Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa

Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa (1857–1931), born in Lucknow in the year of the great uprising, was the Urdu novelist who gave the language its first great novel — and a poet in his own right. His ancestors had come from Persia; his great-grandfather was an adjutant in the Nawab of Awadh's army, and the family lane in Lucknow was still called Adjutant's Lane. Educated at Thomson Engineering School (Thomason College, Roorkee), he taught at Lucknow's Central High School and Christian College, worked as a civil servant and railwayman, and later moved to Hyderabad to work at the Dar-ut-Tarjuma, Osmania University's translation bureau. He knew Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, English, Latin and Greek, wrote on religion, philosophy and astronomy, and even invented a system of Urdu shorthand. His literary career began in 1887 with a verse Laila-Majnu; then came the novels — Afshai Raz, Zaat-e-Shareef, Shareef Zada, Akhtari Begum — and, above all, Umrao Jan Ada (first published Lucknow, 1899; often cited as 1905), the courtesan-poet's life story told as memoir, regarded by many as the first Urdu novel and later filmed in Pakistan and India. His ghazals — 31 sher catalogued on Rekhta — carry the same world as the novel: two ruined cities, a lifetime's weariness, love as affliction. He died at Hyderabad on 21 October 1931.