About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This is the complete Urdu text and an English translation of *Fasana-e-Mubtala* ("The Tale of Mubtala"), a novel by Deputy Nazir Ahmad (1831–1912), with the author's preface dated Delhi, August 1885. Mubtala, the hero's pen name, means "the afflicted" or "the one caught up": a handsome, spoilt young man of Delhi who lives for beauty, takes a second wife, and is ruined by it.

Source of the Urdu text: the transcription on Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org, فسانہء مبتلا, 54 pages), checked for this edition against a printed copy from the Shamsi Press, Delhi, scanned by the Digital Library of India from the Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University, and freely available on the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.435949; 222 pages). That printing is undated, but its publisher's list includes books of the 1890s and 1900s, so it is a reprint made in the author's lifetime or soon after. The Wikisource text lacks the author's preface (*Dibacha*) and the short prelude to the story (*Tamhid-e-Qissa*); both have been transcribed from the scan for this edition. In a few places the scan is clipped at the edge of the page and the reading has been completed from the sense.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of Nazir Ahmad's text has been left out. The print edition has a few short marginal glosses on hard words, each ending with the conventional sign ۱۲; these are not reproduced. Obvious slips in the digital text (misspellings, run-together words, a duplicated page) have been corrected silently against the scan where it could be checked. In a few places the digital text seems to have lost or garbled a few words; the translation says so in a translator's note rather than guessing. Chapter 25 has no number in the digital text; the number has been supplied. The author's longest chapter, the twenty-third, is divided here into two parts at a change of scene. In the preface the author says that his son, Maulvi Bashiruddin Ahmad, helped him so much that he was "in truth a partner in its authorship".

Copyright: Nazir Ahmad died in 1912, and the novel was first published in 1885, so the work is in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. Persian and Arabic verses and phrases are translated, with the original kept in the Urdu text on the facing side; Quranic quotations and allusions are identified by chapter and verse.

Introduction

Nazir Ahmad was born in 1831 in Rehar, in the Bijnor district, the son of a poor family of religious scholars. He was sent as a boy to Delhi, studied at a mosque and then at Delhi College, and entered the British educational and revenue services. He survived the uprising of 1857 in Delhi, rose to be a Deputy Collector (hence the "Deputy" in his name), helped translate the Indian Penal Code into Urdu, and from 1877 served the Nizam of Hyderabad until he retired to Delhi. He died there in 1912. He was a famous preacher and Quran translator as well as a writer, and he is generally counted the first Urdu novelist.

His first novels were written for his own daughters and for the girls of Muslim families: *Mirat-ul-Uroos* (The Bride's Mirror, 1869), about two sisters, one slovenly and one capable, and *Banat-un-Nash* and *Taubat-un-Nasuh*, which follow it. *Fasana-e-Mubtala* turns from the education of women to what the preface calls the second great defect of Muslim family life: "the freedom of men in the matter of marriage". Its subject is polygamy, and the novel argues its case through a story rather than a sermon, though there are sermons in it too.

Mubtala is the only son of a well-to-do Delhi family, petted from birth and spoilt by flatterers, whose one passion is beauty. Married young to his cousin Ghairat Begum, a plain, proud girl from the country family of the Sayyids of Sayyidnagar, he despises her and spends his days with dancing girls and hangers-on. His uncle Mir Muttaqi returns from the pilgrimage and tries to set the house in order; his friend Arif argues with him about beauty and about what the Quran really allows. Mubtala goes his own way and marries Hariyali, a courtesan from Lucknow, whom he smuggles into the house as a housekeeper. The second half of the book follows the two co-wives under one roof: the spying and cursing, a poisoning plot, a lawsuit settled by Ghairat Begum's brother Nazir, a clever and unscrupulous pleader, and the slow ruin of the household and of Mubtala himself.

The novel is remarkable for its comedy as well as its moral. Nazir Ahmad's women talk in the idiom of the Delhi zenana, quick, proverbial and full of curses, and his men in the argumentative idiom of the mosque and the courts; the scenes of the household, the cooking, the servants, the police station and the pleader's tricks are drawn from life. Readers have long noted that his sympathy is not wholly on one side: Ghairat Begum is wronged, but her neglect of herself and her house is part of the story, and Hariyali, the "bad woman", is the best manager in it.

Names: Mubtala (the hero's pen name), Mir Muhazzab (his father), Mir Muttaqi (his uncle), Ghairat Begum (his first wife), Sayyid Hazir and Sayyid Nazir (her brothers), Arif (his friend), Hariyali (the second wife), Wafadar (his servant), Masum and Batool (his children). The names are meaningful: *mubtala* means "afflicted", *muhazzab* "refined", *muttaqi* "God-fearing", *ghairat* "honour", *arif* "one who knows", *wafadar* "faithful", *hazir* and *nazir* "present" and "watching", and *hariyali* "greenery". Delhi is spelled in the usual English way. The glossary at the end explains the Urdu and Persian terms kept in the translation.