About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Mahakama-e-Markaz-e-Urdu* (A Judgement on the Centre of Urdu) by Syed Ahmad Dehlvi, compiler of the dictionary *Farhang-e-Asifiya*. It is a treatise arguing that Delhi is the birthplace, the "mint" and the true centre of the Urdu language, and it closes with the author's signature and the date 12 February 1911, followed by his short note of thanks to the man who had it published.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page "محاکمہ مرکز اردو", which gives the whole treatise on a single page, taken from the Wikimedia dump of October 2026. The author's closing note says that the treatise was published at the request of Shaikh Muhammad Ishfaq Dehlvi, a Delhi merchant, and that it was not printed in large numbers.

What is left out and what was changed: the whole of the author's text is given in his order, with his verses and his note of thanks. The Wikisource page header is left out. The treatise has no chapters of its own; for ease of reading it is divided here into four parts, on Delhi, on Lucknow, on Lahore and the Deccan, and the reply to Wajahat, and these part titles are new. The headings "The First Story", "The Second Story" and "A Word of Thanks" are the author's own. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: Syed Ahmad Dehlvi died in 1918; 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. Much of the book is about words and idioms, so the Urdu words under discussion are kept in italics in transliteration, with a short English gloss where the meaning is clear; where the author's point depends on a pun, a translator's note [TN: ...] explains it. Verses are translated line by line. Persian and Arabic passages are translated, with a note saying that they are in Persian or Arabic in the original. Terms kept in the translation are explained in the glossary at the end.

Introduction

The author begins with an image: a language has a centre, like a circle, and its light is strongest at the place where it was born. He divides speakers into native speakers (*ahl-e-zaban*) and followers of the language (*muqallid*), and argues that Urdu was born in Delhi, was given its shape and name there, and must always be judged by the speech of Delhi. He gives many couplets whose whole effect, he says, depends on the tone of a Delhi speaker.

He then turns to Lucknow, Lahore and Hyderabad Deccan. He lists words and idioms used by Lucknow poets that Delhi does not use, and tells two lively stories of arguments between Delhi and Lucknow over the gender of *tuti* and the "heavy r". He praises the progress of Urdu in the Punjab and the patronage of Hyderabad, but holds that neither can be the centre of the language.

The longest part is a reply to an essay that Wajahat Jhinjhanvi read at the Bazm-e-Urdu on 19 May 1910, which had said that the idioms of Delhi and Lucknow would soon count for no more than local dialect. The author defends idioms such as *jan chhirakna* and the many meanings of *phul*, lists the writers of Delhi in his day, and ends with a plea that Urdu and Hindustani be seen as one language, written in the Nastaliq script.