IT is a common sight in our country to see students running from one library to another to find source material for their assignments or theses. If they can find some material on the topic at all, they can’t be just sure that they have landed all the primary and secondary sources and a nagging voice inside their head keeps them telling “what if some important source is left out?” The solution to the problem is simple: bibliographies.

Bibliography is “the systematic cataloguing, study and description of written and printed works, especially books,” says Encyclopedia Britannica. According to Concise Oxford English Dictionary, a bibliography is a list of sources referred to in a particular work or a list of books of a specific author. A list of books on a particular subject is also called bibliography. The carefully prepared bibliographies, often listing works author-wise, subject-wise and title-wise, can prove to be a boon to students and researchers.

There has been a dearth of bibliographies and reference works in Urdu. It was Moulvi Abdul Haq who planned to publish Urdu’s voluminous bibliographies and ‘umhaatul kutub’ (mother books) and had published many of them, under the aegis of Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu, before he died in 1961. Another institution that has worked hard to address that lacuna is the National Language Authority (NLA). Established in 1979, the NLA began preparing the essential terminologies, books on official correspondence, dictionaries, glossaries and other reference material, such as bibliographies. So far the NLA has published, in addition to some 800 books, about 125 bibliographies and booklets for reference purposes.

These bibliographies and booklets, when first published in the 1980s and 1990s, had become so popular that they virtually flew off the shelves and just a few copies were left, which were intentionally saved as an office record. At a later stage, the NLA was renamed as the National Language Promotion Department (NLPD). Now the NLPD has begun reprinting those bibliographies and other reference booklets by putting them in book form, with fresh and computerised calligraphy. Three such volumes have recently been published, putting together bibliographies or booklets that elaborate different aspects of Urdu literature, Urdu language, especially bibliographies of some well-known writers and poets of Urdu.

Researchers and students had been desperately looking for those bibliographies and they used to get them photocopied, says Dr Saleem Mazhar, the current director general, in his intro to the third and the latest book published in the series, titled Kitabiyat 2. The series has been named “Muqtadira Ke Kitaabche”, or the booklets by Muqtadira, that is, the NLA. The latest volume includes nine bibliographic booklets on some big names and they proffer vital information on primary and secondary sources and they are: Mirza Ghalib (by Inamul Haq Kausar), Khwaja Hyder Ali Aatish (by Sabir Kalorvi), Imam Bakhsh Nasikh (by Sabir Kalorvi), Muhammaduddin Fauq (by Ajmal Niazi), Salahuddin Ahmed (by Anwer Sadeed), Mumtaz Shirin (by Anwaar Ahmed), Saleem Ahmed (by Musharraf Ahmed), Syed Abdullah (by Jameel Ahmed Rizvi) and Khwaja Mir Dard (by A. D. Naseem).

The first volume, published a couple of years ago and titled Kitabiyat 1, had the following 10 bibliographic booklets compiled in one volume: Aziz Ahmed (by Mirza Hamid Baig), Sa’adat Hasan Manto (by Ali Sana Bukhari), Agha Hashr Kashmiri (by A. B. Ashraf), Masood Hasan Rizivi Adeeb (by Tahir Taunsvi), Syed Abid Ali (By Abdur Rauf Sheikh), Naseem Hijazi (by Tasadduq Husain Raja), Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi (by Moinuddin Aqeel), Khalifa Abdul Hakeem (by Mumtaz Gohar), Hakeem Ahmed Shuja (by A. B. Ashraf) and Deputy Nazeer Ahmed (by Iftikhar Ahmed Siddiqi). Both the volumes have been compiled by Dr Rashid Hameed, a scholar and the executive director at the NLPD. In his intro to the first volume, Rashid Hameed has mentioned that the NLPD intends to reprint all those booklets in several volumes and bibliographies in the book form. These booklets are being published chronologically, according to the years in which the first edition had appeared. Secondly, adds Dr Rashid, the contents and texts of the first editions of the booklets have not been altered.

Another volume in the series is titled Jahaan-i-Urdu. Compiled by Dr Arif Husain, it includes the booklets that describe teaching of Urdu in various countries of the world. These countries are: Italy, Great Britain, Burma (now Myanmar) Turkey (now Turkiye), Japan, China and Saudi Arabia. Dr Arif has rightly pointed out in his preface that these booklets reflect the facts about teaching of Urdu in foreign lands at the time of publication of these booklets and now they serve as historical record as well as reference.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2026