About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This is the complete Urdu text and an English translation of *Gohar-e-Maqsood* ("The Pearl of Desire"), by Allama Rashid ul Khairi of Delhi (1868–1936). As its title page says, it is a book of "two delightful tales": *Khayalistan ki Pari* ("The Fairy of Khayalistan") and *La'l ki Talash* ("In Search of the Ruby").

Source of the Urdu text: the transcription on Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org, گوہر مقصود, with one page for each tale), downloaded in October 2026. It has been checked for completeness against the printed edition published by the Dar-ul-Isha'at Punjab, Lahore, in 1918 and printed at the Union Steam Press, Lahore, under the supervision of Maulvi Sayyid Mumtaz Ali; the copy belongs to the Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University, and was scanned by the Digital Library of India (archive.org/details/dli.ernet.409249; 50 pages). The title page reads: "Gohar-e-Maqsood, that is, Khayalistan ki Pari and La'l ki Talash: two delightful tales, by Maulana Rashid ul Khairi of Delhi, author of Subh-e-Zindagi, Sham-e-Zindagi, Salihat, Toofan-e-Hayat and others." There is no preface.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of the author's text has been left out. The title of the second tale is spelt لعل ("ruby") as on the 1918 title page; Wikisource has لال. Each tale is divided by the author into numbered sections, which are kept; for convenience the first tale is printed here in three chapters and the second in two. One obvious typing slip in the digital text has been corrected (راستہ for آراستہ, "adorned", in section 8 of the first tale). Verse is set one line to a line.

Copyright: Rashid ul Khairi died in 1936 and the book was printed in 1918, so it is in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Ghafira, Shahryar, Khayalistan, Saliha, Qayyum, Saghir, Geeti Ara Begum, Husainpur, Saeedabad; Firoza, Shabana, Mohsin, Ahsan, Khalil, Jalil, Amina, Jamila, Salag; the Vindhyachal mountains, the Ganges, Bengal.

Introduction

Rashid ul Khairi was born in Delhi in 1868 into the family of Deputy Nazir Ahmad, the first Urdu novelist, and like him he wrote above all for women. In 1908 he founded *Ismat*, a monthly magazine for women, and he wrote dozens of novels and stories of the lives of Muslim women of Delhi: their marriages, widowhood, quarrels and griefs. His readers called him *Musawwir-e-Gham*, "the painter of sorrow", for the tears his books drew. The two tales of *Gohar-e-Maqsood* show both sides of his work: a fable in the high, ornate Urdu of the old romances, and a domestic story in the everyday speech of the women's quarters.

"The Fairy of Khayalistan" tells of Ghafira, a fairy banished from the Land of Imagination for three days' absence from the king's court, who may return only if she brings the king the best thing in the world. Year after year, on the night of Nauroz when the wall of fairyland opens, she brings her finds: the first drop of blood of a reformer beheaded by his own people, the last breath of a young wife divorced on her deathbed, a mother's tear on the return of her exiled son, a few drops of the flood that drowned a woman who would not break purdah even to save her child, the first tear of a little girl slighted for her brothers, and at last the dying breath of a wife killed by hail as she carried water to her sick husband. The frame recalls Thomas Moore's "Paradise and the Peri" in *Lalla Rookh* (1817), where a Peri shut out of Paradise must bring "the gift that is most dear to Heaven", and Premchand's first Urdu story, "Duniya ka Sabse Anmol Ratan" (1907), built on the same idea. Khairi's gifts, however, are his own: almost every one is a scene of the wrongs or the devotion of Indian women, and he says so plainly, wishing that "our women of India" may learn constancy from Ghafira.

"In Search of the Ruby" is a tale of Delhi family life. Shabana, wife of the elder son, quarrels with her sister-in-law Firoza over a bundle of gifts smuggled to her mother's maid; a month later her husband dies, and she is left a poor widow with one surviving child, Ahsan, after losing four others. The boy vanishes from a family celebration. Shabana searches for years, suspects Firoza, dreams of killing her and kills her own son in the dream, and at last leaves home as a wandering yogini, to be found, on the very point of being sacrificed to a goddess on the Vindhyachal mountain, by the son she has sought for twelve years. The title plays on *la'l* ("ruby") and *lal* ("darling child"), and the son is the "pearl of desire" of the book's title.

Both tales are melodramas, and they were meant to be. They also show, more plainly than many longer novels, what Urdu readers of the early twentieth century found moving: patience, constancy, a mother's love, and the suffering of women under custom. The "reformer" of the first tale, beheaded for wanting religion "as plain and simple as it was revealed", reflects the reformist Islam of Khairi's circle; the drowned woman in purdah is praised and pitied in the same breath.

The translation keeps the ornate style of the first tale and the homely idiom of the second, with notes where an idiom or allusion would otherwise be lost.

Cite as: Rashid ul Khairi, *Gohar-e-Maqsood*, tr. urduintranslation.com (2026), https://www.urduintranslation.com/works/gohar-e-maqsood.