Khwaja Ahsanullah

Nawab Khwaja Ahsanullah , Khan Bahadur KCIE, was the third Nawab of Dhaka. He was the son of Nawab Khwaja Abdul Ghani and Ismatun Nesa Begum. He was a renowned Urdu litterateur.

Ahsanullah was born in 1846 as the son of Khwaja Abdul Ghani and Ismatun Nesa. As a young child he learned Urdu, Arabic and Persian in addition to the Islamic education of Quran, Hadis and Fiqa. He was noted as being a very gifted child, and mastered the religious Islamic doctrine at a very young age.

By age 22, he handled the maintenance and expansion of the family estates. Ahsanullah wrote widely in Urdu under the pen name Shaheen. Much of his spare time was spent composing literature in Urdu and Persian. He published a book of Urdu poems Kulliyat-e-Shaheen which has been preserved at the University of Dhaka.