This is a qissa of three ghosts, a history they wrote together, and another history or fiction yet to be fully written, which owes a debt to these ghosts and their history.

First, the three ghosts.

Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, or Generalissimus Abdul Rahim (1556–1627), was one of Mughal emperor Akbar’s nauratans or nine gems, a title given to nine people of extraordinary ability serving Akbar’s court. He was a poet, scholar of Persian and Sanskrit and author of two books on astrology in Sanskrit. But he is best known to history as a powerful minister and military commander.

Abul Fazl (1551–1602) was another one of Akbar’s nauratans. He was the author of the three-volume Akbarnama, the official history of Akbar’s reign. He authored other important works besides, which included a Persian translation of the Bible. Abul Fazl was executed at the behest of Akbar’s son Jahangir, for his opposition to Jahangir’s accession to the throne.

Muhammad Hussain Azad (1830-1910) was a scholar of Persian and Arabic, and one of Urdu’s finest prose writers. He is best known for 1880’s Aab-i-Hayat [The Elixir of Life], a commentary on Urdu poetry and its chronological history.

After the upheaval of 1857, during which Azad’s father was executed by the British for his outspoken journalism as the editor of the Delhi Urdu Akhbar, Azad and his family lost their home and suffered many hardships. In 1861, Azad arrived in Lahore and, in 1864, joined the newly founded Government College (now the Government College University).

It was in Lahore that Azad authored the hugely important Darbaar-i-Akbari (1898), a history of Emperor Akbar’s court. Besides its qualities as a highly readable history on an important subject, Darbaar-i-Akbari is also a unique experiment in historiography, being a history written on the authority of ghosts.

In 2013, I began work on a project to connect strange, marvellous and miraculous events and creatures in a unified, imaginary history of the world. It will be a book of many parts — all those parts also individual books — connected by frame- and interior stories. By its very nature, such a project required planning and working on several stories at the same time. It also required a systematic study of history with a certain lens. To this end, I began collecting books on history and the occult.

There are several histories written in Urdu, or translated into Urdu from Persian and Arabic. And there is a far greater number of books on the occult written in Urdu. Many of these works were published in the 19th century and can only be found, if one is lucky, in the old books markets of Karachi and Lahore.

In September 2013, Zarrar Khuhro, then editor of Dawn’s Sunday Magazine, requested me to contribute a fortnightly piece of writing. As I did not know how long it would take me to finish the first book from the book of many parts, I thought it a good idea to use the opportunity offered me to begin publishing the sketchy, summarised versions of some of the stories. One of those pieces, ‘Al Qazwini and the Man of the Sea’, later became The Merman and the Book of Power: A Qissa (2019), one of the books in the project.

Earlier, I had published two other pieces, ‘Echoes from the Emperor’s Palace of Silence’ and ‘Shaitan Pura: The Town Where the Devil Lived’. These were fictionalised accounts of strange and tragic events that transpired during Emperor Akbar’s reign, but they needed a frame story which could connect them.

Not too long afterwards, on one of my visits to the old books market, I came upon Sheikh Hasan: Aik Angrez Ka Mashriq Mein Ilm al Arwah Ka Mushahida [Sheikh Hasan: A Britisher’s Observations of the Practice of Soulology in the East]. I must clarify that the book was missing the cover and title, and this information was given as an inscription — either by the original owner or the bookseller — on a pasted-on cover.

This slim volume turned out to be the translation of an English language work originally published from London in February 1888, and translated by Syed Mumtaz Ali, a renowned scholar and champion of women’s rights in Islam.

Mumtaz Ali’s son, Imtiaz Ali Taj, who wrote the book’s brief ‘Introduction’, mentions that his father was unsure whether the book — which narrates the adventures of the narrator and his enigmatic master Sheikh Hasan — was a historical document or a work of fiction. Mumtaz Ali had devoted himself to religious studies in later life and was reluctant to have his name associated with it, but Taj prevailed on him to have it published.

From Taj’s brief ‘Introduction’ to the book, we learn that both Syed Mumtaz Ali and his teacher, Muhammad Hussain Azad, the author of Darbaar-i-Akbari, shared a deep interest in the world of spirits. It also mentions Azad’s method of researching history.

Apparently, Azad had run into problems verifying the many details of historic events. Struggling to find help in earlier histories, he had a brilliant idea: who better to verify a historic detail than the first-hand witnesses of the event, one of whom was also the official court historian?

Azad used a planchette board — a device to communicate with the spirits — to summon the ghosts of Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan and Abul Fazl. It is not known whether the two were summoned simultaneously or in turns. What we know is that all the details of historic events were individually verified by the two ghosts over various sessions, resulting in the ghost-vetted wonder that is the Darbaar-i-Akbari.

As the reader can imagine, I have found my frame story for the book on Akbar’s court, and the ghosts of Muhammad Hussain Azad, Abdul Rahim Khan-i Khanan and Abul Fazl will be properly introduced before long.

My efforts to trace the original English language text of Sheikh Hasan have so far been unsuccessful. Unless it was a work of Syed Mumtaz Ali’s own imagination, I am confident that, sooner or later, it will be found.

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator.

He tweets @microMAF. Website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 6th, 2022