Rekhta Foundation


The Rekhta Foundation is a nonprofit and non-governmental organization dedicated to promote Urdu literature in South Asia. The organization on it literary web portal have digitalized about ninety thousand books during the period of six years since it began publishing Urdu, Hindi and Persian literature, containing
biographies of poets, Urdu poetry, fiction and nonfiction writings that originally belongs to public and research libraries in the Indian subcontinent. It serves multilingual scripts for contents such as English, Devanagari, Roman, Hindi and primarily the Urdu script. It also includes religious text of the Quran and Mahabharata, a Sanskrit epics of ancient India.
It hosts century-earlier books and is recognized the largest web portal in the world for preserving Hindi and Urdu poetry of the Indian subcontinent.
The site has digitalized more than 90,000 e-books with nineteen million pages, which are categorically classified into different sections such as diaries, children's literature, poetries, banned books, and translations, involving Urdu poetry. It is also credited for preserving 4,455 biographies of poets, 41,017 ghazals, 26,414 couplets, 7,852 nazms, 6,836 literary videos, 2,127 audio files, 76,398 e-books manuscripts and pop magazines.

History

Rekhta was founded in January 2013 in Nagpur, India. The portal came into existence after the idea of "Urdu virtual library" was introduced by Sanjiv Saraf to professors at the university. The literary works, including Urdu poetry were collected from the different private and public libraries across the major cites of India such as Lucknow, Bhopal, Hyderabad, Aligarh, including India's capital Delhi.

Literature promotion

Rekhta Live

Following the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, it launched an "online mehfil" of literature, music and poetry across its social channels via third-party software component. It was attended by the people across the five continents, leading the website to receive over two million views.

Festivals

The Foundation celebrates various literary festival, including Jashn-e-Rekhta, in which people from different walks are invited to participate in literary works such as Urdu poetry, music, short stories. It also engage the literary figures in direct conversations to promote Hindustani language along with the Urdu literature. The two day event is organized every year at Delhi.

Shaam-e-Sher

The Foundation has also began organising mushaira, a literary event called Shaam-e-Sher. It is generally attended by the young adult poets aged between eighteen to thirty. It was primarily adopted to promote Urdu literature where ghazals and nazms are recited by the event attendees.

Controversies

The organization made changes in the Jashn-e-Rekhta event by replacing the Urdu with Hindustani language, although the organization was established for the promotion of Urdu literature through its portal. On 13 December 2019, it made official announcement during its sixth edition of the mehfil held at Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium. The posters, which were received by the event speakers mentioned "Jashn-e-Rekhta: The Biggest Celebration of Hindustani Language and Culture". Later, the Urdu speakers criticised the changes citing "It seems Jashn-e-Rekhta has surrendered to the powers that be". An Indian writer and journalist Ziya Us Salam called the changes unfavorable and linked it to the Delhi High Court's decision after it ordered the police "to cut down on “difficult” words in Urdu". An Indian poet Gauhar Raza subsequently called the changes "unfortunate" and "problematic".