About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Jan-e-Urdu* (The Soul of Urdu) by Khwaja Muhammad Abdur Rauf Ishrat of Lucknow. It is a short book on correct Urdu: a preface, an essay on Urdu and Hindi and on Delhi and Lucknow as the centres of the language, notes on the right use of common words, a long list of verbs that go with nouns to make idioms, and a list of wrong words and sentences heard in western and eastern India, with their corrections. It ends with the words "The End".

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page "جان اردو", which gives the whole book on a single page, taken from the Wikimedia dump of October 2026. In the preface the author names his earlier books, among them *Zaban-dani* and *Qawaid-e-Mir*, so *Jan-e-Urdu* was written after them; the source gives no date or publisher.

What is left out and what was changed: the whole of the author's text is given in his order, with his examples and verses. The Wikisource page header and its one-line note are left out. The book is divided here into four chapters, following the author's own headings: the preface, "Urdu and Hindi" with the notes on common words, the chapter on *sila*, and "The Correction of Language". The chapter titles are the author's; the bold repeated heading at the start of the second chapter and two Wikisource verse tags are left out. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: Abdur Rauf Ishrat died in 1940; works of Urdu authors who died in 1961 or earlier are out of copyright in Pakistan and India. The English translation, this introduction and the glossary are new.

Translation: the English follows the Urdu sentence by sentence. Since the whole book is about Urdu words, idioms and sentences, the Urdu examples are kept in italics in transliteration, each with a short English translation, and an idiom is given its literal sense in brackets where that helps. Verses are translated line by line. Where the text seems to say something other than it means, or where a word is unclear, a translator's note [TN: ...] says so; the text itself is not changed. Terms kept in the translation are explained in the glossary at the end.

Introduction

In his preface the author says that Urdu will one day become a language of learning that rules over the largest part of the world, but that the spread of Urdu newspapers across India has given every city its own idioms, so that the language is in danger of breaking apart. His remedy is to follow the speech of Delhi and Lucknow, and to give people books from which they can learn it. He names six earlier books of his, which he says were widely read, and offers this one as the next.

The first long chapter argues that Urdu and Hindi are one language with two names and two scripts, and that the Urdu script suits it better than Nagari. Ishrat tells how Delhi and Lucknow became the two "mints" of the language, describes their quarrels over gender and spelling, and divides speakers into the common, the general and the select. He then explains, with examples, the uses of common words such as *koi*, *kai*, *kitna*, *kuchh*, *kya*, *kal*, *to*, *magar* and *apna*.

The rest of the book is about idiom. A chapter on *sila* shows how verbs such as *lagna*, *chhutna*, *uthna* and *karna* change their meaning when joined with a noun, with dozens of everyday sentences. The last chapter quotes faulty sentences from newspapers and books of western and eastern India, from the wrong gender of *bawasir* to "Taqi Mir" for Mir Taqi, and corrects each one by the usage of Lucknow.