About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This is a complete Urdu text and English translation of *Majalis-un-Nissa* ("Assemblies of Women") by Khwaja Altaf Husain Hali (1837–1914).

Source of the Urdu text: *Majalis-un-Nissa*, Hali Press, Panipat, 1924 (1342 AH); the copy in the State Central Library, Hyderabad, scanned by the Digital Library of India and freely available on the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.373957). The text was transcribed page by page from the scan for this edition.

What is left out: the publisher's advertisements and press notices printed with the 1924 edition. Hali's own text is given complete, in both its parts. The short footnotes of the printing, which gloss difficult words, are kept and listed at the end of each chapter. In the dialogue chapters the printed speaker abbreviations are written out in full. Paragraphs have been divided more often than in the printing, to make the facing translation easier to follow.

Copyright: Hali died in 1914, and the book was written in 1874, so the work is in the public domain everywhere. The English translation is new.

Introduction

Altaf Husain Hali was born in Panipat in 1837. He was a pupil of Ghalib and, later, a close ally of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan in the movement for Muslim educational reform. He is best known for his long poem *Musaddas* (1879), his critical work *Muqaddama-e-Shair-o-Shairi* (1893) and his biographies of Ghalib and Sir Sayyid. In the early 1870s he worked in Lahore, revising Urdu translations of English books, and there he came to know English ideas of education at first hand.

*Majalis-un-Nissa* was written in 1874 as a reading book for girls and women. It won a prize from the government and was long used as a reader in girls' schools in northern India. It is one of the first Urdu prose narratives set entirely in the home, and with Nazir Ahmad's *Mirat-ul-Arus* (1869) it stands at the beginning of the Urdu novel.

The book is a series of nine *majlis* (gatherings or sittings). In a respectable Delhi household, Atu-ji, an elderly governess, talks with the young women of the family. To answer their doubts about educating girls, she tells the life of Zubaida Khatun: how her mother taught her to read and write, to keep accounts and to run a house; how she married Mir Amjad Ali; and how, left a widow, she brought up her son Sayyid Abbas by herself. The second part gives Mir Amjad Ali's testament on education and then Sayyid Abbas's own account of his schooling, his adventures on the road to Bombay, and his rise to the post of interpreter at the Ottoman court in Istanbul.

Why it is studied: the book is a key text for nineteenth-century reform, for the education of women in South Asia and for the culture of the *sharif* (well-born) Muslim families of Delhi. It records the everyday speech of Delhi women, their proverbs, oaths and endearments, with Hali's own glosses. It also shows how a reformer of the 1870s saw science, the railway, the telegraph and the colonial government. Its argument, that a mother's education shapes the whole family, can be read alongside later debates on women's schooling.

Names in this translation: Atu-ji, Mahmooda Begum, Maryam Zamani, Bari Begum, Zubaida Khatun, Khwaja Fuzail, Mir Amjad Ali, Sayyid Abbas, Ghulam Imam, Islam Beg, Khwaja Huzail; Dilli is given as Delhi. Cultural terms are kept in italics with a short gloss on first use, and explained in the glossary at the end. Translator's notes are marked [TN: ...].

How to cite: Altaf Husain Hali, *Majalis-un-Nissa* (1874), Urdu text from the Hali Press edition (Panipat, 1924), with English translation, urduintranslation.com, 2026, https://www.urduintranslation.com/works/majalis-un-nissa.