Mir Amman Dehlavi: The Author of Bagh-o-Bahar

Mir Amman came from a family that had served the Mughal court in Delhi for generations. In the disorder of the eighteenth century, as the empire collapsed, the family lost its lands and position, and he left Delhi to seek a living, first in Patna and later in Calcutta.

In Calcutta he was introduced to John Gilchrist, head of the Hindustani department at the new Fort William College, which the East India Company had founded to train its officers. Gilchrist wanted readable books in the everyday Urdu of Delhi, and Mir Amman, a native speaker of that idiom, was engaged to write one.

Bagh-o-Bahar (completed 1802, printed 1804): his retelling of Qissa-e-Chahar Darvesh in the plain speech of Delhi. Read it here.

Ganj-e-Khubi: an Urdu version of the Persian book of ethics Akhlaq-e-Muhsini.

Mir Amman showed that Urdu prose could be as natural as speech. In his preface he says he wrote the story the way people of Delhi actually talk, and that choice made Bagh-o-Bahar a model for generations of readers and writers. His Fort William colleague Mazhar Ali Khan Vila did the same for the Baital Pachisi.