Akbar Allahabadi

Akbar Allahabadi (1846-1921) spent his career as a judge under British rule while writing the sharpest Urdu satire of the colonial encounter — on English education, on imitation, on the new professional class he himself belonged to. That contradiction is his subject as much as his circumstance. He is quoted today wherever a double standard needs naming, usually by people unaware they are quoting a nineteenth-century sessions judge. Couplets here are verified against his collected work.