Siraj-ud-Din Ali Khan Arzu

Siraj-ud-Din Ali Khan Arzu (1687–1756), born in Agra, was the great scholar-poet of eighteenth-century Delhi — a Persian poet of the first rank, a pioneering linguist and lexicographer, and the mentor of a whole generation of Urdu poetry. Writing mainly in Persian (seven divans, five masnavis), he nevertheless championed rekhta — early Urdu — at a time when Persian still ruled the literary world: he urged poets like Sauda to compose in the vernacular, and groomed his own nephew Mir Taqi Mir alongside Mazhar Jan-e-Janan and Shah Mubarak Abroo. His home mushaira in Delhi was the city's literary court; poets sent their manuscripts to him for correction, and Mir wrote that every master of rekhta was, in effect, Arzu's student. As a scholar he stood a century ahead of his time: his dictionaries — *Siraj-ul-Lughat*, the Urdu–Persian *Nawadir-ul-Alfaz* (1751), and the *Chiragh-e-Hidayat* glossary of poetic idiom — laid the foundations of Urdu lexicography, and in his philological treatise *Muzmir* he was the first scholar to place Sanskrit in the Indo-European language family, decades before Sir William Jones. He moved to Lucknow in 1754 and died there in 1756.