All you need to know about the Urdu Thesaurus app and the team behind it

After about a year of engineering studies, Musharraf had something else in mind. To put it in his own words, he happily dropped out of the engineering program and made his own way through experimenting with writing and translations, although it was a different story for his mother. “My dropping out from the engineering studies was a disappointment to her, and I still hear about it!”

His honors include; Fellow, Harvard University South Asia Institute (Spring 2017), finalist for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 for Between Clay and Dust, finalist for DSC Prize for Literature 2011 for The Story of a Widow and PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant 2011 for Hoshruba.

As he says on his website; “These interests have converged over the years; one kind helping me discover the other, and taking me a little further into the past.”

From these segments, I personally feel that his work on the first of its kind online Urdu Thesaurus is a great contribution that is quite underrated.

This lexicography is accessible via a direct website (https://urduthesaurus.com/features) and an android mobile app.

Urdu Thesaurus has the potential of helping the segment that feels alienated from their native language. When we hear an unfamiliar word, or an obsolete funny sounding word, we discuss it and it comes back in circulation. With the app, the words can be shared via text or social media, and the ease with which a word can be explored in detail will help the exchange and communication. No one has to wait to get back home and look up the word in a hardcover dictionary. No one does that any more, anyways.

So where did the idea for the online Urdu Thesaurus and app come from? The project idea, and its structure, has been with Musharraf for a long time. It came from his practical experiences as a translator of classical Urdu texts. He realized how much of our language stays hidden from a common reader’s view, because the majority of modern readers are not familiar with classical Urdu texts.

“Our language resources have not been centralized. I am familiar with these problems because of my work as a translator of classical Urdu texts. I know how hard it is to find definitions for words of our classical literature. So I thought of making a resource that would help others like me. The Urdu Thesaurus website you see is just a small glimpse of what I dream would one day become a central tool and vehicle for literacy and education in the Urdu language.”

Given that this idea has been taking root for a long period, Musharraf ended up collecting dictionaries, and selecting the reliable ones from them. He started the data entry, and ended up doing the initial proofreading himself. The synonyms data collected from these dictionaries was then merged, and another proofreading was done to remove duplication, followed by yet another phase of proofreading. As he failed to secure any funding for the project, and had to solely depend on his own resources, the progress has been slow. Dr Rafaqat Ali Shahid helped with proofreading the first two letters, and Humaira Ashraf took on the work and did the letters from BAY onward.

Dr Awais Athar advised the project on the technology side of things. The two had met once in Lahore to discuss how to crowd-source the proofreading of large texts. Musharraf approached him again in 2015, and requested his help to which he kindly agreed, and since October 2015 Dr Awais has been advising the team building the Urdu Thesaurus database and the mobile app, voluntarily contributing his time and technical skills.

“The Urdu Thesaurus would not have come out for the lack of resources had Dr Athar not offered help when I requested it. I don’t know how long it would have been delayed. The credit for Urdu Thesaurus’s success belongs equally to him.”

The Urdu Thesaurus is a user friendly resource. According to Musharraf that was the whole point of making a language resource. Before finalizing the interface, the team ensured that it was easy to use, and the search function worked efficiently.

Talking about what is in store for the project’s future, Musharraf shared that this is just the beginning. He hopes that as the project attract funding, they will add more data, and several features to this resource to make it a comprehensive educational tool. A dictionary of antonyms and dictionaries of phrases, idioms and proverbs will come next. He has ideas for several other products that will grow around these resources in the long run.

The general perception about the Urdu language is that it is in trouble, with the next generation not so comfortable with reading and writing it. Musharraf however, doesn’t agree with the majority’s stance. In his opinion there is no doomsday scenario approaching for the language.

While he is quite optimistic about the future of the Urdu language, he knows that there are some issues that have led to the current state. Majority of the educated people don’t read Urdu classics anymore, not much is being written for children in Urdu, and local publishing for children is stagnant. These changes occur over a long period, and reversing them also takes time. For him, solutions should be looked at for their long term significance. In the meanwhile, persistence of the effort is needed to ensure that positive outcomes do transpire in time. Curating our classical literature for children in modern editions, and communicating it to them through making it widely available, is one way to begin this effort.

“My belief is that you are given one life, and if you wish to make a change, or set something right, you should do everything that is within your power to carry out your vision and ideals with whatever resources you have. Waiting for external circumstances to change before you take any action yourself, is not going to end well for you and others.”

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