Alif Laila is the name by which Hindi and Urdu readers know the Thousand and One Nights, the great collection of stories that English readers often call the Arabian Nights. The name comes from the Arabic title, Alf Layla wa-Layla, "a thousand nights and a night". In Hindi it usually means a prose retelling of the stories, sold in one fat volume or in a series of thin ones.
There is no single author. The collection grew over hundreds of years, and every Hindi Alif Laila is somebody's selection and retelling, which is why old library catalogues tend to give the author as "various".
The frame story
Everything in Alif Laila hangs on one frame. King Shahryar, betrayed by his wife, decides to marry a new bride every day and have her killed the next morning. Scheherazade, the daughter of his vizier, volunteers to marry him. Each night she tells the king a story and stops at the most exciting point, so that he spares her for one more day to hear the end. The nights run on, story inside story, until the king has changed his mind.
That device is what makes the book work. Characters inside one tale start telling tales of their own, and a reader can be three stories deep before finding the way back out.
What is inside
The stories range from fairy tales of jinns, magic lamps and flying horses to tales of merchants, thieves, clever women and foolish kings. Some are comic, some are cautionary, and many end with a lesson about greed, pride or honesty. A familiar pattern in Hindi editions has a king who walks his city in disguise, meets a stranger with an odd habit and orders him to the palace to explain it, and the explanation becomes the next story.
Sindbad the sailor's seven voyages, the hunchback's tale and the stories of Baghdad under Harun al-Rashid are among the best known. Aladdin and Ali Baba and the forty thieves are in nearly every popular edition, although they entered the collection late, through the French translation that Antoine Galland published in the early 1700s.
Where the stories come from
The core of the collection is usually traced to a lost Persian book of tales, Hazar Afsan ("a thousand stories"), which was rendered into Arabic and then grew in Baghdad and later in Cairo. Some of its stories have Indian roots, which suits a book that came back to India in Urdu and Hindi retellings in the 19th century and has stayed popular ever since. For many Indian readers who grew up in the 1990s, the name Alif Laila also brings back a long-running television serial based on the stories.
How to read it
Treat Alif Laila as a book to dip into. Read one night's story at a sitting and stop when Scheherazade does. For a new reader of Hindi it is ideal practice: the sentences are usually plain, the vocabulary is everyday and the plot pulls you forward. Our beginner's guide to Hindi literature suggests what to read next once the stories feel easy.
Where to find it
The traditional stories are centuries old and free for anyone to retell. A particular modern Hindi retelling, with its own wording and illustrations, can still be in copyright, so the edition matters. Older Hindi and Urdu editions turn up in scanned form on the Internet Archive, and the classic English translations by Edward William Lane and Richard Burton are long out of copyright and easy to find on Project Gutenberg. See where to read Indian-language books for free for how to search each source, and public domain in India for why the edition matters.
Sahitya Chintan does not host or sell copies of this book. This note describes the work and points to the kinds of places where it can be read legally.
Questions readers ask
Who wrote Alif Laila?
No single author. The Thousand and One Nights is a collection that grew over centuries from Persian, Indian and Arabic storytelling. Hindi and Urdu books called Alif Laila are retellings by many different translators and editors, which is why catalogues often list the author as "various".
Are Aladdin and Ali Baba part of Alif Laila?
They are part of almost every popular edition, but they are not found in the oldest Arabic manuscripts. They entered the collection through Antoine Galland's French version of the early 1700s and have been part of it in most languages ever since.
Is Alif Laila good for learning to read Hindi?
Yes. The stories are short, the plots are easy to follow and each one carries you to the next, which is exactly what a new reader of Devanagari needs. Choose a plainly written prose edition rather than an ornate older one.