About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Akhlaq-e-Hindi* ("Indian Morals") by Mir Bahadur Ali Husaini, an Urdu version of the old Indian book of fables known as the *Hitopadesha* ("Profitable Counsel"). In his preface the author says that he made it in 1802 of the Christian era (1217 of the Hijra) at the order of John Gilchrist, translating it from a Persian version called *Mufarrih-ul-Qulub* ("The Gladdener of Hearts"), which had been made for Shah Nasir-ud-Din, a ruler whose seat was in Bihar.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page اخلاق ہندی and its six section pages (the preface, the account of the book, and the four chapters), downloaded in October 2026. The text runs from the opening praise of God to the closing words "ختم شد" ("The End").

What is left out and what was changed: every part of the author's text is given, in his order. The four long chapters (*babs*) are each split in two at the start of one of their main inset stories, so that the book is easier to read online; the author's story titles are kept as headings. Verse lines that the online text had broken apart are joined back into couplets, and one repeated title line is removed. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: Mir Bahadur Ali Husaini worked at Fort William College in Calcutta in the first years of the nineteenth century, and this book was written in 1802, so his text is in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Bishan Sarma, Chitra Griv, Hiranyak, Lag Patang, Manthrak, Chitrang, Damanak, Karatak, Pingal, Sanjog, Gandharb, Birbal, Rai Manduk, Rai Madan Pal Sarang, Megh Baran, Mahabal, Karanpur, Dhaulagir, Ujjain, Badaun, Kanauj, Bihar. The animal characters of the third and fourth chapters are named by their kind, as in the Urdu: the Goose (*qaz*), the Hoopoe (*hudhud*), the Ruddy Sheldrake (*surkhab*), the Vulture (*kargas*), the Crane (*kulang*), the Heron and the Parrot. A glossary of the Urdu, Persian and Hindi terms kept in the translation is given at the end.

Introduction

The *Hitopadesha* is one of the most famous story books of India. In it a learned Brahmin, here called Bishan Sarma, undertakes to make the idle sons of a raja wise in the ways of the world, and he does it by telling them stories: animals and men who talk, scheme, make friends, betray one another, go to war and make peace. Each story opens into another, so that a tale told by a crow may hold a tale told by a tortoise, and that in turn a tale told by a deer. The four chapters follow the old plan of the book: the winning of friends, the breaking of friendships, war, and peace.

Mir Bahadur Ali Husaini made his Urdu version at Fort William College, the college set up in Calcutta to teach Indian languages to young officers of the East India Company, under its teacher of Hindustani, John Gilchrist. Gilchrist asked his Indian writers to put well-known stories into the plain, everyday Urdu "which high and low speak", as the preface says, and *Akhlaq-e-Hindi* is one of the books that came out of that work. Its prose is easy and lively, full of proverbs, sayings and short verses, and it stands among the early landmarks of modern Urdu prose.

Readers will find in it the wisdom of the old fables side by side with the earthy humour of the bazaar: kings and ministers arguing over war and peace, a donkey in a tiger's skin who cannot stop singing, a crow who betrays the king who trusted him, cunning wives and foolish husbands, and a loyal Rajput who gives everything for his master. The morals are plain and practical, the stories are quick and often funny, and the whole book is still a good way into the Urdu of two hundred years ago.