Wahi Wahanvi Full Stop To

In Urdu, the gemination (or tashdeed) over the second letter of the word was dropped to make the pronunciation easier.

Wahi Wahanvi Full Stop To

Initially, it was used as a full stop to end a sentence, hence the name: when a sentence was needed to be cut, the sign was placed over the last word.

It also came in handy to mark the digits in accounts (such as amount of money) or proper nouns.

And then in Persian and Urdu literary texts, the sign began to denote a takhallus, or the pen name of a poet.

For instance, Mirza Asadullah Khan took the takhallus Ghalib and he is almost always referred to by this penname.

In royal courts, poets adopted the pen name to save their works from being plagiarised by the other court poets.

Sometimes the geographical belonging is added to the takhallus to make it more distinct and examples in this regard abound, such as, Aatish Lukhnavi or Daagh Dehlvi.

How the tradition of takhallus began in Persian and how it was borrowed by the poets of Urdu is an interesting tale.

But I am not going to deliberate on it as Dr Syed Abdullah in his scholarly work Mabahis (Lahore, 1965) has narrated it quite well.

Dr Abdullah has also discussed the nuances of the Arabic word takhallus, which means, literally, to get liberated or become secure The purpose of this piece is to enlist some interesting pen names, or pseudonyms, assumed by some authors of Urdu.

But let there be no confusion that sometimes in Urdu a takhallus is quite different from a pseudonym.

In Western literary culture a pen name or pseudonym is used toeither conceal the identity of a writer or as a part of marketing gimmicks.

For instance, George Eliot, the famous English novelist, poet and the creator of the works such as Adam Bede and The mill on the floss, was born Mary Ann Evans and she adopted the pen name George Eliot so that her works would be taken seriously, since in those days women writers were known usually for writing itty-bitty love stories and romantic tales.

But sometimes the writers of Urdu too adopted a penname to camouflage their identity.

Women writers writing by their real names was frowned upon in the conservative society of the subcontinent, so Zahida Khatoon Shervaniya, a talented woman poet who died quite young, used her initials: Ze Khe Sheen.

On the other hand, some male writers created a shadow writer, their female literary double, to lure the readers, as in theearly 20th century an aura of mystique and romance surrounded woman writers.

According to Qurratul Ain Hyder, female fiction writers were considered mysterious personalities.

Qamar Zamani Begum was not a real person and Niaz Fatehpuri wrote some pieces by this pseudonym.

Tahira Devi Sherazi created a sensation among the readers in 1930s but it was a fake identity, just a pen name used by Fazl-i-Haq Qureshi.

The erotic Urdu novels with the name Wahi Wahanvi printed on the title were the creation of Shaukat Thanvi.

Though he had penned a few, later a plethora, of such cheap works flooded the market, all written by a host of ghost writers.

Even in the latter half of the 20th century, many so-called socio-romantic Urdu novels by women writers were ghostwritten by male writers, as the market for such worl(s consisted mainly of women and a novel by a woman writer would have been moreattractive for the female readers.

Similarly, almost half of the romantic short stories and serialised novels appearing in the digests published for women are ghostwritten by men.