Mirza Jan Tapish

Mirza Jan Tapish — real name Mirza Mohammad Ismail — was a Delhi-born poet and lexicographer whose life ran through the hinge of British India. His father, Mirza Yusuf Begh, had come from Bukhara and settled in Delhi, where Tapish was born and where he learnt Persian, Urdu and Sanskrit. In 1799 he was imprisoned with Shamsuddowlah for an alleged conspiracy to unsettle the British and sent to jail in Calcutta; freed in 1806 or 1807, he joined Fort William College as a scribe of Persian documents and a reviser of other translators' books, and became one of Calcutta's men of letters. His first book, Shamsul Bayan fi Mustalahat-e-Hindostan (1792), is a Persian dictionary of Urdu idioms, proverbs and technical terms, named for his friend Shamsuddowlah; he translated Enayetullah's Persian Masnavi Bahar-i-Danish into Urdu in 1801; and his own Urdu poems, the Kulliyat-i-Tapish, were published by Fort William College in 1812. The tazkiras praise his neatness, his clarity of language (fasahat) and the freshness of his subjects. He died in Kolkata in 1814.