About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This is the complete Urdu text and an English translation of *Ataleeq Bibi* ("The Wife as Tutor"), by Chaudhry Muhammad Ali Rudaulvi (d. 1959), taluqdar and landowner of Rudauli in the district of Bara Banki, Oudh. It is an Urdu adaptation of Douglas Jerrold's *Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures* (1846): fourteen night-time "lectures" that a wife delivers to her husband in bed.

Source of the Urdu text: the transcription on Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org, اتالیق بی بی, with fourteen chapter pages), downloaded in October 2026. The Internet Archive holds a typed e-book of the same text (archive.org/details/AtaleeqBibi, 62 pages), made in 2021 by an online literary group from an older printing; its title page names the author as taluqdar and chief of Rudauli, and the archive gives the date of the work as 1916. No scan of an early printing has been found, so that date has not been confirmed.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of the author's text has been left out. The cover, typing credits and other matter of the modern e-book are not reproduced. The author's one footnote, on the verse in the first lecture, is printed after the verse as a note. A stray footnote marker at the end of the last lecture, and invisible formatting characters, have been removed. Two obvious typing slips in the third lecture have been corrected. Verse is set one line to a line, each couplet as a unit.

Copyright: the author died in 1959, so the work is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. Because the date of first publication has not been confirmed from a printed copy, this edition records its United States status as "check". The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. Persian verses are translated, with the original on the facing Urdu side, and Quranic quotations are identified by chapter and verse.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Muhammad Husain, Allah Bakhsh, Muhammad Shafi, Buddhan, Chhuttan, Munni, Amma (mother), Abba (father), the Farah Bakhsh ("Joy-Giving") club, Lucknow, Calcutta, Lahore.

Introduction

In 1845 the London comic weekly *Punch* began printing "Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures" by Douglas Jerrold. Each week Mrs Caudle, lying beside her husband after the curtains of the bed are drawn, gave him a "lecture" on his failings: the money he had lent to a friend, the umbrella he had lent to someone else, his club, his smoking, his late nights. Mr Caudle hardly gets a word in, and each lecture ends with his note that at last he fell asleep. The book of 1846 was one of the great comic successes of the century and was imitated and translated across Europe.

Chaudhry Muhammad Ali of Rudauli made it an Urdu book of the same shape and an entirely Indian content. Each of his fourteen chapters opens with a heading that sets the scene, often in the style of a newspaper ("the wife's lecture, with the principles of thrift and housekeeping"), then a verse, usually Persian, quoted with mock solemnity. Then comes the wife's monologue, broken by the husband's few protests, which are printed in quotation marks; and at the end the husband, who calls himself the hero and his wife the heroine, reports to his "readers" how the night ended. The author calls himself the "translator" and has fun with it.

The household is that of a respectable Muslim gentleman of a provincial town of Oudh in the early twentieth century, with a salaried post, five children, a mother-in-law who visits, neighbours who come through the women's door, and a bank account with "two or three hundred" in it. The husband's sins are the new sins of his class and time: the club, the Freemasons' lodge, newspapers, cheque books, friends who come to dinner and eat the chicken, a fair with its swings and roundabouts. The wife meets each of them with the old weapons of the *zanana*: the proverb, the curse, the oath "by my head", the threat to go to her mother's, the reminder that when she is dead he will marry again and then learn her worth.

The book was written as a joke against wives, and the Wikisource note calls it "a very true sketch of women's pointless carping at their husbands and unwarranted complaints". A reader today will notice how often the wife is right. The house runs on what he hands her; she does not know what he earns; he gives away money she has saved, brings guests home without warning, comes in after one o'clock, and is sent off to sleep by a lecture while she lies awake. In one chapter he admits that her suspicion of a pretty young relation was not baseless. The humour is in the speed and abundance of her talk, the endless turns of idiom of women's Urdu of Oudh, which is the real value of the book and the hardest thing in it to translate.

The language is the spoken Urdu of the home, full of proverbs, women's oaths and curses ("may it turn to arsenic in him!"), and affectionate abuse. The translation keeps the speed of the talk and translates the idioms rather than explaining them, with a note where an idiom would otherwise make no sense in English. The husband's English is a little stiffer than his wife's, as his Urdu is.

Cite as: Chaudhry Muhammad Ali Rudaulvi, *Ataleeq Bibi*, tr. urduintranslation.com (2026), https://www.urduintranslation.com/works/ataleeq-bibi.