About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of eight prose pieces about old Delhi by Nasir Nazir Firaq Dehlavi (died 1933): "Jahan Abad" (*Jahan Abad*), "A Wedding Party in Delhi and the Teasing of the Begams" (*Dilli mein Biyah ki ek Mahfil aur Begamon ki Chhed Chhar*), "A Humorous Glimpse of the Red Fort" (*Lal Qila ki Jhalak, Zarafat-amez*), "A Tribute of Five Thousand Tamburas and Sitars" (*Panch Hazar Tanbure aur Sitar ka Nazrana*), "The Hidden Masters of Delhi" (*Dilli ke Poshida Arbab-e-Kamal*), "Nawab Aqil Khan, Commander of Five Thousand" (*Nawab Aqil Khan Panj Hazari*), "The Bowls of the Twenty-Second of Rajab" (*Ba'iswin Rajab ke Kunde*) and "The Goldsmith of Tughlaqabad" (*Tughlaqabad ka Sunar*). The title, *Firaq ki Dilli* ("Firaq's Delhi"), has been given to this selection by the present edition; it is not the title of a book published by the author.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the eight pages of the same names listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026. Wikisource does not say in which of the author's books, or in which year, each piece first appeared. No scan of an early printing has been found on archive.org. Wikisource has some further pieces by Firaq that are not included in this selection.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of the author's text has been left out. Verses that run into the prose in the source have been set out on their own lines, a couplet to a block, and the section numbers (2) to (6) in "A Humorous Glimpse of the Red Fort" have been set on their own lines. The lists of dishes in "Jahan Abad" have been set out one item to a line. Long paragraphs in the source have sometimes been divided. A few obvious misprints, such as a doubled word, have been corrected silently.

Copyright: Firaq died in 1933, so his work is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. "A Wedding Party in Delhi" refers to the Delhi Durbar of 1911, and "The Bowls of the Twenty-Second of Rajab" is dated by the author 17 February 1925, so at least some of the pieces were first printed after 1925. Their status in the United States should therefore be checked. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. Arabic and Persian quotations are translated, and the language of the original is given in a note.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Delhi, Shahjahanabad, the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid, the Jamna, Tughlaqabad, Lucknow, Bukhara; Amir Timur, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb Alamgir, Akbar the Second, Abu Zafar Bahadur Shah, Ghalib, Zauq, Momin, Muhammad Husain Azad, Hakim Agha Jan Aish, Nazir Akbarabadi, Shah Bhure Sahib, Shaikh Kalimullah Jahanabadi.

Introduction

Nasir Nazir Firaq Dehlavi was born in Delhi in the middle of the nineteenth century, into a family of Sufis and scholars, and he died there in 1933. He grew up among men and women who had known the city before the Mutiny of 1857, when the Mughal king still held court in the Red Fort, and he spent much of his life writing down what they told him. He calls Muhammad Husain Azad, the author of *Aab-e-Hayat*, his master, and like Azad he wrote a lively, spoken Urdu, full of idioms, proverbs and the special speech of the women of Delhi.

His subject is Delhi itself: its history, its saints, its kings and its ordinary people, and above all the vanished life of the Mughal court and the old city. He writes as "the humble Firaq", an old man who has seen the last of that world and wants to save its memory before "the caravan moves on". His pieces mix history, anecdote, sermon and comedy, and he moves easily from a learned quotation in Persian to the chatter of the women's quarters.

The eight pieces chosen here show that range. "Jahan Abad" tells how a Sufi saint's blessing on Timur led to the Mughal empire and the building of Shah Jahan's new city, and describes the *toras*, the trays of dishes sent from the royal kitchens. "A Wedding Party in Delhi" is a letter from a young woman to her sister, describing a journey to Delhi and a wedding among the old families, written in the women's own idiom. "A Humorous Glimpse of the Red Fort" collects the jokes and anecdotes told by the court storytellers. "A Tribute of Five Thousand Tamburas and Sitars" is a comic tale of a king, a dancing girl and a clever minister. "The Hidden Masters of Delhi" remembers a forgotten fakir by the moat of the Red Fort and the poet Hakim Agha Jan Aish, and "Nawab Aqil Khan" gives the life and Sufi verse of a governor of Delhi under Aurangzeb. "The Bowls of the Twenty-Second of Rajab" begins with a morning walk in a public garden in 1925 and turns into a lament for the generosity of the old court and a sermon on the Red Fort within the heart. "The Goldsmith of Tughlaqabad" is a folk tale of three wishes and how a poor family wasted them.