Mir Amman
1748–1806
Biography
Mir Amman, usually dated 1748 to 1806, was a writer of Urdu prose whose working life was spent in Calcutta, at Fort William College. He was born in Delhi into a family that had served the Mughal court, and he is sometimes called Mir Amman of Delhi. When invasions and plundering in the later Mughal years made the city unsafe, he left for Azimabad (Patna), and after a spell without steady work he made his way to Calcutta.
In Calcutta he was introduced by Mir Bahadur Ali Husaini to John Borthwick Gilchrist, who ran the Hindustani department of the college and took him on. Gilchrist asked him to turn the Persian Tale of the Four Dervishes into simple Urdu prose. The result, Bagh-o-Bahar, was begun in 1801 and finished in 1802, and a revised complete edition appeared in 1804. His second book, Ganj-e-Khoobi, is a translation of Husain Wa'iz Kashifi's Akhlaq-e-Mohsini. Little is recorded of his private life, and even his birth and death years are given with some uncertainty.
Bagh-o-Bahar matters chiefly for its language. Earlier Urdu prose often leaned on ornate, Persian-heavy phrasing, and Mir Amman is often credited with giving the language a plainer and livelier voice. The book was translated into English in the nineteenth century and into Malay in the 1840s, which shows how far it travelled beyond Urdu.
On this site, Bagh-o-Bahar (باغ و بہار) is the book credited to him. It is made of linked tales held together by a frame story, and it shows the Urdu prose of the Fort William College years in its own voice.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
باغ و بہار
by میر امّن دہلوی
Mir Amman's Garden and Spring (1802), written at Fort William College in Calcutta, is the Urdu telling of the Four Dervishes. A merchant-prince in trouble is found by a stranger, who has four wandering dervishes tell how each came to lose his throne or fortune. It is the book…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.