About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This is the complete Urdu text and an English translation of *Bahadur Shah aur Phool Walon ki Sair* ("Bahadur Shah and the Flower-Sellers' Festival") by Mirza Farhatullah Baig of Delhi (1883–1947), with the author's own notes.

Source of the Urdu text: the transcription on Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org, بہادر شاہ اور پھول والوں کی سیر), downloaded in October 2026. No scan of an early printing has been found. The author's notes cite C. F. Andrews' *Zaka Ullah of Delhi* as "just printed, in 1929", so the essay was written in or soon after 1929.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of the author's text has been left out. The author numbered his notes; the numbers are printed here in square brackets, such as [5], and the notes themselves form chapter 7. In the Wikisource text the note numbers after note 53 are one behind the notes they refer to; they have been corrected. Two sentences printed twice in the Wikisource text, in the bazaar scene of chapter 5, are given once. Couplets broken across lines have been rejoined. The essay has no divisions of its own; it is printed here in five chapters.

Copyright: Farhatullah Baig died in 1947, so the work is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. Because it was first published in or after 1929 and the exact date is not known, this edition records its United States status as "check". The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Bahadur Shah, Zinat Mahal, Taj Mahal, Mirza Jahangir, Mumtaz Mahal, Dara Bakht, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, Delhi, Mehrauli, the Qutb, the Jharna, the Shamsi Tank, the Jahaz, the Jangli Mahal, the Bab-e-Zafar, Jog Maya.

Introduction

Every year, at the end of the rains, the people of Delhi still go out to Mehrauli, eleven miles south of the old city, and carry great fans made of flowers, one to the shrine of the Sufi saint Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki and one to the temple of the goddess Jog Maya. The festival is called *Phool Walon ki Sair*, the Flower-Sellers' Outing. According to Delhi tradition it began in the early nineteenth century, when the queen of Akbar Shah II vowed a sheet and a canopy of flowers to the saint if her son, exiled by the British Resident, came home; the flower-sellers added a fan of flowers, and the King made it a yearly fair in which Hindus and Muslims would each join the other's procession.

Mirza Farhatullah Baig, the Delhi essayist best known for *Dehli ki Akhri Shama*, his re-creation of the last royal *mushaira* of the Mughal court, does the same here for the festival in its last great year. He chooses 1264 AH (1848), the last year, he says, before misfortune began to fall on the old King, and asks the reader simply to shut his eyes. We see the city flooded by a terrible monsoon and the King spending a district's revenue on his people; the swimming fair on the Jamna; the night procession of the royal women out of the Red Fort, guarded by armed Turkish, Kalmuck, African and Georgian women in men's dress; Bahadur Shah weeping at the graves of his ancestors in Humayun's Tomb and at the shrine of Nizamuddin; the princesses swinging and singing *malhar* in the mango grove at the Jharna while cakes fry in pans at the roots of the trees; the people of Delhi pouring out to Mehrauli with their belongings in earthen pots on their heads; the procession of the fan with wrestlers, water-carriers, stick-dancers and singing girls; and a naval battle of fireworks on the Shamsi Tank. At its centre is the King's refusal to go with the Muslims' fan because he had not gone with the Hindus'.

Baig is candid about his method. The buildings and the historical events are accurate; the scenes at the Jharna and the mango grove he heard from old women who had taken part in them; the procession he saw in a painting at his drawing master's house; the conversations he has imagined. His sixty-three notes, printed here as chapter 7, are a small encyclopaedia of the vanished life of the Fort and the city, from the ranks of the palace women to the kinds of firework and the two presents every visitor brought home.

The essay is also a lament. Written about 1930, when the festival had lapsed, it says: "There is a binding even now; but that was the binding of love, and this is the binding of the law." The festival was revived in 1961 and is still held each year.

Cite as: Mirza Farhatullah Baig, *Bahadur Shah aur Phool Walon ki Sair*, tr. urduintranslation.com (2026), https://www.urduintranslation.com/works/phool-walon-ki-sair.