About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text, with an English translation, of *Ayama* ("The Widows") by Deputy Nazir Ahmad (1830/31–1912), first published in 1891. The title is the Arabic plural *ayama*, "the unmarried, the widowed", taken from the Qur'anic command "*And marry off the widows among you*" (Qur'an 24:32), which the heroine quotes in her last speech. The novel is Nazir Ahmad's argument for the remarriage of Muslim widows.

Source of the Urdu text: the first edition, printed at the Delhi Printing Works, Delhi, in 1891. The scan, made from the copy in the Allama Iqbal Library of the University of Kashmir, is freely available on the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/dli.ernet.544488, from the Digital Library of India). The book runs to 184 printed pages. The text was transcribed page by page from the scan for this edition.

What is included and what is left out: the whole of Nazir Ahmad's text is given, from the first chapter to the closing word *tammat* ("the end"), with the author's own footnotes, which explain hard words, names and allusions. Left out, as later editorial matter: a publisher's catalogue page bound in with the copy, and footnotes signed "Adib" (ادیب), which are glosses added by a reprint editor and not by Nazir Ahmad. Notes that end only with the usual end-mark "12" (۱۲) are kept as the author's. Where the scan is cut off, blurred or blank, the gap is marked [illegible]. Readings that are possible but uncertain are kept as printed, and a translator's note says so where it matters. Nothing has been supplied to fill a gap.

Arrangement: Nazir Ahmad divides the book into nineteen titled chapters (*fasl*), which are kept here with his own headings. The author's footnotes are collected at the end of each chapter. Page numbers and running heads are left out. Some of Nazir Ahmad's paragraphs run over several pages; to keep the Urdu and the English side by side, a few of these very long paragraphs have been divided where a page of the original turns. No words have been moved or changed by this.

Translation: the translation is faithful and complete, in plain modern English, with nothing summarised or skipped. Dialogue is kept as dialogue, with each speaker's name as printed, and the long sermon, letters and speeches are given in full. Arabic and Persian quotations, Qur'anic verses, hadith and verses of poetry are translated, with the originals in the facing Urdu column; where Nazir Ahmad gives his own Urdu paraphrase of a verse, that is translated too. Key terms are kept in italics with a short gloss and explained in the glossary at the end. Nazir Ahmad's views of religion, of the English, of Hindus, of purdah and of women are those of a Muslim reformer of his time; all are translated as he wrote them, without comment except where a fact needs explaining. Where the text appears to contain a slip (for example, Abel and Cain reversed), it is translated as printed with a translator's note. Translator's notes are marked [TN: ...].

Copyright: Nazir Ahmad died in 1912, and *Ayama* was first published in 1891, so the text is in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new.

Introduction

Nazir Ahmad was born in 1830 or 1831 at Rehar in the Bijnor district, the son of a poor scholarly family. He studied in Delhi, first in a mosque school and then at Delhi College, where he learned Arabic and later English. He entered government service in education, survived the Revolt of 1857, helped to translate the Indian Penal Code into Urdu, and rose to be a deputy collector, which is why he is still called "Deputy" Nazir Ahmad. Later he served the state of Hyderabad, and after retiring to Delhi he made a famous Urdu translation of the Qur'an. He died in Delhi in 1912.

His novels, beginning with *Mirat-ul-Uroos* ("The Bride's Mirror", 1869), are among the first in Urdu. They were written to teach, and each takes up one question of family and religious life: girls' education in *Mirat-ul-Uroos* and *Banat-un-Nash*, religious reform in *Taubat-un-Nasuh* (1874), polygamy in *Muhsanat* (1885), the imitation of English ways in *Ibn-ul-Waqt* (1888), and in *Ayama* (1891) the remarriage of widows.

*Ayama* tells the life of Azadi Begam, a girl of a good Delhi family. Her father is a man of free and sceptical views, her mother deeply religious, and she grows up thinking about religion while other girls play with dolls. As a girl she falls from a roof and dislocates her hip, and the English lady who treats her brings her into contact with English ways. She is married to a young scholar, Maulvi Mustajab, whom she persuades to give up the narrow life of a mosque *maulvi*; he takes service with the Nawab of Bhopal, and dies there within a few years. Azadi is left a young, childless and well-provided widow. The rest of the book follows her widowhood: the mourning and the sermons on patience, her loneliness and her thoughts of suicide, the go-betweens who try to draw her into an affair, and the narrow escape of her honour when the notorious go-between Chhalawa has her palanquin carried to her own house. Azadi never remarries, held back by the custom of her class. In her last illness she examines her own life in a long dialogue with herself, and at the end she calls the men of her family and neighbourhood together and, from behind the curtain, makes them a bequest: a speech on the sufferings of widows and on the duty laid on men by the Qur'an to see them married. She dies as her prayer ends.

Nazir Ahmad's argument is that Muslim law not only allows but commands the remarriage of widows, and that the prejudice against it is a custom taken from Hindu society, kept up by fear of what people will say. He makes it through a woman's own voice, and the book is unusually frank, for its time, about a widow's feelings and needs.

Why it is studied: *Ayama* is read in courses on the Urdu novel, on women's lives and social reform in nineteenth-century India, on Muslim law and custom, and on the debate over widow remarriage, which in Hindu society had led to the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856. Its Delhi speech, especially the speech of women, is lively and exact, and it is a rich source for the daily life, religion, customs and beliefs of Delhi households in the late nineteenth century.

Names in this translation: Nazir Ahmad, Azadi Begam, Maulvi Mustajab, Maulvi Muqtada, Maulvi Nasih, Khwaja Azad, Hadi Begam, Khwaja Mushtaq, Chhalawa (the Will-o'-the-Wisp), Azmuda Khanam (the Experienced Lady), Subhagi, Delhi, Bhopal, Lucknow. Key terms are kept in italics with a short gloss on first use, and explained in the glossary at the end.

How to cite: Nazir Ahmad, *Ayama* (Delhi: Delhi Printing Works, 1891; archive.org/details/dli.ernet.544488), with English translation, urduintranslation.com, 2026, https://www.urduintranslation.com/works/ayama.