About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This is the complete Urdu text and an English translation of *Dr. Nazir Ahmad ki Kahani, Kuch Meri aur Kuch Unki Zubani* ("The Story of Dr Nazir Ahmad, Partly in My Words and Partly in His"), the pen-portrait of Deputy Nazir Ahmad of Delhi (1830–1912) by his pupil Mirza Farhatullah Baig (1883–1947).

Source of the Urdu text: the transcription on Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), downloaded in October 2026, checked against a scan of an undated printing by Fakhr Book Depot, Fatehpur (Bara Banki), on archive.org (in.ernet.dli.2015.241125). That printing ends with the note that the piece first appeared in the journal *Urdu*, July 1927.

What is left out and what was changed: a short modern note about the author at the end of the scanned printing is not the author's work and has been left out. The author's footnote identifying "Dani" is given in brackets after the paragraph where it occurs. The phrase "Come, my pen, in the name of God", which ends the author's preface, is printed as the heading of the narrative that follows it. Nothing else of the author's text has been left out or changed. The memoir has no divisions of its own; it is printed here in six chapters, with the breaks falling between episodes.

Copyright: Farhatullah Baig died in 1947, so the work is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. It was first published in 1927, before 1931, and is in the public domain in the United States as well. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Nazir Ahmad (called "Maulvi Sahib"), Farhat, Dani (Ghulam Yazdani), Abdur Rahman, Sirajuddin, Rahim Bakhsh, Raza, Bashir, Musharraf, Mohsin-ul-Mulk, Sir Syed, Mutanabbi, Delhi, Hyderabad, Churiwalan, Chawri, Dariba, Khari Baoli, Fatehpuri, Batashon ki Gali.

Introduction

Deputy Nazir Ahmad was one of the makers of modern Urdu prose. A poor boy from a village near Bijnor who begged for his bread in Delhi, he became a scholar of Arabic at the Delhi College, a translator of the Indian Penal Code, a Deputy Collector, a revenue officer in Hyderabad, an LL.D. of Edinburgh and a Shams-ul-Ulama. He wrote *Mirat-ul-Uroos*, *Taubat-un-Nasuh* and the other didactic novels which are still read, and spent his last years on an Urdu translation of the Quran.

Mirza Farhatullah Baig, later famous as the author of *Dilli ki Akhri Shama* ("The Last Candle of Delhi"), studied Arabic with him privately for about two years from 1903, together with his friend Ghulam Yazdani, afterwards the great archaeologist of Hyderabad. This memoir, written some fifteen years after the old man's death, is the result. Baig promises at the start to keep no order and to put gravity on the shelf, because to write solemnly of so witty a man would be to mock him; and he keeps both promises.

The two students win their teacher by a trick and by sheer stubbornness, sitting on in his room after he has thrown their book into the courtyard. Through their eyes we see the great man at home: dark, stout and nearly bald, sitting in his waist-cloth with a hookah of harsh tobacco, collecting his debts in person every day, charging interest even to his favourite pupils, and haggling over the price of his own books. In his own words we hear how a ragged boy reading the Arabic odes in a mosque was noticed by the principal of the Delhi College; how he watched the rebel sepoys loot Delhi in 1857; how he taught himself enough English from a dictionary to translate the Penal Code; how *Mirat-ul-Uroos*, written for his daughter, came to the eye of the Director of Public Instruction through a squabble between his children; how an eager young man studying in Edinburgh saddled him with two Edinburgh gowns he never ordered; and how an Afghan Amir nearly crushed him in a bear-hug for quoting a verse of Mutanabbi.

The portrait is affectionate but not flattering. Baig laughs at his teacher's love of money, his stuffing of idioms into every sentence, and the misjudgement of *Ummahat-ul-Ummah*, and the old man answers back in a rich, salty Delhi speech that makes these pages some of the liveliest in Urdu. The memoir ends with a last walk to the courts, the frail scholar refusing to be seen in a carriage, and with a verse of Zauq on the garden that remains when the birds have sung and flown.

Cite as: Mirza Farhatullah Baig, *Dr. Nazir Ahmad ki Kahani*, tr. urduintranslation.com (2026), https://www.urduintranslation.com/works/nazir-ahmad-ki-kahani.