Mir Husain Ata Khan Tahsin
Biography
Mir Husain Ata Khan Tahsin was an Urdu writer of the eighteenth century, who wrote under the pen-name Tahsin. His family home was at Etawah, but he spent long periods in Calcutta, where he went for work, and for a time he served as chief clerk, or mir munshi, to an English army officer. Little is recorded of his life beyond these facts, and the sources consulted give no firm dates for his birth or death.
His best-known book, Nau Tarz-e-Murassa, is a dastan, a long prose romance, rendered into Urdu from the Persian tale Qissa-e-Chahar Darvesh. He wrote it in a rhymed and ornate prose, full of Arabic and Persian phrases and interspersed with verse, a manner that was fashionable at the time. For a long period it was counted as the first Urdu dastan of northern India, until an earlier Urdu prose work, Karbal Katha, came to light.
The book on this site, نو طرز مرصع, is listed under his name. Reading it gives a sense of how Urdu storytelling took shape in the late eighteenth century, before prose in the language moved toward plainer styles. It is a useful text for anyone interested in the early history of Urdu fiction, and it stands at the start of a tradition that later writers would build on.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
نو طرز مرصع
by محمد حسین عطا خاں تحسین
Muhammad Husain Ata Khan Tahsin's Nau Tarz-e-Murassa (about 1775) is the first telling of the Four Dervishes tale in Urdu prose, a full generation before Bagh o Bahar. Four princes in dervish dress each tell how they lost everything, in the ornate, ornament-laden prose of the…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.