About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Beeti Kahani* (The Story of What Befell Me) by Shahr Bano Begum, a daughter of the ruling family of Pataudi. It is the story of her own life, written in prose for an Englishwoman, Miss Fletcher, to whom she taught Urdu, and it runs from the day of her birth to the time of writing.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page بیتی کہانی, taken from the Wikimedia dump of October 2026. The text there is given as one page under the author's own section headings. Wikisource notes that the work was written in 1885; the author's own last dates are of early 1886, after a year of lessons with Miss Fletcher, which began on 21 May 1885.

What is left out and what was changed: the whole of the author's text is given, in her order, with all of her section headings, such as The Date of My Birth, The Mutiny, My Mother-in-law's Death and The End of the Story. The Wikisource page header and notes are left out. The text has been divided into ten chapters for easier reading; the chapter titles are new. Long paragraphs have been divided at sentence ends. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: the author was born in 1848 and wrote this account in the 1880s, so she cannot have been alive in 1961; works of Urdu authors who died in 1961 or earlier are out of copyright in Pakistan and India. The English translation, the chapter divisions and titles, this introduction and the glossary are new.

Translation: the English follows the Urdu sentence by sentence. The author's verses are translated line by line. Her familiar way of addressing her reader as *bua* (sister) is kept. Dates in the Hijri calendar are kept as she gives them, with the Western year in a translator's note marked [TN: ...]. Urdu terms kept in the translation are explained in the glossary at the end.

Introduction

Shahr Bano Begum tells us that she was born on the fifth of Rabi' al-Thani 1264 AH, the daughter of Nawab Muhammad Akbar Ali Khan, ruler of the small state of Pataudi, near Delhi, and that her birth was greeted with salvos of guns. As a child she was betrothed into the house of the Nawab of Jhajjar, and she was married with great splendour. Soon afterwards came the Mutiny of 1857, the arrest of the Nawab of Jhajjar and the ruin of his state, and the rest of her life was lived among the losses that followed.

She writes plainly and frankly about her family: a mother-in-law who was harsh to her for years, a husband who fell into bad company and squandered all their property, the deaths of her husband and of all her children, the debts and lawsuits that followed, and a long and painful quarrel with her own mother. She also records the help of Mirza Ayub Beg, an old servant of the family who managed her affairs, and the doctors, officials and petitions through which she kept her small pension.

The book is valuable as an account, in a woman's own words, of life in the households of the Muslim nobility of the Delhi region in the years around 1857. Her Urdu is the everyday speech of the women's quarters, full of proverbs, verses and familiar turns of phrase, and she speaks directly to her reader throughout, as if telling her story aloud.