|
Khan, Munshi Adalat (1834-1884) linguist, teacher, and writer, was born in Dadrokhi village under manikganj subdivision in dhaka. His father, Zulfikar Khan, was a librarian at fort william college. Adalat Khan studied at
Calcutta Madrasa and Presidency College. He passed the Higher Textbook examination and joined Fort William College as munshi in 1862. Among his duties at the college was to teach
Persian and Hindi to civil and military officers.
Apart from teaching, Adalat Khan also wrote textbooks and compiled dictionaries. Most of his textbooks were translations into English from brajabuli, Persian,
Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, and Arabic. His dictionaries include a trilingual dictionary (Hindi. Persian, and Bangla, 1872) and another pentalingual dictionary (Bangla,
English, Persian, Urdu and Hindi, 1880). He translated
Vidyasagar's vetalapanchavingshati (1864), Tulsi Das's Ramayana (1872), Premsagar, Bag-o-bahar (1875), Gulistan (1880), Iqd-e-Gul (1883), etc into English. These writings display his knowledge of linguistics, history, geography, mythology, etc.
[Badiuzzaman]
|