This essay is a co-winner of the 2025 Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English Translation

In 2025, the Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English Translation was open to translations into English of Urdu non-fiction (essays, speeches or pen portraits between 1000 and 5,000 words), relating to the theme of “Justice”.

This year, the prize was given to Shaiq Ali’s translation of “Kisan, Mazdoor, Sarmayadar aur Zamindar” by Saadat Hasan Manto, and Arif Ansari’s translation of “No God Rises to Accept My Service” by Sardar Jafri. The winners will receive a cash prize of Rs 25,000 and a certificate.

Shaiq Ali is a PhD Student at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis. He is working on Urdu/Hindi literature, Muslim print cultures and South Asian literature. Arif Ansari has translated ten fiction and non-fiction Urdu books into English. He is currently translating the Urdu collection of articles by Sardar Jafri titled Urdu ki Panch Ratein (“Five Nights of Lucknow”).

The judges for this year’s award were Ather Farouqui and Aysha Munira Rasheed.

The jury said, “The translation of ‘Kisan, Mazdur, Sarmayadar aur Zamindar’ is remarkably faithful to the source text and the text feels natural in English. The translator appears to possess an equal mastery of both languages. The nuances of Urdu have been successfully retained and idiomatic terms have been handled with a dexterity that retains their original flavour and nuance. There is a clear preference for preserving culturally resonant terms so that the text retains its texture. Impressively, the translation effectively conveys the rhythm and emphasis of the original, so that the English version never feels contrived or stilted.

“The translation preserves Manto’s sharp socio-political critique of class divisions, economic hierarchies, the unequal distribution of power, and the systemic exploitation that underlies agrarian life. Rather than reducing the translated text to literal equivalence and simple English substitutes, the translator preserves its original form, allowing it to convey social and emotional meaning. This not only safeguards the cultural integrity of the text but also reminds the English reader of a particular Indian landscape – economic, moral, and linguistic – from which the essay arises. The translation thus becomes an act of mediation between two cultural worlds.”

The jury also noted that “‘No God Rises to Accept My Service’ stands out among other entries for its lucid and smooth prose and its fidelity to the source text. This entry rises to the challenge of translating the ornate Urdu prose of the original text by Sardar Jafri and producing a well-composed text in English. The translator’s diction is marked by appropriacy and intelligibility. Despite being an abridged translation of the source text and using multiple ellipses, the translation scores well on the criterion of translational fidelity, coherence and cohesion. It also caters to the theme of this year's Ali Jawad Memorial Prize ‘justice’ in a subtle, yet profound way.”

Co-Winner: ‘Kisan, Mazdoor, Sarmayadar aur Zamindar’ by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated by Shaiq Ali

The two years of experience of distributing aid in famine-struck regions all but attest to our long-held view that these hardships that we have been trying to resolve from a distant corner of Russia are symptoms not of mere minor ailments. They are, rather, outcomes of those cancerous ills that we progressive people and our indifferent attitudes have begotten and which the working class is now dealing with.

Despite offering their labour and suffering unceasing torment, the workers are dependent on us. But we, with our seemingly irreproachable attitudes, do not even spare a thought for them. If this year, our ears refuse to hear their distressed cries of starvation – wreaking havoc in the lives of thousands of helpless youth let alone elderly and children – and continue to turn a blind eye over their miseries, it does not imply that these adversities will not befall us again. It is as if catastrophes can be overlooked if they don't take place in front of our eyes. We will try to make ourselves believe that they do not exist and that if they do, it is simply by the laws of nature. That does not concern us, does it? This optimism rests on falsehood. Not only can these crises be prevented but they must be completely destroyed and that time is not far.

We think that our liquor-filled goblets are hidden from the working class. We use ancestral traditions and shrewd arguments to prove our indulgences lawful. We live lives of comfort and amusement amidst these workmen who, with their gruelling labour and sweat, provide us with our instruments of enjoyment. But now the baton of education is bringing to light our misplaced affiliations, and before long we will be presented as dangerous criminals in front of the world. Criminals who, at the break of dawn, are caught in the very act of crime.

If a merchant comes to vend dangerous or spoiled goods or sells roti and other items of need for a fortune for which he has paid nothing but peanuts and then claim to provide for people’s needs, if a maker of cigarettes, alcohol or glass professes at the top of his voice to be a benefactor as he offers jobs to the working class, if a clerk whose salary runs into thousands of pounds swears that he acts in the service of our community and, if a zamindar boasts that it is in the benefit of the village that he purchases exorbitant farming implements…For if all these pretences are possible today, if these claims can be made loud and clear when thousands of peasants are dying of hunger, when a zamindar sows potatoes in his acres of fields for the sole cause of brewing liquor, then tomorrow these circumstances will change and these false declarations will no longer pollute the air.

Reasonably, we are tired of reiterating that the thousands of hunger-stricken – who are subjected to gross labour exploitation but earn meagre wages – do not even have the good fortune to receive stale bread while they provide for our necessities. Frolicking in gardens, feasts and festivities of hunting grounds, drinking parties, even cheese and meat are available to us only because of their hard labour and our excesses do nothing but put even more strain. But now, we, the people of Russia, are more than capable of comprehending our own realities. I distinctly remember the account of a youth who came to meet me this past winter. He arrived just in time for us to visit a peasant’s home together. In that house, soiled things were scattered everywhere, women all yellow and in dangling swathes and a child, sick and wailing. The air was putrid and wretched. Sorrow and longing lay everywhere. The yellow faces of inhabitants were in want of mercy.

I remember when we came out of the hut, the youth was struggling to say something. His tongue seemed stuck to the insides of mouth and he started weeping. He had earlier spent a few months in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He had visited their beautiful gardens, and saw splendid palaces and been where amusements were ever-present and attended every gathering of entertainment. Today was the first time he had seen the faces of those who produce these goods of pleasure with their sweat. He was astonished and dejected. Perhaps he had expected that in his wealthy bohemian community where access to every nature of gathering is possible because of the spread of knowledge, the reward of hard labour may be recognised. He only now had come to realise that thousands had to toil in coal mines to produce their instruments of luxury.

Perhaps he might forget those people who sacrifice their lives for our necessities but we, the people of Russia, cannot entertain such thoughts in our minds now. The disparity between luxury and labour is nothing but glaring and the indulgent ways of one class of people and the austerity of another is for everyone to see. We cannot turn our faces away from the price the working class pay for the lives of revelry and comfort that we live. The sun has set for us and we cannot ignore the emerging reality. It is no longer possible to continue using the government as a facade to legitimise our malicious desires to rule over people. Hiding behind the veil of arts and sciences – indispensable as they are in the present age – or making use of our riches or our rationalisation of ancestral traditions, we can neither hide nor carry on our corruption.

The arrows of the sun of reality will tear through all those veils…At this moment, every individual has awakened to the reality that whoever serves the government is doing so not for the welfare of the people but to amass wealth. For we are aware of those landowners who expand their cultivation not for mutual interests but instead hoping to pay for their excesses with the profits…At this juncture, the issue cannot remain under shrouds anymore. For how long can such falsehood endure? For the affluent class–those who do no labour yet possess a fortune – there are two paths. One way could be that they turn away from religion and all other ideals and disband them all, saying:

“I am the sole owner of these rights and privileges and I will not abandon them in any condition. If anyone attempts to separate them from me, they will have to consider my power. I have strength in my arms, I can raise troops, order imprisonments, can whip and if it comes to it, even hang.”

The other path is to admit one’s transgressions, to renounce lies, to ask for forgiveness and contribute one’s wealth in people’s interests, not just verbally as has been the case in the last two years but after acknowledging that this wealth was derived from labourers’ hard sweat and which has been forcefully taken away. To raze those walls that stand erected between us and the working class, not only through rhetoric but also through deeds. To consider workers as brothers and alter our current ways of life; to relinquish our individual privileges and profits and collectively labour with the working class to benefit from the developments in science and literature – which we are forcing on them without their consent anyway.

We are standing at a crossroads and we have to select one of the two paths. The former leads to perpetual depravity and condemnation. In this, there is a fear of the wrongdoers being revealed in public and an uncertainty of change in every step of the present system. The second path – to sincerely embrace ethical principles with a clean heart and to unrelentingly endeavour in that cause – is open. For those principles which are being argued by human intellect today or tomorrow, are certain to prevail. If not us, then the generations that are to come will definitely make that certain. Eradicating this hubris is the only way to save our community and nation from those calamities and miseries. Abstaining from weaving falsehoods, refraining from indulgences and forging a fraternity is the most fitting cure for all such maladies.