About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This is the complete Urdu text and an English translation of *Saras ki Tarik-ul-Watani* ("The Cranes Leave Their Homeland"), a short story by Allama Rashid ul Khairi of Delhi (1868–1936). Urdu Wikisource describes it as "the first symbolic story in the Urdu language".

Source of the Urdu text: the transcription on Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org, سارس کی تارک الوطنی), downloaded in October 2026. No scan of an early printing has been found, so the date and place of first publication have not been established; the story was certainly written before the author's death in 1936.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of the author's text has been left out or changed. The story has no divisions of its own; it is printed here in two chapters, the break falling where the crane, having told the story of Prince Ilyas, goes back to study the city.

Copyright: Rashid ul Khairi died in 1936, so the story is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. Because its date of first publication 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: Artashi, Arsivan, Prince Ilyas, Salim, Azizabad.

Introduction

Rashid ul Khairi, born in Delhi in 1868 into the family of Deputy Nazir Ahmad, is remembered as *Musawwir-e-Gham*, "the painter of sorrow", and as the founder in 1908 of *Ismat*, the monthly magazine for women. Most of his many novels and stories are realistic tales of Muslim households of Delhi. This story is something different: an allegory in which a pair of sarus cranes, the Indian birds famous for lifelong faithfulness to their mates, decide to leave their homeland for ever because man has come too near.

The female crane pleads for man: without him the world would be a wilderness of monkeys and kites, and it is his labour that has made the fields green and the orchards fruitful. The male answers with three things he has seen. A prince who once wept over a cut on his wife's wrist stabs her to death to please a new woman. A rich woman scolds her wet nurse for suckling her own baby, and the nurse, who depends on her mistress for her living, drops the child and stands trembling while it screams. A pious-looking man with a white beard and a shaven head swears by God that he means his younger brother no harm, gets him to sign a deed, and then testifies against him in court as a rebel, so that he is exiled and the elder brother takes the village. Man, the "noblest of creatures" (*ashraf-ul-makhluqat*), turns out the basest. The story ends as the cranes fly.

Almost every episode turns on Khairi's lasting themes: the helplessness of women, the cruelty of the strong to the weak, and the gap between the profession of religion and the practice of it. The birds' high-flown, slightly comic Urdu, full of the scientific vocabulary of the day ("the seat of human feeling", "the power of sight"), adds an ironic edge: it is the animals who reason, and the humans who behave like beasts.

Cite as: Rashid ul Khairi, *Saras ki Tarik-ul-Watani*, tr. urduintranslation.com (2026), https://www.urduintranslation.com/works/saras-ki-tarik-ul-watani.