In Urdu poetry, sannata is not merely silence. It is the stillness where everything stops, a pause so deep that it begins to echo. This silence isn’t empty; it carries weight, memory, and emotion. It is the sound of what remains unsaid.
In this episode of Urdunama, Fabeha Syed explores how poets like Gulzar, Ameer Qazalbash, Abbas Tabish, and Manmohan Shukla ‘Talkh’ have turned sannata into a living emotion. For Gulzar, sannata arrives quietly, filled with the fear of losing someone, the hush that follows love’s trembling uncertainty.
Ameer Qazalbash paints it as the silence after tragedy, when words refuse to come. Abbas Tabish sees sannata as the emotional distance between two hearts that once spoke easily, while in Talkh’s verse, it becomes deeply personal, a silence so heavy it erases the self.
Tune in to Urdunama and listen to how silence finds its voice in poetry.