AbstractRecognition of Urdu cursive script is a challenging task due to the implicit complexities associated with it. The performance of a recognition system is immensely dependent on extracted features. There are various features extraction approaches proposed in recent years. Among many, an approach based on zoning features proved to be efficient and popular. Such zoning features represent significant information with low complexity and high speed. In this paper, we used zoning features for the classification of Urdu Nasta’liq text lines, with a combination of 2-Dimensional Long Short Term Memory networks (2DLSTM) as learning classifier. The proposed model is evaluated on publicly available UPTI dataset and character recognition rate of 93.39% is obtained.