About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Qawaid-e-Mir* (The Rules of Mir) by Khwaja Muhammad Abdur Rauf Ishrat of Lucknow. It is a short handbook of Urdu usage: the infinitive, the plural, gender, the adjective, figurative speech, the difference between word, convention, everyday speech and idiom, and the propriety of speech. In his preface the author says that these rules came down "from breast to breast" from the poet Mir Taqi Mir, and he offers the book as a service to the Osmania University founded by Mir Osman Ali Khan, ruler of the Deccan.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the book "قواعد میر" and its eight sections, from the preface to the chapter on propriety of speech, taken from the Wikimedia dump of October 2026. The Wikisource contents page lists these eight sections as the whole book.

What is left out and what was changed: the whole of the author's text is given in his order, with his examples and verses. The Wikisource page headers and the short Wikisource note on the contents page are left out. Each of the author's eight sections is a chapter here, with the author's own titles; the subheadings inside the chapters (such as "Unreal Nouns" and "Abstract Nouns from Adjectives") are also his. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: Abdur Rauf Ishrat died in 1940; works of Urdu authors who died in 1961 or earlier are out of copyright in Pakistan and India. The English translation, this introduction and the glossary are new.

Translation: the English follows the Urdu sentence by sentence. Since the whole book is about Urdu words and forms, the Urdu examples are kept in italics in transliteration, each with a short English gloss, and the author's grammatical terms are glossed the first time they appear. Verses are translated line by line. Where the text seems to say the opposite of what its examples show, or where a word is unclear, a translator's note [TN: ...] says so; the text itself is not changed. Terms kept in the translation are explained in the glossary at the end.

Introduction

The preface is a call to arms for the Urdu language. The author complains that societies, translators and newspapers, especially in the Punjab, are spoiling Urdu through ignorance of its principles, and that the Urdu-Hindi quarrel is pointless, since the two are one language. He holds that Delhi was the birthplace of Urdu but that Lucknow, kept prosperous by the pensions of the kings of Oudh, is now its capital, and that a language without a centre cannot progress.

He then tells how the rules came to him. Mir Taqi Mir, who had learned them from his uncle Sirajuddin Khan Arzu, left them to his son Mir Kallu Arsh; Arsh taught them to his pupil Shaikh Muhammad Jan Shad, called *Pairau-e-Mir* (follower of Mir); and Shad, at nearly a hundred, taught them to the author over three years. Ishrat writes that the rules were meant to stay knowledge of the breast, but that the times forced him to set them down.

The chapters that follow are practical. They show how infinitives, plurals and genders are formed, often by contrasting the usage of Delhi with that of Lucknow; how a simile differs from a metaphor and a metonymy; and how *lughat*, *istilah*, *roz-marra* and *muhawara* differ. The last chapter lists faults of speech heard in the provinces and faults of taste in recent poetry, quoting verses that the author holds up as warnings.