About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Nau Tarz-e-Murassa* ("The New Jewelled Style") by Mir Muhammad Husain Ata Khan Tahsin, his Urdu telling of the *Qissa-e-Chahar Darvesh*, the Tale of the Four Dervishes. It begins with the author's own preface, in which he names his father, his teacher and his patrons and explains how he came to write the book, and it ends with the four dervishes and King Farkhunda Siyar each gaining his heart's desire.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page نو طرز مرصع and its six section pages (the preface, the beginning of the tale, the stories of the second and third dervishes, the story of the king, and the story of the fourth dervish), downloaded in October 2026. The text runs from the opening praise of God to the closing prayer that the wishes of the broken-hearted be granted.

What is left out and what was changed: every part of the author's text is given, in his order. Two long section pages are each split in two so that the book is easier to read online: the first dervish's tale is split where the queen begins her own story, and the king's tale is split where the merchant Khwaja Sag-parast begins his; the author's own story titles are used as headings. The small marks that the online text put beside verse fragments, repeated title lines, and two slips of punctuation inside words have been removed, and verse lines that the online text had broken apart are joined back into couplets and five-line stanzas. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: Tahsin wrote in the second half of the eighteenth century, in the service of the Nawabs of Awadh, and presented this book to Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula, 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: …]. Persian and Arabic verses and sayings are translated, with the language noted in square brackets; the many verses in Braj Bhasha (*kabit* and *doha*) are rendered loosely, since some lines are obscure in the source.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Farkhunda Siyar (king of Rum), Khiradmand (his vizier), Bakhtiyar (his son), Malik Shahbal son of Shahrukh (king of the fairies), Malik Sadiq (king of the jinn), Mubarak, Behzad Khan, Nu'man the travelling merchant, Khwaja Sag-parast, Bedar Bakht, Bahrawar, Kaikhusrau, Shidi Bahar, Yusuf the jeweller; the places Rum, Damascus, Basra, Fars, Nimroz, Ajam, Farang, Chin, Zirabad and Nishapur. A glossary of the Urdu, Persian and Arabic terms kept in the translation is given at the end.

Introduction

The Tale of the Four Dervishes is one of the best-loved story cycles of Persian and Urdu. A king of Rum who has no son goes out by night in despair and comes upon four dervishes sitting by a lamp in a graveyard. Each tells the strange adventure that has brought him there, of love, loss, betrayal and loyalty, and the king, listening in hiding, tells his own tale in turn. In the end the king of the fairies gathers every lost beloved from the corners of the world, the lovers are married, and the king is granted the son he longed for.

In his preface Tahsin tells us that he was the son of Mir Muhammad Baqir Khan Shauq, that he studied with Ijaz Raqam Khan, and that he had already written works in Persian, among them *Insha-e-Tahsin*, *Zawabit-e-Angrezi* and *Tawarikh-e-Qasimi*. He says the idea of putting the tale into Urdu came to him on a boat journey to Calcutta in the company of General Smith, that he later served at Azimabad and with Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula at Faizabad, and that he finished the book and dedicated it, with a *qasida*, to Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula.

*Nau Tarz-e-Murassa* is one of the earliest works of literary Urdu prose from northern India. Its style is just what its name promises: ornate, rhymed and packed with Persian figures of speech, with verses by Tahsin himself, Sauda, Abru, Hasrat, Yaqin and others set into almost every page. A generation later, at Fort William College in Calcutta, Mir Amman retold the same tale in plain everyday speech as *Bagh-o-Bahar*, and he names Tahsin's book in his preface as the one he worked from. Read side by side, the two books show how Urdu prose moved from the jewelled style to the spoken one.