A story of two sisters named Great (Akbari) and Small (Asghari)–right from the start we’re in didactic territory. Don’t we already sense that the younger sister will be the heroine? If there were a sister named Middle too, the fairy-tale likeness would be complete.
The Bride’s Mirror (Mirat ul-Arus) may or may not have been the first Urdu novel, but it was certainly the first Urdu best-seller. Released in 1869, within twenty years it had appeared in editions totalling over 100,000 copies; it had also, its publisher claimed, been translated into Bengali, Braj, Kashmiri, Punjabi, and Gujarati.It had been adopted for almost every Urdu syllabus, and in fact has not been out of print in Urdu from that day to this. In 1903 an English translation was published in London by G. E. Ward; it is this translation that is reproduced in the present volume. Ward was such a careful student of the work that he had already, four years earlier, laboriously produced and published an entire roman-script version of the text, with partial annotation and a complete cumulative glossary.
The Bride’s Mirror was its author’s first literary success. Nazir Ahmad (1831-1912) came from a family with a distinguished religious ancestry.His father, a teacher in a small town near Bijnore, taught the boy Persian and Arabic, and in 1842 took him to study with Maulvi Abd ul-Khaliq at the Aurangabadi Mosque in Delhi. In 1846, the boy had the opportunity to enroll at Delhi College, and studied there till 1853; he chose its Urdu section, he later said, because his father had told him ‘he would rather see me die than learn English’. During this period he also discreetly arranged his own marriage, to Maulvi Abd ul-Khaliq’s granddaughter. Though he passed it off as the usual parentally-arranged marriage, many years later he urged his son in a letter to plan his own marriage, as he himself had done.
In 1854 he joined the British colonial administration, and his career prospered: in 1856 he became a deputy inspector of schools in Kanpur, and at the end of 1857 he was appointed to a similar deputy inspectorship in Allahabad. On the advice of a friend, he took six months’ leave and spent the time acquiring a working knowledge of English. In 1859-60 he began translating the Income Tax Law into English, and followed it with the Indian Penal Code, a project completed in 1861. In 1863 he was rewarded with the post of Deputy Collector in the Revenue Service (hence his conventional title of ‘Deputy’ Nazir Ahmad), and was posted in various cities. Around 1865 or 1866 he started to write school textbooks in Urdu.
Then in 1868, the government of the Northwest Frontier Provinces began to offer prizes for books judged suitable for educational use: the conditions were ‘that the book shall subserve some useful purpose, either of instruction, entertainment, or mental discipline; that it shall be written in one or other of the current dialects, Oordoo or Hindee, and that there shall be excellence both in the style and treatment’. Only one further stipulation was made: ‘Books suitable for the women of India will be especially acceptable, and well rewarded’.
