About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of three lectures by Muhammad Husain Azad (1830–1910): "A Journey Through Iran" (*Sair-e-Iran*), the talk he gave in Lahore after returning from Iran; "Some Thoughts on Urdu and English Prose" (*Urdu aur Angrezi Inshapardazi par Kuch Khayalat*); and "On Poetry and Measured Speech" (*Dar Bab-e-Nazm aur Kalam-e-Mauzun*), an address to the Anjuman-e-Punjab. The title, *Azad ke Lecture* ("Azad's Lectures"), has been given to this collection by the present edition; it is not the title of a book published by the author.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the pages سیر ایران/لکچر، اردو اور انگریزی انشاپردازی پر کچھ خیالات and در باب نظم اور کلام موزوں, downloaded in October 2026. A note printed with the third lecture says that it was taken from the Anjuman's journal for August 1868 and later printed in *Nazm-e-Azad*. The Iran lecture was printed after Azad's death by his grandson, who signs himself Tahir; the year of that printing is not given. No date is given for the lecture on prose. No scan of an early printing has been found on archive.org.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of Azad's own text has been left out. Three pieces of later editorial matter are not given here: the grandson's preface to the Iran lecture and his note at its end, and the modern editor's note at the head of the lecture on poetry, which compares the journal text with Azad's later corrections. Azad's two footnotes to the Iran lecture are kept at its end, numbered (1) and (2). Verses printed as running text have been set on lines of their own, and a few words run together in the source have been separated. In the lecture on poetry, the words in round brackets are supplied in the source itself, and two misprinted verses have been read in their known form ("dar dahan ast / zer-e abruan ast"; "haftad o do millat"). Long passages printed without breaks have been divided into paragraphs at the points where the source runs one paragraph into the next.

Copyright: Azad died in 1910, so his work is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. The lecture on poetry was printed in 1868 and in *Nazm-e-Azad* in his lifetime. The other two lectures were delivered in his lifetime, but the dates of their first printing are not known, so their status in the United States should be checked. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Lahore, Karachi, Bushehr, Shiraz, Isfahan, Kashan, Qum, Tehran, Semnan, Damghan, Shahrud, Bistam, Sabzavar, Nishapur, Mashhad, Jam, Herat, Kandahar, Quetta, Rindli; Hafiz, Sa'di, Jami, Karim Khan Zand, Shah Abbas, Fath Ali Shah, Farhad Mirza, Mukhbir-ud-Daula, Manekji, Mirza Riza Khan, Mirza Yaghma, Nadir, Amir Dost Muhammad Khan, Ayub Khan; Mir Soz, Mir Taqi Mir, Sauda, Jur'at, Mir Dard, Ghalib, Nasir Ali, Bedil, Sarmad, Mail.

Introduction

Muhammad Husain Azad was born in Delhi in 1830, the son of Maulvi Muhammad Baqir, who ran one of the first Urdu newspapers, the *Delhi Urdu Akhbar*, and was put to death by the British after the rising of 1857. Azad escaped the ruin of Delhi, wandered for some years, and settled in Lahore, where he worked in the Education Department, taught Arabic at Government College and became the leading spirit of the Anjuman-e-Punjab, a society founded in 1865 to promote useful knowledge in the languages of the country. There, in 1874, he helped to launch the new *mushairas* on set themes, in which poets were asked to write on nature and ordinary life instead of the conventions of the *ghazal*. His great books are *Aab-e-Hayat* (1880), a history of Urdu poetry told through the lives of its poets; *Darbar-e-Akbari*, on the court of Akbar; and the allegorical essays of *Nairang-e-Khayal*. In his last years his mind failed, and he died in Lahore in 1910.

The two lectures on language belong to the first years of the Anjuman. "On Poetry and Measured Speech" praises poetry as the speech that moves the heart, a gift of God that comes in solitude and at night, and ends by asking the Anjuman to help rescue the noble art from the decline into which, he says, it has fallen. "Some Thoughts on Urdu and English Prose" is more practical. Urdu, Azad argues, is young; its stock of learned words is small because it grew up in an age without learning, and its prose has worn out its old ornaments. The remedy is to spread knowledge, and to bring new plants from the English garden, the personified figures of Time, Anger, Love and Rumour for instance, into Urdu, in the hands of writers who have mastered both languages. These ideas shaped the "natural poetry" movement and much of modern Urdu prose.

"A Journey Through Iran" tells of the journey Azad made in the mid-1880s, in search of books and of material for a dictionary of Persian: by train to Karachi, by steamer to Bushehr, and by caravan to Shiraz, Isfahan, Qum and Tehran, where he spent three months among princes, scholars and the Parsi agent Manekji; then on to Mashhad, and home through Herat and Kandahar to Quetta. It is a lively and personal account, full of scholars who teach the law while washing clothes at a stream, of shrines and their inscriptions, of debates over pure Persian, and of the endless questions of suspicious Afghan townsmen, and it ends with Azad riding into British India on top of a cartload of books.