The eponymous character of Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s Umrao Jaan Ada (1899), the story of Lucknow’s semi-fictional courtesan who courted fame in the 19th century, has captured the public imagination for long. The various retellings and adaptations in films and TV shows that it has spawned over the years have only fuelled this fascination further. While Ruswa gave the flamboyant courtesan a life in Umrao Jaan, he gave her a voice of her own in his little-known novella, Junun-e-Intezar Yani Fasana-e-Mirza Ruswa (Madness of Waiting: The Story of Mirza Ruswa), which Krupa Shandilya and Taimoor Shahid have dusted off from the archives and translated into English. It is believed that the plot of Umrao Jaan drew on a popular novel, Rosa Lambert, by George William MacArthur Reynolds. But, as the translators argue in the introduction to this volume, Ruswa owes the setting and the cultural sensibility of the novel to Urdu literary culture. In both these volumes– Umrao Jaan Ada and Madness of Waiting – the narrative style remains the same: Ruswa blurs the lines between fact and fiction delectably, staving off the temptation to indulge in fantasy or moral didacticism that defined Urdu literature through much of the 19th century. The narrative structure is layered and lyrical, spare yet lush, a blend of prose and poetry.

Interestingly, Umrao Jaan seems to have evolved in Ruswa’s fiction. In his first novel, Afsha-e-Raaz (The Revelation of Secrets, 1896), the courtesan is a minor character and features as an accomplished singer. In Umrao Jaan Ada, she is both the narrator and a character. In Madness of Waiting, published on April 1, 1899, Umrao dons the role of an author. “The representation of Umrao Jaan in Ruswa’s fiction suggests a possibility that she was also a poet and a writer,” note the translators. Umrao Jaan’s character, they conclude, represents the multiple possibilities of artistic expression available to women at this historical moment. In Madness of Waiting, Umrao Jaan exacts her revenge on Ruswa for making the story of her waywardness public. She snoops around his house and with the aid of his servant pries open his secrets buried in letters and an incomplete manuscript of a masnavi, a long narrative poem in Urdu in which two half-lines of each verse correspond in meter, which remains the same throughout the poem.Umrao Jaan, in Madness of Waiting, lays Ruswa’s life threadbare. Ruswa is hopelessly in love with one Sofia (Miss Sahiba) and wanders crazed in the streets. He is a “traveller on the highway of failure” and his journey “leads him into oblivion”. Ruswa is killed by the “sword of intimacy and arrows of unfulfilled desires”. His lover is his executioner. Umrao Jaan, however, also gives her devilish creator his due. She doesn’t fail to enumerate his many virtues. Ruswa, she writes, is “a jester, witty and charming”. He is “a master of enchantment and coquetry”, a poet who not only “measures his eloquent words, but is also judicious and refined in his taste”. He is “pure and pristine, handsome and well-disposed”. There is “subtlety” in Ruswa’s conversation and “delicacy” in his verse.

A story of love and longing, Madness of Waiting is a deft and delightful read that stands out for its playful narrative that pushes the boundaries of fiction, lending it a luminous arc of reality. Umrao Jaan had threatened her creator in Umrao Jaan Ada thus: “Dushnam dey ke mujhko bahut khush na ho jiye/Kya kijiyega aap jo meri zubaan khule?” (Be not too contented, having defamed me just so/What would you do, if my tongue loosens like yours?)