In 1799, the Urdu poet Mirza Jan 'Tapish' was apprehended by the Murshidabad District Collector and charged with conspiring to overthrow East India Company rule in Bengal and Bihar, a plot that was alleged to have involved Shah Zaman of Afghanistan, the Viceroy of Muscat, and dozens of disaffected feudal landlords. Having left his home in the Mughal capital Delhi some fifteen years earlier, 'Tapish' had entered the service of the Naib Nazim of Dhaka (the capital of present-day Bangladesh), Nawab Shams al-Daulah. In 1792 'Tapish' completed the earliest manuscript version of the Shams al-Bayan fi Mustilahat al-Hindustan ('The Sun of Speech on the Idioms of Hindustan'), named for his patron and written "in explanation of the idioms of the houses of Delhi, for which are arranged many verses and the understanding of distant ones." This paper presents evidence of 'Tapish' having continued his lexicographic activities both while in custody in Calcutta and later in collaboration with British philologists. The particular generic form of the Shams al-Bayan, it is argued, was the product of the increasing professionalization and geographic dispersal of Delhi's poets. One result of this professionalized literary economy was the incorporation of new social groups into an elite literary culture and, eventually, the promotion of a language, Urdu, as an ethnic marker of political identity.

Walter Hakala is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He teaches courses on South Asian literature, history, and culture in conjunction with the Asian Studies Program. His recent work reveals the importance of Indians as cultural and linguistic intermediaries in British expeditions to Afghanistan. He completed his Ph.D. in South Asian Regional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 writing a dissertation on the history of Urdu lexicography. Prior to that, he completed an M.A. in Urdu literature (2004) from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India (his city of birth) and a B.A. in Asian Studies from the University of Virginia (2001). He has lived in India, Pakistan, and Morocco.