About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This is the complete Urdu text and an English translation of *Dehli ki Akhri Shama* ("The Last Candle of Delhi") by Mirza Farhatullah Baig (1883–1947), an imagined account of a royal *mushaira* (poetry gathering) held in Delhi in Rajab 1261 of the Hijra, that is, July 1845, in the last years of the Mughal court. The book's subtitle calls it "a memorable royal mushaira of Delhi in 1261 AH, corresponding to 1846 AD"; Baig's own text fixes the date as 14 Rajab, "the twentieth of July by the English calendar", which falls in 1845.

Source of the Urdu text: the transcription on Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org, دہلی کی آخری شمع, typed by Usama Ahmad Nadvi for the Adab-e-Aaliya group and edited by Yethrosh and Aijaz Ubaid), checked for this edition against a printed copy of 1938 from the University of Kashmir library, scanned by the Digital Library of India and freely available on the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/dli.ernet.504768). Spot checks found the two in agreement word for word. Baig's text was first published in *Urdu*, the journal of the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu edited by Maulvi Abdul Haq; one of the notes is signed by the journal's editor.

What is left out: nothing of Baig's text. In the print edition the author's notes are footnotes at the bottom of each page, numbered afresh on every page; the digital text lost their markers in the body, so here they are gathered in chapter 11 and numbered 1 to 25 in the order in which they occur. Where the place a note belongs to is clear from its content, the English translation points to it with a translator's note. Baig refers to a plan of the seating "on the next page"; it is not in the digital text and is not reproduced. The chapter divisions follow Baig's five sections (Preface, The Planning, The Arrangement, The Completion, Fate); the two longest sections are divided into chapters at changes of scene, and the chapter titles in the table of contents are new.

Copyright: Mirza Farhatullah Baig died in 1947, so the work is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]; Persian verses are translated, with the original kept in the Urdu text on the facing side.

Introduction

Mirza Farhatullah Baig was born in Delhi in 1883. As a young man he was a pupil of Deputy Nazir Ahmad, the author of *Mirat-ul-Uroos* and *Ibn-ul-Waqt*, and his affectionate portrait of his teacher, *Dr Nazir Ahmad ki Kahani*, made his name. He spent most of his working life in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, where he rose to be a judge and where he died in 1947. He is remembered as one of the masters of humorous Urdu prose and, above all, as the writer who kept the idiom of old Delhi alive on the page.

*Dehli ki Akhri Shama* is his best-known book. It takes the form of a report by Maulvi Karimuddin of Panipat, a real scholar and printer who in 1848 published *Tabaqat-ush-Shu'ara-e-Hind*, a history of the poets of India, and who, as that book records, did hold a mushaira at his house in Delhi in 1845. Baig keeps Karimuddin as narrator and widens his small gathering into a mushaira at which almost every poet of the last Mughal generation recites: Ghalib, Zauq, Momin, Shefta, Azurda, Sahbai, the young Dagh, the princes of the Red Fort, and a crowd of minor poets, eccentrics and hangers-on. The Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar sends a ghazal, and his son Mirza Fakhru presides.

Baig says plainly in his preface that the meeting is imagined: he brings together men who may never have met in one room, and he gives some of them ages and circumstances that do not quite fit 1845. What is not imagined is the detail. He collected it, he tells us, from old people who remembered that world, from portraits and from the tazkiras, and he left out any story that anyone contradicted. The result is a gallery of portraits: what each poet looked like, how he dressed, how he sat and recited, how the others received him. Ghalib slaps his thighs at a good couplet and teases the pompous; Momin combs his long hair with his fingers while he recites; Zauq, the King's master, quietly arranges the princes' seating; the naked mystic Tishna blows out the candle and walks out into the night saying "nothing at all". The book ends at dawn, with the call to prayer rising from the mosque next door just as Zauq reaches the line about the muezzin.

Behind the comedy is grief. Within twelve years of the mushaira most of these men were dead, the Fort was sacked, and the culture Baig describes was gone; the title, *The Last Candle of Delhi*, is an elegy. The book is a standard text in university courses on Urdu prose and on the literary culture of Mughal Delhi, and it is the most vivid introduction there is to the poets of Ghalib's age.

How the mushaira works: at a formal mushaira a candle is set before each poet in turn, and he recites when it reaches him. Usually all the poets write ghazals on a *tarah*, a line whose metre, rhyme and refrain are set in advance; at this mushaira, by the King's order, there is no tarah, and two candles go round, one on each side, so that no one need quarrel over the order of reciting.

Names: personal names are given in the usual English spellings (Ghalib, Zauq, Momin, Mirza Fakhru, Bahadur Shah Zafar). "Delhi" is used in the translation; the title keeps Baig's spelling, *Dehli*. Poets are often called by their pen names, which appear in the verse itself; the glossary at the end explains the Urdu and Persian terms kept in the translation.