Introduction: The Newspaper Writer Who Helped Invent the Urdu Novel
Ratan Nath Sarshar is one of those names that turns up in every history of Urdu literature and on almost no modern reading list. He did not write a shelf of novels. He wrote one enormous, wandering, funny book that grew out of a newspaper column — and that book, Fasana-e-Azad, helped turn the Urdu novel from an experiment into a popular form.
This guide is honest about that shape. Sarshar is not presented here as a prolific novelist with ten titles to tick off. He is presented as what he was: a Lucknow newspaper editor whose serial fiction captured a whole city, and whose other books are best understood around that one great work.
Life: From a Lucknow Schoolroom to the Editor’s Desk
Sarshar — full name Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar — was born in 1846 or 1847; even his birth year is uncertain, and this guide does not pretend otherwise. He came from a Kashmiri Brahmin family that had settled in Lucknow, a community well known for its command of Persian and Urdu. His father, Pandit Bej Nath Dhar, died when Sarshar was four, and he was brought up by his mother. He learned Arabic and Persian at a local maktab, then went to Canning College in Lucknow — the institution that later became part of the University of Lucknow — and left without taking a degree.
Before journalism, he worked as a schoolteacher, including a spell teaching in Kheri district. In August 1878 he was appointed editor of Avadh Akhbar, the Lucknow newspaper published by Munshi Nawal Kishore. That appointment changed Urdu fiction. It was in the paper’s pages that Sarshar’s most famous work first appeared, instalment by instalment, and it was the paper’s readers who made it a success before it ever became a book.
In 1895 Sarshar moved to Hyderabad, where he was engaged by Maharaja Sir Kishen Pershad to work on his prose and poetry, and where he edited the journal Dabdaba-e-Asifi. He died in Hyderabad on 21 January 1903. One online author profile gives 1895 as his death year, but that conflicts with the biographical record used here, which dates his Hyderabad move itself to 1895 and his death to 1903; this guide follows the 1903 date.
Fasana-e-Azad: How a Column Became a Novel
Fasana-e-Azad — The Tale of Azad — began not as a novel but as a newspaper series. Sarshar’s column in Avadh Akhbar, titled Zarafat (“Wit and Humour”), started on 13 August 1878 and satirised the life of Lucknow: its streets, its gatherings, its manners, its talk. Readers loved it. The columns grew into a continuing story, and that story became Fasana-e-Azad, serialised between 1878 and 1883 and then published in four large volumes by Nawal Kishore Press — volume one in 1881, volume two in 1882, and volumes three and four in 1883. All told, the book runs to roughly three thousand pages.
Its hero, Azad, is a wanderer. With his companion Khoji — a character readers took to so warmly that a separate collection of Khoji passages was published decades later — Azad moves through Lucknow’s markets, fairs and festivals, meets people from every class of society, and eventually travels far beyond the city, to Constantinople and Russia, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. At theme level, the book is a comic journey through a changing city: it is as much a portrait of Lucknow as it is the story of one man.
Two influences are usually named, and both are visible in the book’s shape. Cervantes’ Don Quixote gives it the wandering hero and his loyal, earthy companion; Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers gives it the episodic, city-wandering structure, in which one scene follows another rather than a single tight plot driving everything forward. That looseness is also the reason scholars argue about the book. Some call it one of the first modern Urdu novels; others call it a proto-novel, or “not a novel proper,” because its plot is unfocused by later standards. Sarshar himself was the first to call it a novel, in 1879. This guide takes the middle position the scholarship supports: Fasana-e-Azad is one of the earliest landmarks of Urdu fiction, whether or not it fits a strict definition of the novel.
One claim this guide does not make: Sarshar was not the first Urdu novelist. Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s Mirat-ul-Uroos appeared in 1869, nearly a decade before Fasana-e-Azad began its serial run. Sarshar belongs to the pioneering generation that followed — the generation that made the new form popular, not the single inventor of it.
The Other Books: What Else Sarshar Wrote
Beyond Fasana-e-Azad, Sarshar’s other books are fewer and less famous, and a reader’s guide should say so plainly rather than padding the list.
Sair-i-Kohsar is his other named novel. Premchand translated it into Hindi as Parvat Yatra, just as he translated Fasana-e-Azad into Hindi as Azad Katha — a sign of how widely Sarshar was read across languages.
Jam-i-Sarshar began life as Fasana-i-Jadeed (A Modern Tale) and was later renamed. It deals with changing cultural values in Lucknow, including the dangers of drinking — a subject with a sad personal echo, since Sarshar’s own death is attributed to heavy drinking.
Two further titles need careful labelling, not a place on a novels shelf. Gor-i-Ghariban remained unpublished at his death. Khuda-i-Foujdar is an Urdu translation of Don Quixote, not an original novel — although it is a revealing one, since it shows how deeply Cervantes’ wandering-hero model sat in Sarshar’s mind.
Why Sarshar Still Matters
Sarshar matters for three reasons, and none of them requires exaggeration. First, Fasana-e-Azad was the first serialised Urdu fiction in an Urdu newspaper, and its success helped make Avadh Akhbar one of South Asia’s first commercially viable Urdu dailies. Second, the book is treated as an encyclopaedia of contemporary Lucknow culture: its marketplaces, fairs, festivals and social classes, described with a liveliness that reviewers of the time found unprecedented. Third, Khoji is one of Urdu fiction’s great comic creations — historian Ram Babu Saksena called him a unique character in the whole of Urdu literature, and critic Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah called him Sarshar’s greatest achievement.
The book also reached readers beyond the page. Wah Janaab, a Hindi television serial based on Fasana-e-Azad, aired on DD National in 1984 — more than a century after the serial began, the wandering Azad was still funny enough for television.
Reading Order: Where to Start
Start with Fasana-e-Azad, and start with the honest warning that it is long. A modern reader does not need to read three thousand pages to understand why the book matters. An abridged edition — the Jamia Book Department published one, Fasana-e-Azad (Talkhis), in 1970 — or a good selection of passages is a sensible first step, and the Khoji passages are the most enjoyable way in. If the humour and the Lucknow portrait win you over, the full four volumes are there to explore at leisure.
After that, Sair-i-Kohsar is the natural second book, and Jam-i-Sarshar the third — not because they match Fasana-e-Azad, but because they show the same writer turning from comic panorama to a changing Lucknow. Readers who want context should also read the generation around him: his Lucknow contemporary Abdul Halim Sharar, whose Guzishta Lucknow is history rather than fiction, gives the city from the other side of the writing desk.
For other classic-era writers covered in the same honest-label style, see our guides to Abdul Halim Sharar’s novels, Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi’s books and how to read classic Urdu novels. For background on Sarshar himself, see Sarshar’s Wikipedia profile and the Fasana-e-Azad page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Fasana-e-Azad the first Urdu novel?
No — or at least, not by the standard scholarly account. Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s Mirat-ul-Uroos (1869) came first. Fasana-e-Azad is one of the earliest Urdu novels and a landmark of the form, but its status has always been debated: most scholars call it one of the first novels or a proto-novel, and some argue it is not a novel in the strict sense at all.
Why is Fasana-e-Azad so long?
Because it grew by instalments. It began as short satirical newspaper columns, and the story kept extending as readers kept asking for more. The four book volumes together run to about three thousand pages.
Who is Khoji?
Khoji is Azad’s companion in Fasana-e-Azad — a dwarf with a fondness for opium and a high opinion of his own handsomeness and martial skill, echoing Sancho Panza beside Azad’s Don Quixote. He became the book’s most beloved character.
Did Sarshar write many novels?
No. His reputation rests chiefly on Fasana-e-Azad, with Sair-i-Kohsar and Jam-i-Sarshar as his other named novels. One further novel remained unpublished, and one famous title is a translation, not an original work. This guide lists them exactly that way.
Is there a TV version of Fasana-e-Azad?
Yes. Wah Janaab, a Hindi serial based on the book, aired on DD National in 1984.
Conclusion
Ratan Nath Sarshar did not build a large bibliography. He built something rarer: a book so alive with a city’s talk, humour and street life that readers followed it week after week in a newspaper, and scholars are still arguing about it more than a century later. Begin with Fasana-e-Azad — in an abridgement if the full four volumes feel daunting — and you will meet the Lucknow that the Urdu novel grew up in.