage and decided to increase public knowledge about this poetic tradition in Pakistan.

The basic idea was to create a place for documenting and discussing our poetry heritage, as the description on the website says,

“Umang encapsulates a digital humanities endeavour for poetic knowledge in translation, alongside a moderated forum where users can submit and share their own poetry. It also features a blog for covering all things poetry, including essays, book reviews, and interviews.”

While there are a lot of crises in Pakistan, there is also much to celebrate, such as our rich traditions in poetry, says Nosheen. To create a place for poetic learning with global reach, Nosheen chose a digital platform or online poetry magazine, as opposed to publishing a research paper on poetry in Pakistan, which can be accessed by few people only. She chose to name it “Umang”, which means joy, hope and enthusiasm, and is used in both Urdu and Hindi.

At first glance the site appears to be bilingual (English and Urdu), but it is actually a multilingual platform. The focus of the website is more on poetry works in regional languages, as Nosheen feels Pakistanis are not exposed to some great works being produced by the lesser known and even unpublished poets in different regions of the country. Although tributes have been paid to well known poets such as Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz, Nosheen thinks there are numerous online resources already dedicated to them and people are missing out other rich works, such as folk songs from Tharparkar.

The Umang platform will not be restricted to Pakistan only. It will represent the poetic heritage of South Asia. So far the site has featured Urdu, Wakhi (a language of upper Hunza) and Sindhi poetry. All works appear with English translation and videos have subtitles in English, Urdu and sometimes other languages as well. The works featured so far include Urdu poems ‘We hear’ by Zehra Nigah and ‘Name and Pedigree’ by Ali Akbar Natiq, Sindhi poem ‘A Song Everlasting’ by Attiya Dawood, and Wakhi poem ‘Danatum Passu’ by Shahid Akhtar. A blog post entitled ‘Jinn of Civilization’, written by late critic and poet Salim Ahmad and translated by Nauman Naqvi, explores the cultural and psychological context in which certain words are used.

Nosheen says poetry flows in the veins of Pakistanis, and this platform is for contemporary poets, writers, artists, translators and filmmakers, young and old, famous and unknown. She says Umang is not just the first poetry cross language platform in Pakistan, but creative visualisations for each poem will also be done for the first time. There is this new genre called film poetry or visualised verse, she shares, which is being used by her team. Some poems are being interpreted through videos, while in others the poets recite their poems, featuring some scenes of abstract art or poetic artists such as Suhaee Abro in between. For some works, Umang will also showcase a “poementary”, which is a documentary centred around the poems.

Anyone can contribute to the website, which has been developed by Karachi-based firm Dezigncore. The site is user friendly, with the option to register and post comments on each work. It has a neat layout, with just the right colours communicating the mood for South Asian literary discourse. There is a search bar and users can also filter through categories: feminist poets, northern Pakistan, progressive writing and literary criticism. The Urdu font however, is not very easy to read on certain pages and needs to be enlarged or changed to make it more reader friendly.

Along with bi-monthly updates to the site, there is a fortnightly newsletter (poem letter), highlighting the poem of the week and other updates to maintain audience interest. The Umang team will also organise initiatives for poetic learning offline. At the recently-held fifth annual Karachi Literature Festival, a booth was set up to promote the site and videos which are yet to be uploaded were also aired, attracting a lot of attention from visitors of all ages. Bookmarks were distributed to encourage people to visit the site and follow its Facebook and Twitter pages for new videos and poems. The site will also be promoted amongst poetry enthusiasts at the Islamabad Literature Festival, in which poets from Gilgit Baltistan will also be invited.

Given the right kind of publicity and contributions, Umang holds the potential to become a vibrant online poetic symposium for South Asia.