About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

Fasana-e-Azad ("The Tale of Azad") is by Pandit Ratan Nath Sarshar (1846–1903) of Lucknow. It first appeared in instalments in the newspaper Avadh Akhbar in 1878–79 and was then published as a book in four large volumes by Munshi Nawal Kishore. Sarshar died in 1903, so the work is in the public domain everywhere.

This is a selection: Sarshar's preface and the opening fifteen episodes of volume one, as far as the young gentlemen's search for work. The Urdu text was transcribed for this library, page by page, from Fasana-e-Azad, volume 1 (Taraqqi Urdu Bureau, New Delhi, 1986; scan on archive.org). Only Sarshar's text is given; that edition's modern footnotes are not included. The print is dense, and a few words, mostly in the Persian verse, could not be read with certainty; the most likely reading is given.

The English is a new, complete translation of the selected chapters, made for this library, paragraph by paragraph.

Introduction

Sarshar was a Kashmiri Pandit of Lucknow, a journalist and editor of Avadh Akhbar. Fasana-e-Azad grew day by day in his newspaper into the largest comic panorama of nineteenth-century Lucknow: its bazaars, weddings, Muharram processions, poets' gatherings, opium dens, courtesans' salons and decaying nawabi households, all seen through the wanderings of Mian Azad, a clever, idle, footloose young gentleman, and the people he meets. Its style mixes ornate rhymed prose, Persian verse and the raw slang of the street, and its comedy is often a criticism of a society Sarshar saw as living on past glories.

The book is a landmark between the old dastan and the modern novel, and it is studied on Urdu courses in Pakistan and India, including the syllabus of Pakistan's Higher Education Commission. Its later volumes, in which Azad goes to fight in the Russo-Turkish war with his comic companion Khoji, are not part of this selection.