Hafiz Mehmood Khan Shirani

His ancestors belonged to the Afghan tribe named Shirani which had come to India with Mahmood Ghaznavi and stayed back in Tonk.

In his childhood Sherani received religious education; later, he was sent to Jodhpur for learning English and subsequently admitted to Oriental College, Lahore from where obtained the Degree of Munshi Fazil.

Later he collected two thousand rare volumes which he donated to the Library he had established for the London-based Pan Islamic Society of which he was an active member.

His interest in legal education gradually diminished and he started devoting more time to the study of scripts, research, ancient history and culture, etc.

At the request of Abdullah Yusufee, he wrote his reputed book Punjab mein Urdu which made him a linguist of no small achievement.

This renowned critic and researcher of Persian and Urdu language & literature, died in Tonk on February 15, 1946.

Aside from historical aspects, they showed that in addition to similarities between the two languages, there were a large number of syntactical and morphological differences that proved that Urdu was not the daughter of Punjabi.