constructing pathways to translation - Higher Education Commission

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Thus the development of Urdu prose is directly linked and related to the influence of the
West in general and English in particular.
The influence of English is observable not only in the addition that it has made to the
vocabulary of Urdu, but also in the adoption of Western methods of expression.
Translations, like ‘angle of vision’, ‘point of view’, ‘method of approach’, come into
vogue through the medium of English. But this tendency to borrow phrases from English
is not conducive to linguistic simplicity or elegance. The most pervasive influence of
English on Urdu language is in the domain of style, on its prose, fiction, poetry and
drama. The focus of attention in this thesis is only prose.
Before the nineteenth century, there was hardly any prose literature in Urdu. Earlier
prose writings were either religious tracts or books of old world stories. About the
middle of nineteenth century books like, Fisana-i-Ajaib and Bagh-o-Bahar, Dastan-i-
Amir Hamza, Taslim-i-Hosh Ruba and Bostan-i-Khiyal were published. The first two
had long served as text books for British officials desiring for proficiency in Urdu, while
the other three are voluminous stories related to imaginative reading. The style of these
books is artificial and stilted, but they were great achievements at the time when they
were written.
The idea of Urdu prose first sprang up at Calcutta, by Dr John Gilchrist, the Principal of
the Fort William College, who has also been called by some, the father of Urdu Prose.
He compiled a dictionary and a grammar of Hindustani (a popular synonym for Urdu)
for the use of western students attracted a large number of Indian scholars from Delhi
and the Northern Western Provinces. Among them was Mir Amman Dehlwi, who
produced Bagh-o-Bahar, a translation of the Persian work Chahr Darwesh of Khusrau.
Many other translations from Persian and other languages were done by Hindu and
Muslim scholars employed at the Fort William College, under Gilchrist and his
successors. The first writer of standard Urdu prose is the famous poet Mirza Ghalib of
Dehli, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and the devoted band of his fellow workers, like Nazir
Ahmed, Hali and Shibi belonging to the Delhi School of Urdu Literature and Pandit
Ratan Nath (Sarshar) and Maulvi Abdul Halim (Sharar) of the Luckhnow School,
completed the superstructure laid by Ghalib. He was the first to discover the charm of
Urdu Prose. Like all cultured people of his day, Ghalib used to write letters to his friends