Sardar Mohammad Khan

Sardar Mohammad Khan, also known as SMK, was a Pakistani linguist and lexicographer who wrote the largest Punjabi-Urdu dictionary in the history of Punjabi language. He was born in a Pathan family at Basti Danishmandan, Jalandhar, in 1915. He did his B.A degree from the University of the Punjab, Lahore in 1934. He joined the united Indian Army as a civilian employee and retired as a civilian gazetted officer from the Pakistan Army General Headquarters (G.H.Q.), Rawalpindi in 1969. Being a government servant, under the rules, he could not publish any book until his retirement. He gave fifty years of his life to writing the Punjabi-Urdu dictionary, which consists of two volumes of more than 3500 pages each. It has been published by the Pakistan Academy of Letters along with Punjabi Adbi Board in 2009. It has been written with a scholarly approach, and besides giving meanings and explanations of Punjabi words in Urdu, it also explains idioms, riddles, children's games, traditions, customs and religious terms. His love for dictionaries was evident from the fact that he remembered all the contents of Oxford Dictionary. He said, "it is the spelling that makes a dictionary: the pronunciation can differ from Peshawar to Sindh, but once you agree on a spelling, one word shall suffice for all". This Punjabi-Urdu dictionary has been proven to be the most detailed and authoritative on the subject as of 2015. Sardar Mohammad Khan had a command of Arabic, English, Urdu and Persian and could write and speak in these languages fluently. He had thoroughly studied the Quran and Islam and could speak in a scholarly manner on any aspects of this great religion with confidence. He also wrote a book on phonetics, Aswatiat in Urdu. It is a very specialized book. He got it printed in a small press that he himself ran. He never did anything half heartedly. His love for songs that brought him into the subjects of sounds,phonetics and dialects, forms the basis of his philological research in literature. This love made him a scholar of music and he learned to sing 'raags' (a kind of music) and play the sitar. He had a great passion for working on his family history. He worked hard to give details of his ancestors' migration from one place to another with genealogy of the family of the past three hundred years. He died of natural causes in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on May 26, 1998.