Stylogenyin the style of Urdu Katib Lithography

Traditions & vernacular · 1837–present · South Asia

Urdu Katib Lithography

Also known as Katib (khushnawees) newspapers, Lithographed Nastaʿlīq print, Handwritten Urdu press

For about a century and a half Urdu chose lithography over movable type, because metal type could not reproduce the sloping, stacked ligatures of Nastaʿlīq. Teams of katibs wrote whole newspapers, books and advertisements by hand on transfer paper, nesting each cascading word into dense, hand-ruled columns under enlarged calligraphic headlines. Noori Nastaliq (1981), digitised from Ahmed Mirza Jamil's hand, carried the katib's letterforms into computer composition.

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A sample layout drawn from the style’s design choices. Its AI image is held back until someone who knows the tradition has checked it.

Use it with care

Urdu pages often carry Qur'anic phrases, the names of God and the Prophet and religious verse; never use Nastaʿlīq as meaningless texture or set invented text that imitates it, and have every word read by a fluent Urdu reader. Katibs were rarely credited; name the calligrapher where known, and commission a working khushnawees rather than tracing archival pages.

01

How it works

  • Write every line by hand in Nastaʿlīq, letting each word cascade diagonally down to the baseline rather than forcing the script onto movable type.
  • Nest words into compact lines judged by eye, filling the column without stretching the spaces.
  • Rule columns, boxes and advertisement frames by hand, and build hierarchy through enlarged, heavier calligraphic headlines.
  • Keep the page black on cheap paper and print it by lithography from the katib's transfer sheet.
  • When digitising, keep the katib's ligatures, as Noori Nastaliq did, instead of simplifying the script to fit a Naskh-style type model.

Lithographic presses of Delhi, Lucknow (Newal Kishore Press, 1858) and Lahore; later the Urdu dailies of Pakistan and India, from Karachi and Lahore to Delhi and Chennai

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Full polychrome, Gradients, Generous white space, Grotesque & neo-grotesque, Monospace, Gloss & highlights, Photomontage

Palette

  • #eee6d2
  • #141312
  • #5f5a52
  • #c9bfa6
  • #a32a2a

Typefaces

  • Lahori Nastaʿlīq

    katib hand

  • Dehlavi Nastaʿlīq

  • Noori Nastaliq

    Ahmed Mirza Jamil with Monotype, 1981

  • Naskh for Arabic quotations

Known for

  • Newal Kishore Press, Lucknow (founded 1858) and its weekly Avadh Akhbar

    1859

  • Tajuddin Zareen Raqam (1906–1955), calligraphic front pages for Zamindar, Inquilab and Nawa-i-Waqt; Muraqqa Zareen

    1936

  • Madinah, Bijnor (1912–early 1970s), a lithographed Urdu newspaper

  • The Musalman, Chennai (founded 1927), still written by hand by katibs in the 2010s

  • Ahmed Mirza Jamil with Monotype, Noori Nastaliq

    1981

  • InPage (Concept Software), which brought Noori Nastaliq to Windows PCs from 1995

03

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleUrdu Katib Lithography1837–present · South Asia

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

04

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

05

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, 'Noori Nastaliq' and 'Ahmed Mirza Jamil' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noori_Nastaliq, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mirza_Jamil)
  2. The Friday Times, 'Remembering Tajuddin Zareen Raqam, a forgotten master calligrapher of Lahore' (2022)
  3. Global Voices, 'India: The Last Handwritten Newspaper in the World' (2012)
  4. Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India (Permanent Black, 2007)

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.