Darbar e Dil

About the Author

Sidq Jaisi

(early–mid 20th century)
Sidq Jaisi was an Urdu poet-courtier attached to the court of the last Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, in the early twentieth century. He is best known for his Urdu diary Darbar-e-Durbar, a first-hand account of court life under Prince Muazzam Jah, later translated into English by Narendra Luther as The Nocturnal Court: The Life of a Prince of Hyderabad. The memoir is valued as a rare insider record of the splendor, leisure, and eventual decline of Hyderabadi court culture in the decades before Indian independence. His writing captures the rhythms of aristocratic life — the mushairas, the etiquette, and the slow unraveling of a feudal order — with the intimacy of someone who lived within it.