The city has an Urdu history. Here is where it happened.
Urdu has left its mark on Cambridge. These are the places where that history was made, and where the language is still read, studied and taught today.
The map
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College1905–07
Trinity College
Trinity Street, Cambridge CB2 1TQ
Allama Muhammad Iqbal came up to Trinity in September 1905 as an Advanced Student and stayed two years, reading Moral Sciences - the name philosophy went by here then - under the neo-Hegelian J. M. E. McTaggart. He submitted his dissertation, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, in March 1907 and took his BA by research with distinction that June, before moving on to Munich for his doctorate. He is the reason this society has a thread to Cambridge at all: the poet who shaped modern Urdu verse spent two formative years a few streets from where we now meet.
Residence1905–06
17 Portugal Place
Portugal Place, Cambridge CB5 8AF
Iqbal's lodgings while at Trinity. A plaque on the house records it: “Allama Muhammad Iqbal / Born 1877 Died 1938 / Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan / Lived here 1905-6 while at Trinity College”. A narrow terraced street behind the Round Church, close enough to college to walk in minutes - the ordinary domestic setting behind a name that is now recited across South Asia.
Collegefrom 1931
Emmanuel College
St Andrew's Street, Cambridge CB2 3AP
Choudhry Rahmat Ali joined Emmanuel in 1931 to read law, taking his BA in 1933 and an MA in 1940. When he died in Cambridge in 1951, insolvent, the college paid for his funeral on the instruction of its Master, Edward Welbourne; he is buried not here but at the city cemetery out on Newmarket Road. Emmanuel is the second of the two colleges around which this city's Urdu history turns.
Source: Choudhry Rahmat Ali, Wikipedia
Literary Landmark1932–33
3 Humberstone Road
Humberstone Road, Cambridge CB4 1JD
The house Rahmat Ali moved to in 1932. It is said to be where he first wrote the name "Pakstan", in the pamphlet Now or Never, dated 28 January 1933 - a claim repeated often enough to have become local tradition, though the documentary record is thinner than the retelling suggests. Either way, the pamphlet was written in Cambridge, in a rented room on an ordinary residential street.
Source: Choudhry Rahmat Ali, Wikipedia
Resting Place1951
Cambridge City Cemetery
Newmarket Road, Cambridge CB5 8PE
Rahmat Ali died on 3 February 1951 and was buried here on the 20th, in section 16. He had spent most of his adult life in Cambridge and died with nothing; the grave is three miles east of the Emmanuel gate, at the edge of the city, past the airport. Of everything on this map it is the easiest to visit and the least visited.
Source: Choudhry Rahmat Ali, Wikipedia
Urdu HistoryOngoing
Cambridge University Library
West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DR
The Library's Islamicate manuscript collections run to more than seven thousand volumes in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Pashto and Urdu. The Urdu holdings are among the smaller of those and are catalogued largely inside the Persian and "Muhammadan" hand-lists rather than under their own heading, which is its own small piece of history. They are ordered up to the Manuscripts Reading Room like anything else: the material is here, in the tower at the end of West Road, and it can be read.
Source: Near and Middle Eastern Department, Cambridge University Library
Urdu HistoryPresent day
Centre of South Asian Studies
Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT
Urdu is still taught in Cambridge. The Centre runs language training at beginner and intermediate level in Hindi and Urdu for its MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies, taught through the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. It is the one pin here that is not history: a hundred and twenty years after Iqbal sat his Moral Sciences papers, the language is still on a timetable a few hundred yards away.
Source: MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies handbook, 2025–26
Urdu Historyopened 2019
Cambridge Central Mosque
309–313 Mill Road, Cambridge CB1 3DF
Not a literary site, and newer than everything else here by eighty years. It is on the map because the city's Urdu-speaking life now has a building of its own: the first purpose-built mosque in Cambridge, opened in April 2019, used as a community hall as much as a prayer hall. The rest of this map is individuals in rented rooms. This is the part that happened to a community.
Source: Cambridge Central Mosque