Pen Names of Famous Writers: Real Names and Takhallus

A pen name is the assumed name under which a writer publishes, and it is called a pseudonym in English, a nom de plume in French and a takhallus in Urdu poetry. Writers have taken such names for every reason imaginable: to hide their sex from publishers who would not print a woman, to escape the notice of a colonial government, to separate serious work from popular work, to keep a government job and a literary life apart, or simply because a short, musical name sits better at the end of a couplet. For a competitive examination the topic is pure matching: a real name on one side, a pen name on the other. The question appears in SSC, Railway and State papers as one-liners and in matching sets of four pairs, and the safest preparation is to learn the pairs in blocks, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and world literature.

Why writers take a pen name

• To write as the other sex: the Bronte sisters published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and Mary Ann Evans as George Eliot, because fiction by women was taken less seriously.
• To keep two kinds of work apart: Agatha Christie wrote romances as Mary Westmacott and Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman.
• To write freely under a government or an employer: much nineteenth-century political writing in India and Europe appeared under invented names.
• To follow the convention of a form: every Urdu poet takes a takhallus, which is woven into the last couplet of a ghazal.
• To choose a name with meaning: Nirala means the unique one, Agyeya the unknowable one, and Dinkar the sun.

Hindi writers and their pen names

Premchand is the most asked of these. Dhanpat Rai first wrote in Urdu as Nawab Rai; when his collection Soz-e-Watan was seized by the colonial administration he began to publish as Premchand, and under that name he wrote Godan, Nirmala, Gaban and Kafan. Nirala, Dinkar, Neeraj and Bachchan are the pen names that later became surnames, carried by their families and used on title pages.

Urdu poets and the takhallus

In Urdu and Persian poetry the pen name is not optional. It is called the takhallus and the poet usually names himself in the final couplet, the maqta, of a ghazal. Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan wrote first as Asad and then as Ghalib, which means dominant or victorious. Raghupati Sahay is known as Firaq Gorakhpuri, Abdul Hayee as Sahir Ludhianvi, Athar Hussain Rizvi as Kaifi Azmi, Asrar ul Hassan Khan as Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shabbir Hasan Khan as Josh Malihabadi, and Sampooran Singh Kalra as Gulzar. The second part of such a name is usually the poet's town, which is why Ludhianvi, Sultanpuri, Azmi, Malihabadi and Gorakhpuri appear so often.

World literature

Mark Twain took his name from the call of a riverboat man sounding the Mississippi, where mark twain meant two fathoms of safe water. Charles Dickens wrote his early sketches as Boz. J. K. Rowling, herself an initialled name chosen so that boys would read the books, later wrote crime novels as Robert Galbraith. Nicolas Bourbaki was not a person at all but the shared pen name of a group of French mathematicians.

The traps to avoid

Many names that look like pen names are not. Gurudev for Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma and Bapu for Gandhi, Netaji for Subhas Chandra Bose, Deshbandhu for Chittaranjan Das and Lokmanya for Bal Gangadhar Tilak are titles given by others, not names the writers published under. Tagore did use a real pen name, Bhanusimha, for the poems collected as Bhanusimha Thakurer Padavali, and that is the fact a paper setter wants. In the same way Munshi in Munshi Premchand is an honorific attached later, not part of the pen name he chose, and Kabir, Tulsidas and Surdas wrote under their own names. Keep the pen name, the title and the surname apart and this chapter becomes a scoring one.