Vaniya
20 · Lucknow
Published author. Believes Urdu belongs to anyone who’ll listen.
Harf
Making Urdu fun for everyone
01 The Mission
Urdu is a language of poetry, longing, and the everyday — but for most people growing up around it, the only way in is a textbook or a religious class. We thought there should be a third door. So we're building one, out loud and in public — short videos, a guide to the language from the letters up, and poems pulled apart and explained. However you find your way in, you're welcome here.
02 The Logo
The mark is two letters in one. The Urdu حر, hay and ray and the Latin F, sharing a stroke.
Harf means letter. It's the smallest piece of a language, the thing every word is built from. We liked the idea that our logo is exactly that: one mark, two scripts, the place a story starts.
03 Meet the Founders
Two people, both in their twenties, both in love with Urdu, both sure the language deserves a better way in for everyone who grew up around it. That's how Harf started.
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.