About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of four travel pieces by Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926) of Lucknow: three sketches from a journey between India and England, at Gibraltar, in Italy and in Switzerland, and a longer account of a visit to the princely state of Palanpur in Gujarat. They first appeared in Sharar's own monthly magazine, *Dilgudaz*. The title, *Sharar ke Safarname* ("Sharar's Travels"), is the one under which the four pieces are gathered on Wikisource; it is not the title of a book published by the author.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page شرر کے سفرنامے and its four subpages, downloaded in October 2026. Wikisource gives no dates or first printings for these pieces. No scan of an early printing has been found on archive.org.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of the author's text has been left out. The short note that Wikisource prints at the head of the collection is modern editorial matter and is not given here. In "A Few Hours in Gibraltar" the author's footnote has been numbered (1) and kept at the end of the piece, and a printer's mark, "continued from the previous page", has been dropped from it. Persian verses quoted in the prose have been set on lines of their own. Obvious misprints have been read in the sense the context requires, and doubtful dates are marked with a translator's note. "Our Journey to Palanpur" was printed in two instalments; the author's sentence promising the rest "in the next number" is kept.

Copyright: Sharar died in 1926, so his work is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. All four pieces were written and published in his lifetime: the European sketches describe the 1890s, and the Palanpur journey took place in 1915. As they were therefore first published before 1931, no United States check is needed. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Gibraltar, Tariq, Musa ibn Nusayr, Uqba ibn Nafi, Julian, Roderic, Tarifa, Algeciras, Ceuta, Tangier; Brindisi, Bologna, Milan, Gian Galeazzo, Charles Borromeo; Chiasso, the St Gotthard, Göschenen, Airolo, Louis Favre; Palanpur, Jalor, Sir Sher Muhammad Khan, Tale Muhammad Khan, Gulab Miyan, Shabbir Miyan, Mr Dehlavi, Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur, Lucknow.

Introduction

Abdul Halim Sharar was born in Lucknow in 1860 and spent part of his boyhood at Matiya Burj near Calcutta, where the deposed king of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, kept his court in exile. He became one of the busiest writers of his age: a journalist and editor, the founder in 1887 of the monthly *Dilgudaz*, the author of more than twenty historical novels such as *Firdaus-e-Bareen*, and of the essays on old Lucknow collected as *Guzishta Lakhnau*. He also wrote histories, among them a history of Sind. He died in Lucknow in 1926.

In the 1890s Sharar spent more than a year in England, and three of these pieces come from that journey. In "A Short Tour of Italy" he lands at Brindisi on the way out, rides by night through the Italian countryside, waits at Bologna and walks through Milan to its marble cathedral; "Switzerland" follows the railway over the Alps by the St Gotthard tunnel, then a marvel of engineering; "A Few Hours in Gibraltar" describes the voyage home, past the coasts of Portugal and Spain to the Rock. These are the impressions of an Indian Muslim in Europe at the height of the British Empire: curious, admiring of modern progress, sharp about European poverty and superstition, and haunted at Gibraltar by the memory of Muslim Spain and the sight of its Muslims reduced to sweeping the streets.

"Our Journey to Palanpur", written some twenty years later, takes Sharar, now an old man who rarely left Lucknow, to a small Muslim state on the borders of Gujarat and Rajasthan. He gives a short history of its Afghan rulers, who traced their rule back to the fourteenth century and followed the Mahdavi teaching of Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur; he describes his audience with the aged Nawab, the Eid procession, a dinner served in brass *thalis*, and the quarrels of the day over the reformist women's manual *Bahishti Zewar*. It is a warm portrait of a princely court on the eve of great changes, and of Hindu and Muslim customs living side by side.