Abdul Halim Sharar

Lucknow's great storyteller — the pioneer who made history the stuff of the Urdu novel. Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926), pen name Sharar, was a Lucknow novelist, historian, essayist, playwright and poet — the pioneer of the historical novel in Urdu. Born at Lucknow in 1860, the son of Hakim Tafazzul Husain, a scholar of Islamic religion and Persian literature, he was educated at home in Arabic and Persian. His first novel, Dilchasp, appeared in 1885, and in 1887 he launched his own magazine, Dil Gudaz, which he ran for decades. More than a hundred books are counted to his name, about thirty of them historical novels — Malik-ul-Aziz Virginia (1889), Firdaus-e-Bareen (1899), Zawal-e-Baghdad (1912), Husn ka Daku (1913–14), Darbar-e-Harampur (1914) and Fateh Maftooh (1916) among them — romances of the Islamic past that made history the stuff of popular reading. From 1913 his essays on the life and culture of Lucknow appeared in Dil Gudaz; gathered as Guzishta Lucknow, they remain the fullest portrait of the city's last Nawabi age. He served for a time in Hyderabad in the service of the Nizam, translated the Kitab-ut-Tauheed into Urdu, and also wrote poetry under his pen name. He died at Lucknow on 1 December 1926.