You must've heard the phrase, "Fulaan Sahib Shaahid Takhallus Karte Hain".

Takhallus is a word that’s commonly used to mean a ‘pen-name’. But is it that straightforward?

What words and their evolution have taught us so far is that sometimes to find the very essence of a word’s meaning, we have to connect a lot of dots, in a number of directions.

So, ready to split open Takhallus?

Let’s rope in its root word that is “KHals”, meaning ‘to free someone from a difficulty; liberation, deliverance, release’. But clearly that doesn’t tell us a lot.

Okay, let’s keep following our instincts and move ahead. Does the phrase, “KHaalis Sonaa” ring a bell?

Guess it does. It means Pure Gold, right? 

If KHals gives us deliverance, and KHaalis gives us pure, what else can we deduce?

Umm, how about KHulaasa? 

Don’t tell you don’t know of this word, we hear it all time in the news, over the radio, at times even while telling tales. 

Guessing you’ve picked on it over the news, you might say it means revealing, uncovering, or laying bare a fact, for we often listen to anchors say, ‘unhone is KHabar kaa KHulaasa kiyaa hai’.

Unfortunately, those meanings aren’t so correct. Perhaps these means have been misattributed to the word due to its resonance with the Hindi word ‘Kholna’- to open, lay bare. That’s why we never get tired of shrieking, ‘Learn the Urdu script!’. 

Anyways, in Urdu, KHulaasa means summary or an abstract of a text. Why and how? You might ask. Well, the answer lies in the two words we’ve just mentioned above.

KHulaasa actually means the purest part of something. A word that really can help us wrap our heads around it is the Hindi word NichoD, or the essence of a matter; ‘baat kaa nichoD yeh hai kih…’.

Just replace NichoD with KHulaasa in the above phrase, and you’ve already perfected the word’s use!

But remember the correct way to use it independently is “KHulaasa denaa”, not “KHulaasa Karnaa”. That is, you give a summary, you don’t do one.

Okay, now after much messing around KHulaasa, what about Takhallus?

Simple, TaKHallus is what the purest part of something is called or named.

That is, a poet’s pen-name is a word that most agrees with his identity {don’t read ego, please}. In short, TaKHallus is the summary (KHulaasa) of his True Self (KHaalis) that gives a medium to his expression, or liberates him of his difficulty (KHals)!

But only if poets thought this far before adopting pen-names!