Mirza Ali Lutf

Mirza Ali Lutf (d. 1813) was an early Urdu prose writer and poet of the age of Fort William College, Calcutta, remembered above all as the author of Gulshan-e-Hind — the first biographical treasury of Urdu poets, written in 1801 at the suggestion of John Gilchrist, the college's head. He rendered Ali Ibrahim Khan's Persian Gulzar-e-Ibrahim into Urdu, giving the new Urdu prose its first literary history, and he also turned Saadi's Pand-Nama into Urdu verse and wrote the masnavi Nairang-e-Ishq. His own poetry, in what survives, is small — ten ghazals and fifteen couplets — and it is the plain-spoken ghazal of a traveller: the rind answering the preacher, the road from the temple winding to the Kaaba, and a wanderer who left Hindustan not knowing whether the dark men of the Deccan or the fair men of England would be his end. No birth year is settled for him, and no birthplace is recorded; his working life ran between Hyderabad, where Gulshan-e-Hind was written, and Calcutta.