Ratan Nath Sarshar

Ratan Nath Dhar was born in Lucknow in 1846 into a Kashmiri Pandit family that had migrated to the city, one of many Hindu families of Kashmiri origin who found service and livelihood in the culture of Awadh ^[1]. His father died when the boy was still young, and his mother raised him in modest circumstances in a city that was then the last great center of Indo-Islamic courtly refinement. Anyone asking who was Ratan Nath Sarshar has to begin with this setting: a Hindu child growing up entirely inside the Urdu and Persian literary world of Lucknow, absorbing its idiom as his native inheritance ^[2].

His education followed the pattern common to Kashmiri Pandit households of the period. He learned Persian and Urdu from maulvis in the traditional manner, then entered Canning College in Lucknow, where he picked up English without completing a degree ^[1]. The mixture proved decisive. He read English fiction, including the picaresque tradition, while remaining saturated in the oral storytelling of the dastan reciters who performed nightly in the city's bazaars and salons.

The Lucknow of his boyhood was a city in shock. The annexation of Awadh by the East India Company in 1856 and the upheaval of 1857 had ended the nawabi court and scattered its poets, musicians, and hangers-on. Sarshar came of age among the survivors of that world, and the tension between nostalgia for old Lucknow and impatience with its decadence became the central subject of his writing ^[3].

After leaving college Sarshar worked for a time as a schoolteacher in the districts of Awadh, a job he found dull and soon abandoned for journalism ^[2]. He began contributing sketches and essays to Avadh Akhbar, the Urdu newspaper published from Lucknow by the printing magnate Munshi Newal Kishore, whose press was then the largest publishing house in northern India ^[4]. His pieces caught attention for their wit and their exact ear for Lucknawi speech.

In 1878 Newal Kishore appointed him editor of Avadh Akhbar, a position that gave the young writer both a salary and a daily audience ^[4]. Sarshar used the paper as a laboratory. In its columns he began publishing installments of a loose, episodic narrative following a witty, westernized hero named Azad through the streets, fairs, and drawing rooms of Lucknow. Readers wrote in demanding more, and the serial swelled far beyond anything its author can have planned.

The adoption of serial fiction by an Urdu daily was itself a novelty. Sarshar was borrowing a commercial form pioneered by English and French newspapers and grafting it onto the inherited conventions of the Urdu dastan, with its endless episodes and improvised digressions ^[3]. The graft took, and it changed Urdu prose.

The serialized narrative was gathered and published by the Newal Kishore Press as Fasana-e-Azad (The Tale of Azad), a work of roughly three thousand pages in four large volumes, completed in the early 1880s ^[4]. It follows Azad, a charming and resourceful man about town, and his companion Khoji, a tiny, opium-addled braggart whose delusions of gallantry made him one of the most beloved comic figures in Urdu literature. Critics from Sarshar's own day onward have noted the pair's kinship with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a debt Sarshar acknowledged late in life by producing Khudai Faujdar, an Urdu rendering of Cervantes ^[3].

Any honest account of Ratan Nath Sarshar achievements puts Fasana-e-Azad first. The book stands between two eras: it keeps the dastan's looseness and love of talk, yet it observes real streets, real prices, real newspapers, and real social types, from courtesans and wrestlers to reformist lecturers ^[1]. Later novelists, including Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa, wrote with more discipline, but they wrote in a form Sarshar had shown to be possible. Premchand, the master of Hindi and Urdu fiction in the next generation, admired the book enough to prepare an abridged Hindi version ^[5].

Sarshar followed his triumph with further novels, among them Jam-e-Sarshar (1887), Sair-e-Kohsar (1890), and Kamna (also known as Kamini), along with a stream of essays and sketches ^[2]. None repeated the success of Fasana-e-Azad, and critics have generally judged them thinner reworkings of his established manner. His lasting technical contribution lay elsewhere: he proved that colloquial Urdu, especially the idiomatic speech of Lucknow's women and its street characters, could carry extended prose fiction ^[3].

Sarshar's private life is less documented than his public career, and the standard accounts rest on the recollections of contemporaries. He married and lived most of his life in Lucknow, but sustained domestic stability seems to have eluded him ^[2]. Friends and later biographers describe a sociable, generous, quick-witted man who was happiest in company, trading verses and anecdotes in the mixed literary gatherings of the city.

His position was unusual and he knew it. As a Kashmiri Pandit he belonged to a Hindu community, yet his entire imaginative world was the Urdu culture of Muslim Lucknow, and he wrote about Muslim social life from the inside with an intimacy few outsiders matched ^[1]. In the growing Hindi-Urdu controversy of the late nineteenth century, his career itself was a kind of argument that the language belonged to whoever loved it.

The same accounts record a darker thread. Sarshar drank heavily, and his dependence on alcohol worsened through the 1880s and 1890s, damaging his health, his finances, and his reliability as an editor ^[2]. The comic drunkards and addicts of his fiction, drawn with such unsparing accuracy, had a source close to home.

Sarshar's association with Avadh Akhbar ended in the 1880s after disagreements with the management, and the following years were unsettled ^[4]. He edited or wrote for various periodicals and continued to publish fiction, but his output grew uneven and his circumstances strained. Lucknow itself was changing around him, and the world he had chronicled was slipping further into memory.

Around 1895 he accepted an invitation to Hyderabad, the largest princely state in India and a magnet for Urdu writers seeking patronage. There he worked in the circle of the Hyderabadi nobility, notably in the service of Maharaja Kishen Pershad, the state's Kashmiri Pandit prime minister, and was associated with the periodical Dabdaba-e-Asafi ^[2]. The move gave him an income and renewed respect, and it was in Hyderabad that he completed Khudai Faujdar, his version of Don Quixote ^[3].

His health, undermined by years of drinking, did not hold. Ratan Nath Sarshar died in Hyderabad on January 21, 1903, at the age of about fifty six ^[1]. Obituaries in the Urdu press mourned him as the man who had put Lucknow itself into a book.

Every serious Ratan Nath Sarshar biography returns to a single claim: he opened the door through which the modern Urdu novel walked. Historians of the literature, from Ram Babu Saksena in the 1920s to Muhammad Sadiq in the 1960s, treat Fasana-e-Azad as the hinge between the dastan and the novel proper, flawed in construction yet unmatched as a panorama of a living city ^[1]. Ralph Russell, the British scholar of Urdu, devoted a detailed study to the book's mixture of reformist preaching and anarchic comedy ^[3].

The characters outlived the arguments. Khoji in particular escaped the book entirely, becoming a proverbial figure whose name is still used in Urdu for a boastful little man with grand pretensions ^[3]. Passages of Fasana-e-Azad remain staples of Urdu syllabi in India and Pakistan, prized for their idiomatic richness, and the full work has drawn renewed scholarly attention, including Firoza Mookerjee's monograph on Sarshar's Lucknow ^[5].

Among the basic Ratan Nath Sarshar facts worth remembering are these: a Hindu writer who became a classic of Urdu, a journalist who turned a newspaper serial into a national entertainment, and a satirist whose affection for his city survived every joke he made at its expense. More than a century after his death in Hyderabad, readers still meet nineteenth century Lucknow first through his pages ^[6].