Thanks to the BCC Urdu Service we have found a writer in Raza Ali Abidi. It was on behalf of the service that Abidi planned a journey of the Grand Trunk Road popularly known in the subcontinent as Gernaili Sarak. He took a bus from Peshawar and embarked on his journey strictly following the winding route of that long road, the last stop being Calcutta. He narrated this journey on BBC and the serial was a hit with listeners.

After narrating his journey on air, Mr Abidi took a step further and published his narrative under the title Gernaili Sarak. And lo, an Urdu writer of the BBC make was born.

Mr Abidi then planned a journey across the subcontinent with the purpose of probing into the private book collections of the fallen nawabs and jagidars who had inherited this treasure from their forefathers and were not ready to share it with knowledge seekers and researchers. He somehow won their confidence and returned with an exhaustive account of handwritten manuscripts and old material.

The third in this series is centered on his travels along the banks of the Indus River, popularly known as Sher Darya, as according to the legend, it gushes out from the mouth of a roaring lion. This account has been presented in the book titled Sher Darya.

But the volume under discussion is a different kind of book, though it appears to be well in tune with the above mentioned series. What connects one with the other is Abidi’s manner of capturing the essence of the subcontinent. Though no longer associated with the BBC, he was reminded of a series he had planned during his years there. It was conceived after he found out that India Office Library at the British Library has a large stock of old Indian publications preserved.

The story of this stock, as Abidi tells us, goes back to the year 1803 when the printing of books had started in India. Since then, a few copies of every book published in India were dispatched to London. And in London, those at the helm of affairs took care to preserve each and every book received from India.

Abidi planned a series of talks with the aim of introducing selected books from this stock to listeners of the BBC Urdu Service. Because of its immense popularity, this programme continued for a number of years. After retiring, he made a selection of one hundred scripts from these talks and revised and collected them in one volume, Kitaabein Apne Aaba ki, published by Sang-e-Meel.

The first book included in this volume is a publication of Fort Williams College published in 1803, Akhlaq-i-Hindi. It had been compiled by Mir Bahadur Ali Hussaini under the instruction of John Gilchrist who was at the time the head of the college. With the purpose of teaching Urdu and Hindi to the Englishmen serving there, Gilchrist instructed the compilers to write in easy Urdu and avoid ornate prose. Cumbersome Persianised expression too was to be avoided. Mir Hussaini kept these instructions in view and wrote the book in easy Urdu. The book is an adaptation from an old Sanskrit classic, Hatt Updaish, which was first translated in Persian under the title Mufarrahul Quloob and most of the stories in the volume are fables.

The next book discussed is again a Fort Williams publication titled Bagh-o-Bahar (1804) written by Mir Amman. The book has come to stay as a classic, which paved the way in which Urdu prose is now in practice.

In fact, Mir Amman may well be seen as the father of modern Urdu prose.

Most of the books printed in the early 19th century belong to the category of fiction. But with the passage of time they started to cover a variety of subjects; in 1847 the research of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was published under the title Asarus-Sanadeed. Later, the French scholar Garcin de Tassy brought out a volume of selections from Urdu’s literary writings. In 1864, we had a book on Lahore, the research of Maulvi Noor Ahmad Chishti, who, with his classic work Tahqiqat-i-Chishti, is an acknowledged authority on Lahore.

In 1877, a detailed account of the cities and towns of Punjab was published under the title Tareekh-i-Makhzan-i-Punjab while in 1897 an account of the birds of Punjab was published under the title Sair-i-Parand. And at the close of the 19th century came Ruswa’s novel, Umrao Jan Ada.

This book brings to us the history of printed works during the 19th century.