Agha Ahmad Ali


Āghā Aḥmad ʿAlī was a 19th-century Bengali academic, historian and scholar of the Persian language. In addition to Persian, he also composed poetry in Urdu. He is seen as one of the greatest Persian scholars of Bengal.

Life

Agha Ahmad Ali's grandfather Agha Abdul Ali was a Sunni Muslim calligraphist who originated from Isfahan in Iran and settled in the city of Dhaka during Nader Shah's invasion of India. Ahmad's father was Agha Shajaat Ali, a Dhakaiya who had a hobby of collecting rare manuscripts. Ahmad studied Persian locally with Munshi Mutasim Billah as well as Khwaja Asadullah Kawkab, a noteworthy poet of the Dhaka Nawab family. He developed a personal library of over 2000 books. It is said that he completed all valuable books in the city of Dhaka some time between 1856 and 1860.
Ali involved himself in a literary competition with Mirza Ghalib, a prominent poet of the Indian subcontinent, after Ghalib criticised Mohammad Hossein ibn-khalaf Tabrizi's Persian dictionary Burhan-e-Qate. In response, Ali wrote the Muayyid-i-Burhan in 1865 in defence of Tabrizi. Ghalib responded to Ali in Tegh-i-Tez. Ali again replied in challenge to Ghalib, with a booklet called Shamsher-i-Teztar.
In 1862, he established the Calcutta Madrasah-i-Ahmadiyah. He started to teach Persian at the Calcutta Aliyah Madrasah in 1864 taking the advice of Edward Byles Cowell, the principal of the Sanskrit College. In addition to this, Ali also taught Persian to Cowell as well as Heinrich Blochmann, another leading European orientalist. With a number of students, Ali's most senior disciples were Muhammad Ashraf and Fida Sylheti. Agha Ahmad Ali died of tuberculosis on June 1873, in his early 30s. He was buried in the graveyard near the langar khana of Mirza Saheb.

Works

Agha Ahmad Ali worked closely with The Asiatic Society and contributed heavily to the Bibliotheca Indica. He wrote a number of commentaries on historical works such as:
Some of his other works included: