At the end of the 19th century Muhammad Hadi Rusva had hardly any predecessors or indigenous prototypes on which to model his famous novel Umrao Jan Ada. The first tentative novelistic experiments in Urdu were inspired substantially by Victorian English prose, especially sensational or romance fiction by authors like W.M. Reynolds, Marie Corelli or F. Marion Crawford, which in the second half of the 19th century became extremely popular and vastly appreciated among Indian readers. Rusva was well conversant with such literature and even translated some of it into Urdu, and no doubt this was one of his sources of inspiration. But he was also well-versed in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and had received a classical schooling in various fields including literature; hence he was familiar with traditional literary means and conventions allowing Urdu authors to avoid openly expressing erotic feelings, and to write about love, lust and desire in a veiled and metaphorical manner. Drawing from all these resources, partly foreign and partly indigenous, Rusva created a masterly novel portraying and exploring the complexity of sex workers’ lives and work long before feminist discourse took these up. But he tackles sexuality and male-female relations in a manner often leaving the issues oblique and imperceptible on the surface, though, a reader aware of the relevant cultural and linguistic idiom is able to look behind the veil and perceive matters in their appropriate, often even obscene dimension. Rusva’s book thus seems an early harbinger of the controversy regarding obscenity in Urdu literature, which burst into full force in the 1940s. This article analyses the hidden and the overt in Rusva’s Umrao Jan Ada. It discusses the literary and linguistic techniques and tools used to depict what was “shameful” according to the prevalent morality and to speak about what according to this should have remained unsaid.