Note on Translation

Begum Sarbuland’s travel account began its life in 1909 as a private travel journal. It was only published decades later with light editing. The production quality of the print version was low and the book contains many transcription errors. I have corrected obvious mistakes in my translation but generally noted their occurrence. In my translation, I have also tried to approximate the journal’s easy informality for an English-speaking audience. To this end, I have particularly shortened or removed lengthy honorifics that are intuitive in Urdu but cumbersome in English, though I have left them in place in section headings and where they form a logical unit, as in “Nawab sahib.” The journal also contains a moderate number of English words (such as “lunch” or “breakfast”) that Begum Sarbuland presumably used in her daily life, even when they were unfamiliar for general Urdu readers. She retained these English words in her published diary but often provided parenthetical glosses. These glosses are of course unnecessary for English-speaking readers, and I have excluded them here. On some occasions, I indicate the use of English vocabulary with quotation marks. Another idiosyncrasy of the book is its shifting use of tense; presumably, some diary entries were written as reflections on days past, while other entries describe events as she experienced them. At other times, even when clearly narrating events in the past, she switches between using the past and the present. In English, these rapid shifts are jarring. Thus, even as I have attempted to retain the book’s meandering temporality, I have, on occasion, regularized her use of tense where confusion might arise. These slight modifications do not affect the meaning or the feeling of the text, but they do make the translation more readable. The original text is divided into 118 sections. I have retained the original section headings but divided them into ten chapters. Unfamiliar terms that appear often in the diary are defined in the glossary. This book uses a consistent transliteration scheme for words and proper names in Urdu, a simplified version of the system advocated by the Journal of Urdu Studies. There are a few exceptions: when words have been adopted into English, like “purdah,” “nawab,” or “begum,” I use the more familiar spellings. In keeping with a longstanding family practice, I have rendered the honorific title (and later surname) “Jang” as “Jung.”