Urdu, spoken by many millions today, has a rich past that reflects how cultures melded to forge India’s complex history. But its literature has been subsumed by the cultural domination of Hindi, struggling against false perceptions that its elegant Perso-Arabic script makes it a foreign import and a language of Muslims in the Hindu-majority nation.

The narrow streets of Urdu Bazaar, in the shadow of the 400-year-old Jama Masjid mosque, were once the core of the city’s Urdu literary community, a centre of printing, publishing and writing. Today, streets once crowded with Urdu bookstores abuzz with scholars debating literature are now thick with the aroma of sizzling kebabs from the restaurants that have replaced them. Only half a dozen bookstores are left.

Urdu, one of the 22 languages enshrined under India’s constitution, is the mother tongue of at least 50 million people in the world’s most populous country. Millions more speak it, as well as in neighbouring Pakistan. But while Urdu is largely understood by speakers of India’s most popular language Hindi, their scripts are entirely different.

Urdu has faced challenges in being viewed as connected to Islamic culture, a popular perception that has grown since the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi took power in 2014.

Sellers first set up stores in the Urdu Bazaar in the 1920s, selling stacks of books from literature to religion, politics and history – as well as texts in Arabic and Persian. By the 1980s, more lucrative fast-food restaurants slowly moved in, but the trade dropped dramatically in the past decade, with more than a dozen bookshops shutting down.