The Author's Preface and Prelude to the Story

The Author's Preface

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

God, God, what days those were, when Sir William Muir was Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces and Mr M. Kempson was Director of Public Instruction! In matters of education these two gentlemen were, for the Muslims, a Harun al-Rashid and a Mansur, and for the Hindus a Vikramaditya and a Bhoj. [TN: Harun al-Rashid and al-Mansur were Abbasid caliphs remembered as patrons of learning; Vikramaditya and Bhoj are the legendary patron-kings of Hindu tradition.] However much English is learned, it is still too little; and however far it spreads, it will never become the native language of Hindustan. A people, as a people, will rise, whenever it rises, only by reading and writing in its own language. That was Sir William Muir's secret. Under the guise of fostering the Urdu language, he was thinking of our welfare. It was his encouragement that set me to writing and compiling books, until a whole course for the education of women had taken shape: in housekeeping, *Mirat-ul-Uroos* (The Bride's Mirror); in necessary knowledge, *Banat-un-Nash* (The Daughters of the Bier, that is, the Great Bear); in the worship of God, *Taubat-un-Nasuh* (The Repentance of Nasuh). These books became so popular that they were translated into seven languages, English, Bengali, Gujarati, Bhaka, Marathi, Punjabi and Kashmiri, and in Urdu forty thousand copies have been printed in successive editions up to now. It was in those days that the thought came to me that in the social life of the Muslims there are two very great defects: the ignorance of women, and the freedom of men in the matter of marriage. If I had made the poor man's effort to remove the one defect, I ought to do something to remove the other as well. The plan of the story had settled in my mind when Sir William Muir left for England and I for Hyderabad. Now that I have retired from service and sit at home, my worthy son, the good and fortunate Maulvi Bashiruddin Ahmad, seized the opportunity and pressed me to it. If any benefit comes of this book, as, God willing, it will, people ought to be more grateful to Maulvi Bashiruddin Ahmad than to me, for he helped me so much in writing it that he is in truth a partner in its authorship, and not just a partner but the senior one.

Delhi, August 1885. Nazir Ahmad, may God grant him to lay up provision for tomorrow.

Prelude to the Story

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Mubtala was only his pen name, but because it suited him so well it became so famous that not even his distant relatives knew his real name. [TN: *Mubtala* means "afflicted", "caught up in", "smitten", a common word in love poetry.] Under the name of Mubtala the boys went about every street and lane of the city singing and reciting, while he was still a beardless youth, *ghazals* (lyric poems) and *wasokhts* (poems of a lover's reproach); when he grew up, songs and *thumris* (light love songs); and after he died, for a long time afterwards, elegies and laments. What is there in our poetry except love-making and indecency? The young boys of respectable families mostly learn bad habits in this school and practise wicked tricks in this wrestling ground. The poetry we are discussing has three stages: hearing it, learning it, composing it. The first two stages are part of our very method of education. Of anyone counted among the educated, it is impossible that his first lesson after learning his letters should not be this:

O you whose mole has left a grief-brand on the heart of the tulip,
Whose doe-like eyes have put the fawn to shame! [TN: Persian verse.]

Things the faintest whisper of which is deadly poison to the young are made to be learnt by heart, lesson by lesson; and thoughts which, once they cross the mind, can ruin both this world and the next are impressed upon it by years of drill and practice, so that they become second nature and cannot be removed, and become innate and cannot be got out. Poor Mubtala was no exception to this general rule, he was not outside it; on the contrary, he was afflicted with a further misfortune of birth: the wretch happened to be good-looking, fair of complexion and well-proportioned of limb, in short the very subject for which poetry is made. It is hard to believe that he went as far as taking a pen name and never composed a verse; but leave aside *mukhammas* (five-line stanzas), *qasida* (odes), *masnavi* (narrative poems), *wasokht*, *ghazal* and *rubai* (quatrains): not a single line of Mubtala's has come down to us. One may guess that if he wrote poetry it was in his early years, for from the age of thirty we find him so entangled in the miseries of his household that in such a state the ease of mind and composure of the senses that poetry demands cannot be had. Very probably the verse of Mubtala's youth was not without grace of expression, wit and delicacy, and there is no doubt at all that when he recited a ghazal at a *mushaira* (poetry gathering) there must have been a great clamour of "Bravo!" and "Glory be to God!" and calls for "Again!", as there was for Mir Insha Allah Khan. [TN: Insha Allah Khan Insha (d. 1817), a celebrated and brilliant poet of Delhi and Lucknow.] Mubtala's time is not so very long ago; at the very least a hundred or two hundred people who saw him must still be alive in the city. So if we had searched, some of his verse would have turned up somewhere or other; but beside his story we have given no thought to his verse.