A Letter from the Editor Dear Friend: Annual of Urdu studies has been started with the hope to meet the needs of the "Urduwallahs" in the West. For some time we had felt a paucity of forums for articles and translations concerning Urdu. Further, it was difficult to keep track of even those few things which did get published. All in all, whatever work on Urdu was being done in Europe and in the United States was not reaching its proper audience. Annual of Urdu Studies is expected to mend the situation. Devoting itself to Urdu, it will publish translations (fiction, drama, poetry, criticism) as well as original articles dealing with all aspects of Urdu literature and culture. A section entitled Documents will reprint significant writings from relatively hard-to-find sources, to bring them to the attention of a larger group. The section entitled Bibliography will seek to present an annual addenda to the bibliography published by Frances Pritchett. There will also be a section entitled News & Events which will carry information of various sorts expected to be of interest to our readers, e.g., notices of awards, conferences, research in progress, obituaries, etc. There will also be a section for letters from our readers to promote scholarly discussion of books and ideas. A major effort will be made to publish reviews of books. Annual of Urdu Studies is not affiliated with any institution. To continue publication, it will need a great deal of support from its readers. We urge you to subscribe and get your friends, students, and institutional libraries to do so. It may interest our American readers that though four European libraries sent in subscription orders in response to the notice published in the Newsletter of the AAS, not a single American university has yet ordered a subscription. Only one hundred copies of this first issue are being printed. The cost is likely to be around $650.00, not including other expenses. The editor will bring out a second issue in 1982, but beyond that publication will depend on the support we are able to get. Let us try to make the journal self-supporting by the middle of 1982. Annual of Urdu Studies will come out once a year, usually in February, The size may increase, and subsequent issues may contain special sections devoted to individual topics. We urge you to contribute to it. We don't want you to stop publishing in other journals—let us spread the good word, by all means--but let us also keep this exclusive forum going. Even if you are not able to contribute an article or a translation, please send us a review or notice of any book dealing with Urdu that you found of significant interest. Please also send items for the special sections described above, and ideas for corrections and improvement s. c.M.N. -124-