Mirza Muhammad Hasan Qateel

Mirza Muhammad Hasan Qateel (c. 1758–1818) was born Diwani Singh, into a Punjabi Khatri family of Delhi, and became the most influential Persian teacher of his age in India. Educated in Persian and Urdu, he came at eighteen under the influence of his tutor, the Shi'a poet Mirza Baqir Shahid Isfahani, embraced Twelver Shi'a Islam, and took the name Mirza Muhammad Hasan Qateel. After service in the army of Najaf Khan, he moved to Lucknow in 1784, where he became the city's leading philologist and teacher of Persian. A polyglot — Persian, Urdu, Turkish and Arabic — he wrote nearly twenty books, above all the Persian grammars Chahar Sharbat and Nahr al-Fasahat, which were copied across India as primers and drew a famous line between Indian Persian and the Iranian Persian he held as standard. With Insha Allah Khan Insha he wrote Darya-e-Latafat, the first book on Urdu metre and prosody. His Urdu ghazals, in the manner of Hafiz, survive only scattered in tazkiras. He died in Lucknow in 1817 or 1818 and is buried at Qaisar Bagh.