In short,, don t embark upon a history of Urdu literature in English unless you genuinely feel that Urdu literature has something substantial to give the world and you want to help people to understand what that something is. If you do feel that, and are confident that you can write a good history, there are still things that you need to think about. First, "literature" covers a vast range of writing. Don't try to cover it all. Give major coverage to major writers, writers who produce that kind of literature which makes a writer really great, the kind of literature that has the power to change you, enlarging both your capacity to enjoy life and your ability to understand more fully yourself, and other men and women, and the world around you. By all means include lesser writers too, but let the space you give a writer always be proportionate to his greatness. Secondly, since you are writing in English, make the most of your medium, realize how many millions of people in how many different countries you can reach and, as far as you can, write for them all, bearing in mind that it will be through your book that most of them will be making the acquaintance of Urdu literature for the first time, and assuming only that they want to know—not that they already do know—something of the subject. If you are an academic you may have fallen prey to the absurd, but, alas, very widespread idea that you need to display to a (you hope) admiring audience how extremely learned and extremely original you are. Actually you don't need to and shouldn't want to do that even in writing for an academic audience And you must certainly not do it in a work of this kind. Tell your readers what they need and want to know—and only that. Thirdly, realize that Urdu literature is the product of a kind of society and of a history of which most of your readers will know very little. So set the literature in its social and historical perspective. Tell them what they need to know of these things if they are to understand and appreciate it—and, for example, don't be coy about love Your readers need to know that the love which Urdu poetry celebrates is, in the eyes of the society in which it was written, illicit love Otherwise, they'll think Urdu love poetry very odd stuff—which, of course, it isn't. (In my own case, it was more than three years after I first made the acquaintance of the ghazal before I encountered in Khurshidul Islam someone who was prepared to tell me plainly what it is all about.) Well, that covers all that it seems appropriate to say in an article of this length. I must, however, just add a tailpiece to say that the publication in 1985 of Urdu Literature, by D. J. Matthews, C Shackle and Shahrukh Husain, marked the appearance at long last of a short account of Urdu literature written, by and large, as it should be written.8 Its one major defect, in my view, is that it does not perform adequately the task that my immediately preceding paragraph ["Thirdly, . . ] explains and, for example, continues the tradition of coyness on the subject of love. For all that, it is a vast improvement on its predecessors, and a forerunner, I hope, of still better to come. available from Urdu Markaz, 28 Sackville Street, Piccadilly, London W1X 1DA, U K Annual of Urdu Studies, #6 i0