Vaniya
20 · Lucknow
Published author. Believes Urdu belongs to anyone who’ll listen.
Harf
Making Urdu fun for everyone
01 The Mission
Most people who grow up around Urdu are offered two ways into it: a textbook, or a religious class. We wanted a third door. So we make an Instagram page, a first book that starts at the alphabet, and pages that take a song you already love and tell you what every line of it means. Come in whichever way suits you.
02 The Logo
The mark is two scripts in one. The Urdu حر, hay and ray, and a Latin F, drawn with one shared stroke.
Harf means letter, the smallest piece of a language and the thing every word is made of. So the logo is a letter too: one mark, written in two scripts at once.
03 The Founders
There are two of us, both in our twenties. We love Urdu, and we think it deserves a better way in than a textbook.
Hishaam
24 · Calcutta • Bangalore
Engineer by trade. Found Urdu through Nusrat and the Sabris, and never quite left.
04 What We Make
Most of it lives on Instagram, where seventy thousand of you turn up for a language a lot of us were told we'd already lost. The first book is Dars, Volume One. Urdu from the letters up.
Alongside it, poetry read closely: the ghazals and qawwalis people already love, with what the words actually mean. Classes in small batches come later. The rest we are working out in public.