Abdul Halim Sharar

Abdul Halim Sharar was born in Lucknow on September 4, 1860, three years after the uprising of 1857 had broken the old order of the Kingdom of Awadh ^[1]. His family belonged to the learned service class that had gathered around the Awadh court, and his father, Hakim Tafazzul Husain, was attached to the household of the deposed ruler Wajid Ali Shah ^[2]. When the British exiled the king to Matiya Burj, a suburb of Calcutta, many Lucknow families followed, and the young Sharar spent formative years of his boyhood in that transplanted court ^[2].

Matiya Burj gave him something few writers of his generation possessed: direct memory of Awadh's court culture as a living thing rather than a legend. He watched its poets, musicians, cooks and courtiers attempt to recreate Lucknow on the banks of the Hooghly, an experience he drew on for the rest of his life ^[2]. His education was traditional. He studied Arabic, Persian and the Islamic sciences with private tutors, and later added enough English to read European fiction and journalism, though he never passed through a colonial college ^[3].

After Wajid Ali Shah's establishment declined, Sharar returned to Lucknow as a young man. The city he came back to was administered by British officials and dominated by new schools, printing presses and railway lines. That contrast, between the courtly world of his childhood and the colonial city of his adulthood, became the central subject of his writing ^[1].

Journalism gave Sharar his start. In the early 1880s he worked for the Lucknow paper Avadh Akhbar, one of the most widely read Urdu publications of the period, where he learned the discipline of writing quickly for a general audience ^[3]. The pen name Sharar, meaning spark, suited a writer who produced copy at speed on history, religion, social reform and literature.

In 1887 he founded his own monthly journal, Dil Gudaz, and it became the axis of his career ^[1]. The magazine mixed serialized novels, historical essays, travel writing and commentary, and Sharar kept it going, with interruptions, for nearly forty years. Few Urdu periodicals of the era matched its longevity or its influence on prose style. Contemporary critics credited it with training a generation of readers to expect clear, direct, unornamented Urdu in place of the elaborate rhymed prose inherited from Persian models ^[4].

Sharar also spent periods away from Lucknow in search of patronage. He worked for a time in Hyderabad, where the Nizam's government employed men of letters, and these appointments supported his writing when journal subscriptions could not ^[3]. Financial security never lasted long, and he repeatedly returned to his desk in Lucknow and to Dil Gudaz.

Any account of Abdul Halim Sharar achievements begins with the Urdu historical novel, a form he did more than anyone to establish. Beginning in the late 1880s he serialized romances set in the Islamic past, among them Malik ul Aziz Varjina, written as a deliberate answer to Walter Scott's The Talisman and its portrait of Saladin, and Firdaus e Bareen, a tale of the Nizari fortress sect of Alamut that became his most popular fiction ^[4]. Other novels, including Flora Florinda and Husn ka Daku, followed the same pattern of adventure, romance and religious feeling set against carefully researched historical backdrops ^[4].

Critics have long noted the purpose behind these books. Written when Indian Muslims were absorbing the loss of political power, they offered readers heroic episodes from Arab and Islamic history as a source of confidence, while borrowing the narrative machinery of the European novel ^[5]. Muhammad Sadiq, a standard historian of Urdu literature, treated Sharar as the founder of this school even while faulting the novels for idealizing their heroes ^[5].

His most durable achievement, however, is a work of cultural history. Between 1913 and 1920 he published in Dil Gudaz a long series of essays on the civilization of Lucknow under its Nawabs, collected under the title Guzashta Lucknow and known in English, through the 1975 translation by E. S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain, as Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture ^[2]. Drawing on his own memories of Matiya Burj and on interviews with survivors of the old court, Sharar recorded the city's poetry, music, cookery, dress, etiquette, festivals and street life in precise detail. Historians still mine the book, with due caution about its nostalgia, because no comparable insider account of Awadh's culture exists ^[6].

Sharar lived almost his whole life within the Urdu speaking Muslim gentry of Lucknow, and its concerns shaped his private world. He married and raised a family in the city, supporting his household through journalism, patronage and book sales rather than land or office, an insecure existence he shared with most professional writers of his day ^[3].

He was a practicing Muslim of reformist temperament. His essays urged modern education for Muslims, criticized wasteful custom and defended the faith against missionary and orientalist attack, positions broadly aligned with the Aligarh movement of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, though Sharar wrote from Lucknow and kept his independence ^[1]. Religion also entered his fiction; several novels turn on conversion, martyrdom or the defense of Islam, which contemporary readers found stirring and later critics found didactic ^[5].

By the accounts of those who knew his work habits, he wrote constantly and at great speed, producing over his lifetime a body of novels, plays, biographies, essays and translations that ran to scores of volumes ^[4]. The haste showed in places, and Sharar himself treated writing as a livelihood as much as an art, but the sheer volume kept Dil Gudaz alive and his name before the public for four decades.

The last phase of Sharar's life coincided with the great political awakening of Indian Muslims after 1918, but he remained primarily a man of letters rather than a platform politician. He continued to edit Dil Gudaz and to publish fiction and history, and the Lucknow essays that became Guzashta Lucknow were the major project of these years, appearing serially while the world they described receded further into memory ^[2].

Age and financial strain wore on him, yet the journal carried his voice almost to the end. He died in Lucknow on December 1, 1926, at the age of sixty six, in the city where he had been born and whose vanished culture he had spent his career recording ^[1]. Obituaries in the Urdu press mourned him as one of the last links to the age of the Nawabs and one of the first makers of modern Urdu prose.

Sharar's reputation rests on two foundations. As a novelist he opened a path that Urdu fiction followed for half a century; the historical romance he pioneered was continued by writers across North India, and literary historians such as Ram Babu Saksena and Muhammad Sadiq gave him a founder's place in their surveys of the language ^[5]. His prose style, plain, rapid and conversational, helped push Urdu away from ornament toward the modern idiom used by journalists and novelists after him ^[4].

As a chronicler of Lucknow he has proved even more lasting. Guzashta Lucknow is cited by historians of Awadh, food writers, musicologists and urban historians alike, and the Harcourt and Hussain translation has kept the book in print for English readers since 1975 ^[2]. Scholars treat it critically, noting that Sharar wrote as an elegist for a culture he loved, but they return to it because he saw that culture with his own eyes ^[6].

For readers seeking basic Abdul Halim Sharar facts, the outline is clear: a writer born into the wreckage of a kingdom in 1860 who turned memory into history and entertainment into a national literature. Every serious Abdul Halim Sharar biography written since, in Urdu or English, works from the record he himself created in the pages of Dil Gudaz ^[1].