One of the more curious aspects of Aʿzam's Rosegarden (Tazkira-yi gulzar-i Aʿzam), a biographical anthology (tadhkira) recounting the lives and works of Persian poets of mid-nineteenth-century Carnatic, is that the entry on the local poet Mawlavi Muhammad Mahdi ‘Vasif’ (d. 1873) spans more than twenty pages. The author of this work, who may or may not have been Muhammad Ghaws Khan Bahadur ‘Aʿzam’, the last Nawab of Arcot, clearly had a great deal to say about Vasif, who was still alive at the time of writing.This is especially true when the length of this entry is compared to that of all the others, which at most amount to no more than a page or two.

The initial portion of the entry follows the long-established template of biographical anthologies by noting Vasif's birth, education and employment: he was born in 1802–3, studied Persian poetry with his father and taught at an East India Company (EIC) school for seven years. The entry remains positive in nature. The author notes that Vasif entered the Nawab's exclusive Persian poetic society in 1846 at the urging of one of its presiding heads and that among the attendees his ‘face shone with reverence’. On account of his many scholarly works, the author continues, Vasif reached a position of honour. There was, however, one work that the author of Aʿzam's Rosegarden viewed with the utmost disdain: Vasif's own biographical anthology of poets entitled Mine of Jewels (Maʿdan al-jawahir). ‘It is not a secret’, the author of Aʿzam's Rosegarden writes, ‘that Vasif in his own tadhkira had criticised the words of poets in complete mockery and impudence. I have presented many of these [errors] in their appropriate place and written answers to them.’ So does the assault upon Vasif and his work begin.

The author proceeds methodically to list the errors found in Vasif's tadhkira on a variety of topics. He accuses Vasif of misunderstanding certain points of prosody (ʿaruż). He mentions that Vasif erroneously stated the death date of a certain poet, when it was well-known that the poet was alive and well after that date.