The following is C.M. Naim’s preface to his upcoming volume by Primus Books, Delhi, on Hasrat Mohani, titled Prison Observations of a Maverik Maulana. Naim’s formal dedication of the book reads: “This book about a 27-year-old maverick is dedicated to all 27-year-old mavericks in South Asia. May their tribe thrive and grow strong!”Naim passed away in the US on July 9, 2025. §Mushāhidāt-i Zindānī by Syed Fazlul Hasan Hasrat of Mohan, Unnao (U.P.), a unique book in Urdu, is an illuminating account of what a young Indian observed and experienced when he was sentenced to one year of ‘rigorous imprisonment’ at Naōn Central Jail in 1908 under Section 124-A (‘Sedition’) of the Indian Penal Code—Section 152 in the current Bharat Nyaya Sanhita. His crime: publishing an article on the state of public education in Egypt, then under British occupation, in his modest, monthly, Urdu-i Mu’alla (Aligarh). He was 27 at the time, slight, pudgy and near-sighted, married and father of an infant daughter. He had yet to become Maulana Hasrat Mohani – master ghazal poet, maverick political activist, coiner of the slogan, ‘Inqilāb Zindabād’, contrarian member of the Constituent Assembly of India – who during the remaining four decades of his life also performed more than a dozen Hajj at Mecca and possibly celebrated as many Janam Ashtamis at Brindavan.The dedication page of the draft.My book is primarily about that young man and his times, what he was like at that age and how people thought of him, how he coped with the calamity, and what insights he then shared with his fellow Indians and, more importantly, also practiced all his life. It is organized in two parts. The first part is an introduction, divided into short chapters and based on contemporary records. It aims to acquaint the reader with the youthful Fazlul Hasan, the milieu at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, where he reached adulthood, and the literary journal he started as the first step in his grand project of saving classical Urdu poetry from oblivion. The second part is the translation of the title text, duly annotated, followed by an afterword that highlights certain milestones in his later public life. My translation of Hasrat’s Urdu prose is close to the original but not literal. Sentences and words have frequently been rearranged to make for easier reading. Nothing, however, has been left out except a few duplications.Urdu words are quoted in a simple phonetic transcription; only two diacritics are used: a macron over a, i, u when they are pronounced long—Examples: kāmil, ‘perfect,’ mūlī, ‘radish’—and a tilde over n (ñ) to indicate that the preceding vowel is nasalized—Examples: hāñ, ‘yes,’ maiñ, ‘I.’I am indebted to Abdur Rasheed, Amrita Shodhan, and Shariq Khan for their acts of kindness and to Rekhta.org for continuing to be an invaluable resource for people interested in Urdu across the world. I can only offer my sincere gratitude to B. N. Varma and Primus Books for helping me bring Hasrat’s little book to new readers.Chicago, 2025Choudhri Mohammed Naim is a legendary scholar of Urdu language and literature. He was professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.