of the composition predicated that they be set in contemporary society. If they were convincingly to show the advantages of female education, they must show them accruing to characters in contemporary surroundings with which the readers can identify themselves and see the relevance of the message to their lives. For the first time, in the second half of the nineteenth cenury, there arose a need in the society which could not be fulfilled through the medium of traditional romance. To meet this need, fiction had to be yoked to contemporary life. The importance of these works lay in the fact that they brought Hindi fiction from the fairy tale world of Rani ketaki ki kahani (1803) to the threshold of life. In the transition of Hindi fiction from romance to realism, Nazir Ahmad's Mirat al-'arus acted as a guide. It may be further noted that sister languages like Urdu and Hindi, faced with new identical educational needs, responded by producing similar didactic fictional works aimed at the education of women. That this should have been so is to be expected; that it should have remained unrecognised across the critical boundaries that lie between Hindi and Urdu cannot be described as satisfactory. At a broader level, the Hindi fictional works discussed above probably provide the first instance of Hindi drawing strength from its elder sibling Urdu in the field of fiction, of which the second important example was to be seen in the last decade of the nineteenth century when Devkinandan Khatri (1861-1913) drew upon Urdu dastans for his tilismi novels.67 m the beginning of the twentieth century, Hindi and Urdu were to have a common author is the form of Premcand (1880-1936). The mutual influences of Hindi and Urdu on each other when recognized and studied have yielded valuable results.68 One notices similar developments taking place in the field of Hindi and Urdu short stories which are worthy of further investigation. In fact, one can include Panjabi in this gambit of mutually productive influences as the case of the celebrated Panjabi novelist Nanak Singh (1897-1971) reminds us, who molded his literary career on Premcand.69 ^The first Hindi tilismi novel Candrakanta by Devkinandan Khatri was published in 1891. Urdu dastans had been in print much longer. On the life and works of Devkinandan Khatri, see Rudra Kasikey, Devkinandan Khatri: uyaktitiva aur krttitva, Banaras, 1961; Giris Tripathi, ed., Devkinandan smritigranth, Banaras, 1963. "See, for example, Prakash Monis, Urdu adab par hindFka asar, Allahabad, 1978. "See Nank Singh, Men dunia, Delhi, 5th edition, 1968, pp. 87-89. His novel Citta lahu (1932) translated into Urdu by Ratan Singh, Safed Xun, National Book Trust of India, New Delhi, 1971. Annual of Urdu Studies, #7 4^