About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text, with an English translation, of the section headed *Pesh-rau, ya'ni qit'at* ("The Vanguard, that is, Occasional Pieces") from the first volume of the collected poems of Akbar Allahabadi (Sayyid Akbar Husain, 1846–1921). This section holds sixty of the satirical and topical poems for which Akbar is best known, including "A Glimpse of the Delhi Durbar", "Lightning in the Church", the purdah poem written at Kanpur in 1891, the answer to Southey's "Cataract of Lodore", the poems on Sir Sayyid and the Aligarh college, "The Curzon Sabha", and the national poem written for Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk.

Source of the Urdu text: *Kulliyat-e-Akbar, Hissa-e-Awwal* ("The Collected Works of Akbar, Part One"), fourth edition, Standard Press, Allahabad, 1914, published in the poet's lifetime. The scan is freely available on the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.334175, from the Digital Library of India). The section is printed on pages 157 to 196. The text was transcribed page by page from the scan for this edition.

What is included and what is left out: everything in the section that could be read has been transcribed and translated, in the order of the printing. The scan is poor in places. Where a word, half-line or line could not be read, it is marked [illegible] in both columns. Three pieces on page 182 and one at the foot of page 183 (two short ghazals, a four-couplet piece and a Persian ghazal), and two pieces on page 188, were too badly printed or scanned to be read without guessing, and are left out rather than reconstructed. Readings that are possible but uncertain are kept, and a translator's note says so where it matters. Nothing has been supplied to fill a gap.

Arrangement: the printing runs the pieces on with a rule between them, and most have no title. Here every piece is numbered, and an untitled piece is headed by its first line. Akbar's own titles and dates are kept. The sixty pieces are divided into seven chapters by page; the chapter titles are editorial. Akbar's footnotes are collected at the end of each chapter, marked "Akbar's note". Page numbers and running heads are left out.

Translation: the translation is line by line, with each couplet rendered as two lines. Accuracy comes before rhyme. Akbar's English words (station, college, Sunday, miss, policy, speech, and many more), which he writes in Urdu letters for comic effect, are given as English. Persian and Arabic quotations, of which there are many, especially from Hafiz and Sa'di, are translated, with the originals in the facing Urdu column. Key terms are explained in the glossary. Translator's notes are marked [TN: ...].

Copyright: Akbar Allahabadi died in 1921, and these poems were printed by 1914, so they are in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new.

Introduction

Sayyid Akbar Husain was born in 1846 near Allahabad, in a family of modest means. He had a traditional education in Persian and Arabic, learned English largely on his own, and entered government service, first as a clerk and then in the law. He became a pleader, then a munsif, and finally a Sessions Judge, retiring in 1903; the Government gave him the title Khan Bahadur. He lived in Allahabad until his death in 1921, and wrote under the pen name Akbar.

Akbar began as a writer of conventional ghazals in the Lucknow manner, but he became famous for something new: short, sharp poems of comic satire on the meeting of India and the West. Many of them first appeared in the *Oudh Punch*, the Lucknow comic weekly. His targets are the "New Light" of English education, the craze for English clothes, manners and words, the Aligarh movement of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Westernised young men and their English brides, the end of purdah, the railway and the telegraph, the Viceroy's durbars, and the hollowness of public speeches and committees. He also laughs at the mullas and at himself. Behind the jokes is a serious and sad argument: that a people who give up their faith, their language and their customs in order to imitate their rulers lose themselves and gain nothing.

Why it is studied: Akbar is the great comic poet of Urdu and the classic voice of resistance to colonial modernity in South Asian literature. His poems are a running commentary on the forty years from the 1870s to the First World War, and they are read in courses on Urdu poetry, on colonialism and modernity, on religion and reform, and on gender. These pieces show his whole range: the comic ballad of the Delhi Durbar of 1903, mock-epics, dialogues, parodies of Hafiz, satirical ghazals, an elegy for Sir Sayyid and Theodore Beck, a celebration of the Nizam's grant to the Aligarh college, and plain moral and religious poems.

Reading Akbar: much of his wit is in the sound and double meaning of words, which no translation can keep. Where a poem turns on a pun, a note explains it. Readers should also remember that Akbar's view of Sir Sayyid was mixed: he mocked the Aligarh movement but admired its founder, and several pieces here praise him. His views on women's education and purdah are those of his time and are translated as he wrote them.

Names in this translation: Akbar, Sir Sayyid (Sayyid Ahmad Khan), Aligarh, Allahabad, Lucknow, Delhi, Kanpur, Lord Curzon, Edward the Seventh, Hafiz, Sa'di, Majnun and Laila. Key terms are kept in italics with a short gloss on first use, and explained in the glossary at the end.

How to cite: Akbar Allahabadi, *Intikhab-e-Akbar: Pesh-rau* (from *Kulliyat-e-Akbar*, Part One, 4th ed., Standard Press, Allahabad, 1914, pp. 157–196; archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.334175), with English translation, urduintranslation.com, 2026, https://www.urduintranslation.com/works/intikhab-e-akbar.