About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Risala-e-Nazr-e-Asaf, ya'ni Muraqqa-e-Zaban-o-Bayan-e-Dehli* ("An Offering to Asaf, or A Portrait of the Language and Speech of Delhi") by Sayyid Ahmad Dehlavi, the compiler of the great Urdu dictionary *Farhang-e-Asafiya*. It is a short book about the Urdu of Delhi as it was spoken before 1857, in the Red Fort and in the city, by men and by women, and about how the author saw it changing in his own day. Around the language he sets lively pictures of old Delhi: its street cries, dress and pastimes, the games and festivals of the last Mughal court, and anecdotes of the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page مرقع زبان و بیان دہلی and its twenty section pages, downloaded in October 2026. The text is that of the second printing: the author dated the work in Delhi in December 1915, dedicated it in thanks to the Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Usman Ali Khan, and signed the finished book on 1 June 1916, adding a note that it had been reprinted with revisions after the Punjab Text Book Committee bought 289 copies. The letters of praise from Akbar Allahabadi, Maulvi Abdul Haq and others, and the review from the magazine *Makhzan* (April 1916), which the author printed at the end of his book, are kept as its last chapter.

What is left out and what was changed: every part of the author's text is given, in his order. His own footnotes, which speak in the first person and are sometimes signed "Sayyid Ahmad", are kept inside the text in brackets as [Note: …]. One footnote added by the Wikisource editors is modern and is not given. Page-continuation markers such as "(continued on the next page)" are removed. Where the Wikisource layout split a couplet over two blocks or printed a verse stanza in two columns, the lines are joined and put back in rhyming order. The twenty sections are grouped into twelve chapters, with the author's own section titles kept as headings.

Copyright: Sayyid Ahmad Dehlavi died in 1918, and this book was first printed in 1915–16, so his text 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: Sayyid Ahmad Dehlavi, Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Akbar Shah, Zinat Mahal, Mirza Fateh-ul-Mulk, Ghalib, Zauq, Momin, Dagh, Mir, Hudhud, Hakim Agha Jan Aish, Tirmohi Khanam, Mahbuban, Mir Fateh Ali, Samand Khan, Mirza Yawar Bakht, Mirza Kaure, Sukh Dev, Arshad (Mirza Abdul Ghani Arshad), Akbar Allahabadi (Sayyid Akbar Husain), Abdul Haq, Diwan-e-Am, Diwan-e-Khas, Chandni Chauk, Jama Masjid, Shahdara, Mehrauli, Lucknow, Hyderabad.

Introduction

Sayyid Ahmad Dehlavi spent most of his working life on the Urdu language. As this book itself records, he first published a dictionary called *Armaghan-e-Dehli*, then the many-volumed *Farhang-e-Asafiya*, named after the Asaf Jahi rulers of Hyderabad, which remains one of the standard dictionaries of Urdu; he also ran a newspaper written in the speech of women, and in 1915 he was a member of the Punjab Text Book Committee and drew a pension from the Nizam's government, with the title Khan Sahib. He was a Dilliwala who had seen the last years of the Mughal court, and that memory is the heart of this book.

The book moves from argument to picture. It opens with the author's view of the past, present and future of Delhi Urdu, his friend Arshad's witty classification of the "kinds" of Urdu, and a comparison of the speech of the Fort with that of the city, including long lists of the idioms used by the begums of the Red Fort and by the women of the town. It then asks which languages Urdu was mixed with, how English words were entering it, and how one should judge good speech. The second half shows the wit and skill of the people of Delhi in their dress, pastimes and street cries, the elephant fights, quail fights, pigeon flying, egg fights and kite flying of the last Mughal princes, a set of anecdotes about Bahadur Shah Zafar and his court, and finally the ceremony of a festival court and a day of the palace women's outing by the river.

Sayyid Ahmad writes as a witness and a lover of his city, often wistfully, sometimes sharply about the speech of his own time, and he gives the reader many words and sayings that are found almost nowhere else. The translation keeps his street cries, idioms and verses as close to the Urdu as possible, with brief explanations in brackets where a pun or a custom would otherwise be lost, and the glossary at the end explains the terms that recur.