n India, Urdu ghazals are published in Dēvanāgarī, transliterated from Perso-
Arabic nastaliq script. This paper studies the accuracy of these transliterations,
by comparing 152 poems (2734 lines) from seven poets, including Jaipur-based
Urdu poet Parsā Kaūsarī Jaipūri (1922-1999) whose hitherto unknown Urdu
manuscript containing his Collected Poems is introduced and described. Word-
by-word comparison detected that in 113 out of 2734 lines the original and
transliterated texts slightly differed. As the Hindi and Urdu languages are almost
identical in their vocabulary and grammar, rewriting an Urdu nasta‘lÊq text in to
Dēvanāgarī is a special case of domestication , that is a strategy of making the
target text closely conform to the pronunciation, orthography and grammar of
the Hindi language. For the lay reader such “Urdu-in-Dēvanāgarī” reproductions
of the Urdu ghazals are useful, satisfactory and preserve their esthetic value, but
to avoid loss of information from the source text, it is recommended that
definitive, scientific editions of Urdu ghazals should always be published in both
scripts en face, with the rare Urdu words explained in footnotes.
