Observations on the Mussulmauns of India

Observations on the Mussulmauns of India
By Mrs. Meer Hasan Ali

Written by an Englishwoman who married an Indian Muslim nobleman and lived among his family for twelve years in Lucknow, this 1832 work is one of the earliest and most detailed firsthand European accounts of Muslim domestic life, customs, and religious observance in India, covering subjects from marriage and mourning rituals to festivals and household routine.

This 1917 second edition, edited with notes and an introduction by the scholar W. Crooke, preserves the original text and its distinctive transliterations while adding scholarly annotation, making it a valuable ethnographic and historical source on 19th-century Indo-Muslim society.

A public-domain work, offered as a free digital edition by Nile Book Store.

Excerpt

Actuated by a sense of duty to the people with whom twelve years of my life were passed on terms of intimacy and kindness, I was induced to write the principal number of the following Letters as faithful sketches of the Manners, Customs, and Habits of a people but little known to the European reader. They were at first designed merely for the perusal of private friends; who, viewing them with interest, recommended my bringing them before the public, considering that the information they contained would be acceptable from its originality, as presenting a more familiar view of the opinions and the domestic habits of the Mussulmaun community of Hindoostaun than any hitherto presented through other channels.