About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of eight essays by Mirza Farhatullah Baig (1883–1947), the Delhi humorist who spent most of his working life in Hyderabad. They are taken from the pieces published under his name on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Mazameen-e-Farhat: Intikhab* ("Farhat's Essays: A Selection"), belongs to this edition; the author's own collected essays appeared in several volumes as *Mazameen-e-Farhat*, but this selection does not follow any one of them.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the author's page مصنف:مرزا فرحت اللہ بیگ, eight pages, downloaded in October 2026. No scan of an early printing has been found on archive.org. Wikisource gives no dates or first printings for these pieces.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of the author's text has been left out. "Our Examination and Us" was written in two parts, two "sides of the picture"; the Wikisource text gives only the first, with a note by a later compiler saying so. That note is modern editorial matter and is not printed here. The author's own notes, marked "(Author)" or printed at the end of an essay, are kept. In the Wikisource text many paragraph breaks were lost and some verses ran into the prose; these have been restored. Footnote numbers have been put in their places, and obvious misprints have been read in the sense the context requires. Doubtful readings are marked with a translator's note.

Copyright: Baig died in 1947, so his work is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. "Carrying Out a Will" was written soon after the death of Wahiduddin Salim in 1928; "New Delhi" speaks of the new capital and of Osmania University; "The Editor's Room" names writers of the 1930s. As some pieces may first have been published in 1931 or later and the dates of the others are not known, this edition records its United States status as "check". The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Farhat (the author), Dilli for the old city in the speech of its people and Delhi elsewhere, Hyderabad, Aurangabad, Chandni Chowk, the Chawri, Mehrauli, the Qutb; Mirza Qamru (Mirza Chhakra), Wahiduddin Salim, Abdul Haq, Nazir Ahmad, Shahid, Rashida, Mahbub.

Introduction

Mirza Farhatullah Baig was born in Delhi in 1883 and studied at St Stephen's College there. As a young man he came under the influence of Deputy Nazir Ahmad, the novelist and translator of the Quran, and his affectionate, comic portrait of his old teacher made his name. In 1908 he went to Hyderabad, where he served the Nizam's government for the rest of his career, in the courts and in the administration, and he died there in 1947. Though he lived far from Delhi, he wrote all his life in the speech of old Delhi, which he loved and recorded.

Baig is one of the masters of Urdu humour. His best-known work, *Dehli ki Akhri Shama* ("The Last Candle of Delhi"), brings back to life a *mushaira* (poetry gathering) held in Mughal Delhi a little before the Revolt of 1857, with Ghalib, Zauq, Momin and the rest reciting in turn. His essays, collected as *Mazameen-e-Farhat*, are written in an easy, talking style, full of the idioms and proverbs of the Delhi household, and they laugh at the follies of family life, the office, the examination hall and the literary world, usually with affection and sometimes with a serious purpose.

The eight essays here show that range. "The Land of Love" is a fantasy: a grieving friend writes from a village where everyone who arrives falls in love, a place no railway guide can find. "The Servant Boy" is the life story of a foundling brought up to be beaten in a well-to-do house, told in his own voice. "The Editor's Room" is a comic scene in the office of a literary magazine, full of the names of real writers of the day. "The First of the Month" stages the monthly quarrel between husband and wife over the salary, and "Our Examination and Us" is a mock letter to an editor about the miseries of the examination season.

Three essays have a graver purpose. "Child Marriage" tells, through an uncle who tried to stop it, how a twelve-year-old girl was married off and fell mortally ill. "New Delhi" records a talk on the steps of the Jama Masjid with an old Delhi gentleman who mourns the city of his youth: its courtesans and their manners, its fairs, its street cries and its language, all lost to riots, police and the new capital. "Carrying Out a Will" is a portrait of the scholar Wahiduddin Salim, who coined many of the technical terms of Urdu at Osmania University; at their first meeting he asked Baig to write about him after his death, and Baig, with laughter and grief, kept his word.