Insha Allah Khan

Syed Insha Allah Khan, known as Insha (c. 1752–1817), was an Indian poet and writer in Urdu, Persian and Hindi at the courts of Delhi and Lucknow, and the author of the first grammar of Urdu ¹.

His father, Mir Masha Allah Khan, was a famous physician in the service of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula at Murshidabad, where Insha was born ¹. The Urdu article traces his Sayyid family to Najaf, his grandfather a physician summoned to Delhi by the emperor Farrukhsiyar ². Insha came to Delhi under Shah Alam II, joined Mirza Najaf Khan's army in 1780 and reached the royal court, where his wit made him famous and unpopular in equal measure ¹. After the blinding of Shah Alam II in 1788 he tried Lucknow in 1791, entered the court of the exiled prince Mirza Sulaiman Shikoh and displaced his ustad Mushafi in a legendary rivalry, then passed to the court of Saadat Ali Khan, from whose favour he fell after a joke at the ruler's expense; he died in 1817, patronless and in poor health ¹.

Insha composed in Urdu, Persian, Arabic and at times Hindi, Punjabi and other tongues, and his verse is gathered in the Kullyat-i-Insha ¹. Two works display his linguistics — Rani Ketki Ki Kahani, a short romance among the earliest Hindi prose, written without a single Arabic or Persian word, and Darya-e-Latafat (1807), a Persian treatise on Urdu grammar and rhetoric and on the dialects of Delhi and Lucknow whose grammatical terminology is used to this day ^{1 2}. His themes were deliberately eccentric, down to a whole ghazal on a woman's undergarment and a masnavi on cock-fighting ¹.

No source read names a school or order for the man himself; his Sayyid family's Najaf origin is descent and family background, which never count, and Wikidata carries no religion value for him at all ^{2 3}. His faith is therefore recorded as unknown.

His birth year is debated — the English article's lead and infobox and the Urdu article's lead give about 1752, the Urdu article's body states 1756 at Murshidabad, and Wikidata carries both years as competing statements ^{1 2 3}. The museum builds 1752 and preserves 1756 in his record. All sources agree on his death on 19 May 1817 at Lucknow ^{1 2}. Neither Murshidabad nor Lucknow has a museum place record yet, so he carries no place edges.