Asian and African studies blog

The 20^th of May is World Bee Day – an internationally recognised day when the United Nations, other partner organisations, countries and individuals recognise the important role that bees and other pollinators such as butterflies and wasps, play in the sustainability of our planet. Without the pollinating activities of these animals, much of our established food supply and agricultural crops would not be sustainable and yet researchers and scientists are witnessing an alarming decline in bees and other pollinators across the world.

World Bee Day aims to raise awareness of a range of ways in which individuals, corporations and countries can make a difference in supporting, restoring and protecting these vitally important species.

In celebration of World Bee Day and the British Library’s new exhibition Animals; Art, Science and Sound, this blog will explore a small selection of manuscripts and printed works that record our ongoing fascination with bees throughout human history.

On display in the Animals exhibition are three unique manuscripts that deal with the subject of bees.

The first is Mitsubachi densho [蜜蜂傳書] [蜜蜂伝書], a hand written and illustrated treatise on bees and beekeeping from Japan. Dating to the middle of the nineteenth century, the text is split into two sections – the first documents deals with honey bees and the different beekeeping practices found across Japan as well as the different flavours of honey produced in different regions. The second part of the volume contains illustrations and descriptions of other species of bee and associated insects such as wasps and hornets that also play an important role in the pollination of plants.

A page containing hand painting illustrations of different species of carpenter bees, Mitsubachi densho [蜜蜂傳書] [蜜蜂伝書], c. 1850, Or 1311.

Whilst much of the history of beekeeping has been dominated by western narratives this work offers an important insight into the traditional and local practices of bee keeping in Japan before the introduction of the western honey bee during the second half of the nineteenth century.

A second work on display in the Animals exhibition also includes information and illustrations concerning bees. The manuscript copy of Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (Theatre of Insects), is often cited as the work of Thomas Moffett (1553-1604) but also containing research by Conrad Gessner (1516-1565), Edward Wotton (1492-1555) and Thomas Penny (1523-1589). The manuscript contains not only the handwritten descriptions of hundreds of different insects known in England but also over 500 pencil, ink and watercolour illustrations of different species of insects that have been stuck to the relevant pages. This includes a page in which four watercolour paintings of different species of bee have been attached. Produced before 1590, the manuscript was not published until 1634, 30 years after Moffett died and although lacking the minute detail of the manuscript paintings, the printed edition of the work did include woodblock copies of the four bees found in the manuscript. The Library also holds a volume of proof impressions from the woodblocks made for the printed publication, showing that the four bees were carved into a single block rather than four individual blocks.
Folio from the manuscript copy of Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (Theatre of Insects), Sloane Ms 4014, alongside the printed edition, 1634, C.78.c.17., and the impressions of the woodblock of the bees, C.107.e.91.

A final manuscript on display in the Animals exhibition that also documents bees is a Renaissance copy of Historia animalium (History of Animals). Produced in Italy in 1595, the manuscript contains 245 illustrations and accompanying textual descriptions of a range of real and fantastical animals including birds, butterflies, frogs, hedgehog and elephants. The descriptions are taken from various historical sources, including Historia naturalis (Natural History), compiled by the Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder(23/24-79AD), and Historia animalium by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322BC). Of all the animals included in the manuscript however the bee has the most space dedicated to its description, including 7 illustrated folios, showing bees as passive but also aggressive animals, swarming and stinging humans around their hives.

Four of the seven illustrations related to bees in Historia Animalium, 1595, Add MS 82955

Other apian works held by the Library but not on display include Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie or, a history of bees, first published in 1609 and subsequently revised for new editions in 1623 and 1634. Butler (1571-1647) was a grammarian, author and priest but is perhaps most well-known as a beekeeper. Drawing heavily on his practical experience and from his observations of the social organisation of a bee colony and the production of beeswax, Butler wrote The Feminine Monarchie as a practical guide to beekeeping, with details on how to design gardens for bees, how to create hives as well as how to breed them and the products produced by bees. The Feminine Monarchie became the first full length English language publication on beekeeping and remained as a reference work for over two centuries. The name of the book highlights Butler’s argument that the colonies of bees were organised around a female queen bee rather than a dominant male – a theory that had already been posited by earlier entomologists but which Butler made more widely known. Due to the success of The Feminine Monarchie, Butler is known as a the ‘father of English beekeeping’ and although the first edition does not contain any illustrations, the third edition does include a rather novel piece of vocal music on a score known as a madrigal in which four people would imitate the sound of bees whilst swarming.

Left: Title page and frontispiece of the 2^nd edition of The Feminine Monarchie, 1623, Cup.405.i.21/3. Right: madrigal score imitating the sound of bees swarming, from the 3^rd edition, 1634, C.27.h.7.

The Library also holds a copy of Jan Swammerdam’s Bybel der nature published posthumously in 1737-38. Swammerdam (1637-1680) was a Dutch biologist who used the newly invented microscope to undertake a range of anatomical studies and was one of the earliest scholars to accurately document the process of metamorphosis in insects. His research covered a range of insects, including the bee – the results of which were finally published in Bybel der nature. This included illustrations of his dissection of queen bee ovaries, mouthparts, brains and their compound eye.

Plate XX of Bybel der nature showing a highly detailed view of a bee’s eye, 459.c.14,15.

The Library is also home to the UK’s national sound archive that holds over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music and wildlife from across the world. One recording in the Wildlife and Environmental sound collections contains the piping, tooting and quaking of three virgin queen bees found in a hive in a garden in the village of Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire. The recording was made by Richard Youell in 2014 and not only gives insight into the individual noises Queen bees make but also the general hum of a colony in the background.

The recording can be listened to here: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/honey-bees-piping-cambridge-2014

These are just a few of the items held in the British Library on the subject of bees – there are many more to discover.

Alongside materials held in the Library’s collection, there is currently a wonderful display of largescale high resolution photographs by Levon Biss that shows the mesmerising micro sculpture of various insects as never before. One of the prints on display is of an orchid cuckoo bee – a species of bee that takes its name for their behaviour of laying their eggs in the nests of other bees – similar to how a cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds.

View of the orchid cuckoo bee on display in the British Library’s Front Entrance Hall, St Pancras.

To find out more about our wider collections see: https://www.bl.uk/catalogues-and-collections

To find out more about our current Animals; Art, Science and Sound exhibition see: https://www.bl.uk/events/animals

To find out more about World Bee Day see: https://www.un.org/en/observances/bee-day

Further reading:

Claire Preston, Bee, Reaktion, 2006

Malini Roy, Cam Sharp Jones, Cheryl Tipp, Animals; Art, Science and Sound, British Library Publishing, 2023

By Cam Sharp Jones, Visual Arts Curator

Animals amaze, fascinate and delight us!

In the British Library's new exhibition Animals: Art, Science and Sound (21 April - 29 August 2023)  you can see how documenting the animals world has resulted in some of humankind's most awe-inspiring art, science and sound recordings. It can take years of research to unlock the secrets of a single species. Did you know that the first photograph of a live giant squid was published in 2005? That bats were first described as birds, and sharks referred to as dogs.

From an Ancient Greek papyrus detailing the mating habits of dogs to the earliest photographs of Antarctic animals and the mournful song of the last living Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, recorded in 1983 and declared extinct in 2000, this is the first major exhibition to explore the different ways in which animals have been written about, visualised and recorded.

The exhibition is arranged into four distinctive environments and visitors will journey through darkness, water, land and air - to encounter striking artworks, handwritten manuscripts, sound recording and printed publications that speak to contemporary debates around discovery, knowledge, conservation, climate change and extinction. Each zone also includes a bespoke, atmospheric soundscape created using recordings from the Library's sound archive.

Some of the highlights includes: 

An illustration of a fruit bat, painted at Barrackpore, India. 1804-7, British Library, NHD3/517.

An image of a 'monkfish' from Pierre Belon's De aquatilibus (Of aquatic species), Paris, 1553. British Library, 446.a.6. 

Illustration of the defects of a horse from Kitab al-baytarah (Book on Veterinary Medicine) by Abu Muhammad Ahmad ibn Atiq al-Azdi, 13th century. British Library, Or 1523, ff. 62v-63r.

An education record for children: The Hip-po-pot-a-mus. Talking Book Corporation, 1918-29. British Library, 9CS0029512.

A section of the Chuju zui (Illustrations of Animals and Insects) showing dragonflies and moths, Japan, 1851. British Library, Or 1312. 

There is a season of in-person and online events inspired by the exhibition, such asa Late at the Library with musician, composer and producer Cosmo Sheldrake hosted by musician, author and broadcaster Cerys Matthews and Animal Magic: A Night of Wild Enchantment where five speakers, including wildlife cameraman, ornithologist and Strictly Come Dancing winner Hamza Yassin and birder, environmentalist and diversity activist, Mya-Rose Craig, each have 15 minutes to tell a story. A selection of these works are included in an outdoor exhibitionaround Kings Cross.

A richly illustrated publication written by exhibition curators Malini Roy, Cam Sharp Jones and Cheryl Tipp can be purchased through the British Library's shop. The publication is supplemented with interactive QR technology allows readers to listen to sound recordings.

The exhibition is made possible with support from Getty through The Paper Project initiative and PONANT. With thanks to The American Trust for the British Library and The B.H. Breslauer Fund of the American Trust for the British Library. Audio soundscapes created by Greg Green with support from the Unlocking our Sound Heritage project, made possible by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Scientific advice provided by ZSL (the Zoological Society of London). 

(Left) Art work by Sudanese artist Ibrahim El Salahi (b. 1930) in issue 13 of Ḥiwār (1964), edited by Palestinian poet Tawfiq Sayigh (1923-1971). (British Library, 14599.e.69)
(Right) Front cover of issue 7 (1963) of Ḥiwār magazine. (British Library, 14599.e.69)

Between April and June 2021, the British Library and Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, hosted Histories and Archives of Arabic Publishing: an online series of talks exploring publishing practices in Arabic as a site for unfolding intellectual networks, artistic practices and political imaginaries from the 1960s until the present.

The series was co-curated and convened by Hana Sleiman, Research Fellow in History at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and Daniel Lowe, Curator of Arabic Collections at the British Library.

Recordings from all four events in the series are now available to watch on the British Library’s YouTube channel and we have collated them below for your convenience.

We regarded the series as a space for collective learning. As such we invite anyone with an interest in the subjects and themes raised —both in Arabic and different linguistic and regional fields— to be in touch so we can explore potential activities and interventions that build upon this series. You can do this by emailing Hana and Daniel.

Kayfa ta: On Shapeshifting Texts and Other Publishing Tactics
Ala Younis and Maha Maamoun appeared in conversation with Hala Auji

Archives of Design and Designing the Archive
Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès and Moe Elhosseiny

Visualising the archive: Arabic publishing during the Cold War
Zeina Maasri and Fehras Publishing Practices

This session was organised in partnership with Delfina Foundation as part of their Collecting as Practice programme, and Middle East History Group, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. Fehras Publishing Practices current exhibition is Borrowed Faces: Future Recall is on at Mosaic Rooms, London, until 26 September 2021.

Fragmented Archives and Histories of Solidarity
Refqa Abu-Remaileh and Kristine Khouri

Hana Sleiman, Research Fellow in History, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
Daniel Lowe, Curator of Arabic Collections, British Library

Between April-June 2021 the British Library and Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, will co-host Histories and Archives of Arabic Publishing: an online series of talks exploring publishing practices in Arabic as a site for unfolding intellectual networks, artistic practices and political imaginaries from the 1960s until the present.

From the collected archive for the project Borrowed Faces by Fehras Publishing Practices, Berlin, 2018-2021.
© Ferras Publishing Practices

The series has been co-curated and convened by Hana Sleiman, Research Fellow in History at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and Daniel Lowe, Curator of Arabic Collections at the British Library.

The series has been organised in partnership with the Delfina Foundation, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and the Middle East History Group, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.

Video still from Past Disquiet.
© Past Disquiet

Engaging with a variety of artistic, design, archival, curatorial and academic research projects, this series will reflect on the multiple and overlapping worlds of publishing and on the contemporary efforts to reconstruct and reimagine them.

Learning from the leading practitioners in the field, the series examines past and present practices of publishing in Arabic. It explores questions of scale of operations and reach; mediums and formats; audience and language; and the social and political context that gave rise to the practices in question. The series also explores contemporary collecting practices of publishing archives. It highlights collections’ capacity to foreground publishing archives not merely as a signifier of other historical processes but as a historical process in its own right.

Left: Image courtesy of Kayfa ta.
© Kayfa ta

Right: Hala Auji. 
© Hala Auji

How to maneuver: shapeshifting texts and other publishing tactics

The first session in the series on Tuesday 27 April at 17:00 BST (register via Zoom) brings together artists and curators Ala Younis and Maha Maamoun, in conversation with art historian Hala Auji, to talk about Kayfa ta: On Shapeshifting Texts and Other Publishing Tactics. In 2012, they founded Kayfa ta as an independent publishing initiative that emerged from a need to break out of the limited readership and distribution of alternative books: books that cross genres, engage a mixed range of writers and readers, and are not driven by restrictive market values that control who and what is publishable. Their project is also interested in identifying the mechanisms of “gate-keeping”, be they in art or publishing, that shape and limit the voices and practices that have access to a wider public. In 2019, Kayfa ta expanded its interest into understanding the wider field of self and independent publishing and distribution, as well as the new challenges facing access of the private to shared public platforms, and the space left to maneuver the mounting obstacles therein. Their talk explores the expanded fields of contemporary publishing and distribution – modes of making-public and of public–making, as developed through quotidian as well as artistic strategies – as a revealing entry point to understanding contemporary efforts to limit and expand the space of the commons.

Left: Arabic Design Library by Khatt Books.
© Khatt Books

Right: Moe Elhossieny.
© Ahmed Othman

Archives of design and designing the archive

On Tuesday 11 May at 17:00 BST (register via Zoom) Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès, Founding Director of the Khatt Foundation and Khatt Books publishers, will speak on The Arabic Design Library: Alternative Narratives from the Arab World. She will address the importance of documenting and presenting an alternative design history from parts of the world that are rarely covered in main-stream design publications. She will present the series of design monographs, The Arabic Design Library, published by Khatt Books since 2016. The series covers the work of some of the Arab world's design pioneers (including the likes of Hilmi al-Tuni, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Dia Azzawi, Nasri Khattar and Abdulkader Arnaout) who were practicing in the period stretching from the 1960s to the 1980s and who in their own way, engaged with design as a tool for political emancipation and socio-cultural progress.

She will be joined by Cairo-based multidisciplinary designer, researcher and writer Moe Elhosseiny who will speak on Arabic Cover Design Archive: Digital Archives as Design Activism. Through engaging with Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, he takes a critical approach to history, archival practices and access in relation to collective memory in South Western Asia and North Africa. With archives being suppressed, neglected, avoided, or locked away, there is an urgency to support collective memory building. Consequently, forms of digital archiving may take on the role of design activism. Elhosseiny founded the Arabic Cover Design Archive which seeks to surface and record book design practices throughout the history of Arabic publishing, providing an accessible digital extension to an often inaccessible physical archive. By making the archive visible through digital means, this project multiplies the instances where engagement with this material can occur. It thus aims to increase the potentiality for creating meaning and greasing the wheels of knowledge production while simultaneously alerting the public to the existence of their history.

Left: Fehras Publishing Practices: Sami Rustom, Kenan Darwich, Omar Nicolas.
© Fehras Publishing Practices

Right: Zeina Maasri
© Zeina Maasri

Visualising the archive: Arabic publishing during the Cold War

On Tuesday 25 May at 17:00 BST (register via Zoom) Zeina Maasri, senior lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton, will speak alongside Berlin-based artist collective Fehras Publishing Practices (Sami Rustom, Omar Nicolas and Kenan Darwich) about their respective projects on Arabic publishing during the Cold War.

In her talk The Visual Politics and Poetics of Arabic Publishing, Maasri will explore Beirut’s development from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s as a nexus of transnational Arab artistic encounter, intellectual debate and political contestation, which was marked by anticolonial struggle and complicated by a cold war order. Central to this nodal configuration was the city’s infrastructure of printing, Arabic publishing and distribution that sparked creative collaborations between various Arab artists, intellectuals and militants who crossed paths in Beirut. These transnational circuits have materialised in some of the pioneering modernist Arabic cultural periodicals of the period, as well as in politically radical publishing projects that summoned revolutionary change and solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. Her talk centres the visuality and materiality of Arabic publications as important sites of aesthetic experimentation and as reproducible and mobile artefacts of print culture. She argues that the translocal visuality of such Arabic printscapes helped articulate political imaginaries, mobilize cross-border identifications and shape aesthetic sensibilities in and through the disjunctive flows of the global sixties.

Likewise, through their project Borrowed Faces, Fehras Publishing Practices focuses on the Cold War era as one of the most fertile and critical periods in the history of Arab culture and publishing because of the entanglement between politics and culture. Their ongoing project researches cultural policies, and intellectual hegemony pursued by the bipolar power, the United States and the Soviet Union, and their establishment of institutions to fund international networks, conferences and projects. It observes the transformation of culture and publishing in the region from within, where new literary styles and ideas started to emerge. At the core of these movements were publishers, writers, poets, and translators, some of whom established collectives and seminars or who launched initiatives, publications, and publishing houses. Borrowed Faces looks into this period by observing the common denominators between cultural practices then and today. Pursuing these lines of inquiry, the project digs into print archives from the 1950s and 60s, such as books, magazines, memoirs, personal letters, newspaper articles, and photographs.

Left: Exhibition view, Past Disquiet, Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon, July 27-October 1, 2018.
Photograph: Christopher Baaklini, Courtesy: Sursock Museum.

Right: Refqa Abu-Remaileh
© Refqa Abu-Remaileh

Fragmented archives and histories of solidarity

The final session in the series on Tuesday 8 June at 17:00 (register via Zoom) brings together Refqa Abu-Remaileh and Kristine Khouri to speak about their respective archival and curatorial projects.

In her talk  A Database for Palestinian Literature, Abu-Remaileh will share the work-in-progress of the ERC project PalREAD-Country of Words. Focusing on PalREAD’s use of digital tools, the talk will discuss the challenges and joys of tracing and mapping a highly fragmented and scattered history of Palestinian literary production in Arabic from the early 20th century to the present spanning a multiplicity of geographical locations around the globe.

Researcher and writer Kristine Khouri’s talk Reflections on the (Digital) Future(s) of Past Disquiet focuses on her decade long research project conducted with Rasha Salti which took the form of an archival and documentary exhibition, publication, and seminars and other discursive events. The project investigated the histories of art collections and museums built in solidarity with political causes for Palestine, Chile, Nicaragua and South Africa as well as unearthed histories of transnational artistic solidarity networks of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial liberation struggles from the 1960s to the 1990s. While the exhibition presented the research in the form of text, digital surrogates of archival and other materials, video montages of interviews with participants and other testimonies and film and other footage, the exhibition did not exhibit any artwork. Today, over a decade later, the question remains on how to treat the digital archive which has been built throughout the project, gathering surrogates of documents held primarily in private homes or difficult to find ephemera of histories that have yet to be properly written. The talk will explore some of the reflections and challenges in thinking about the digital (and other) afterlives of Past Disquiet and ways to imagine encouraging further research.

Full abstracts and speaker biographies for the series can be found here. For any further enquiries please email Hana Sleiman and Daniel Lowe.

Hana Sleiman, Research Fellow in History, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
Daniel Lowe, Curator, Arabic Collections

I am thrilled and delighted to inform our readers and followers, that the long awaited exhibition Hebrew Manuscripts: Journeys of the Written Word will be opening to the public on Tuesday 1st September in PACCAR2, the newest gallery of the British Library.

The exhibition has been put together by Ilana Tahan and Zsofia Buda, who have worked diligently and tirelessly with colleagues from across the Library, to bring about its realization.

Temple implements. Harley Catalan Bible. Catalonia, Spain, 14th century (Harley MS 1528, f.7v-8r)


Showcasing 44 outstanding objects, including 39 manuscripts from the British Library’s remarkable Hebrew collection, the exhibition transports the visitor on an exciting journey of discovery, via four distinct sections:

• The Bible and beyond
• Living together
• The Power of letters and words
• Science and scholarship

What do all these treasured manuscripts have in common? They all share the same script, Hebrew; one of the oldest writing systems that has been in continuous use, from around the 10^th century BCE to this day. This significant exhibition thus embraces the assiduous, unrelenting journeys of both the written word and the Hebrew script.

Micrographic masorah. Duke of Sussex’s German Pentateuch. Lake Constance, Germany, 14th century (Add MS 15282, f.28r, detail)

Viewers will come face to face with the centuries-long culture, history and traditions of Jewish people from various parts of the world. Rare handwritten texts, spanning from the 10^th to the 19^th century, some handsomely illuminated or decorated, will take audiences from Europe and North Africa, through to the Middle East and China, to explore the relationships between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours in the communities they lived in.

Visual aid for calendrical calculations in Joseph ben Shem Tov ben Yeshu’a Hai’s She’erit Yosef (Joseph’s Legacy). Tlemcen, Algeria, 1804 (Or 9782, f.14r)

The interplay, high points, as well as signs of conflict and discord in the relationships between these groups, are conveyed through a captivating display of writings on legal issues, calendrics, kabbalah , literature, music, philosophy, and science.

Decorative motifs in Shalom Shabazi’s Diwan (Collection of poems). Tan’am, Yemen, and Jerusalem, 17th-18th century (Or 4114, f.2v, detail)

Some of these works were created by prominent Jewish scholars, such as Moses ben Maimon (b.1135, Cordoba, Spain, d. 1204, Cairo, Egypt), and Abraham bar Hiyya (ca. 1065- ca.1136). The former, known in the Christian world as Maimonides , was not only a legal authority, compelling philosopher and accomplished physician, but also the most influential spiritual leader of his time. His Moreh Nevukhim (The Guide for the Perplexed), completed ca. 1190, was probably the most authoritative Jewish philosophical treatise of the medieval era. Two important manuscript copies of this work are on view in the exhibition.

Illuminated pages in Moses Maimonides’ Moreh Nevukhim (Guide for the Perplexed). Catalonia, Spain, 14th century copy (Or 14061, f. 156v-157r)

Abraham bar Hiyya , known by his Latin name as Savasorda, was an eminent Spanish Jewish philosopher and scientist, who is credited with writing the first works on astronomy and mathematics in Hebrew. Among these was his vastly popular astronomical treatise Tsurat ha-arets (Shape of the earth), a 15 ^th century copy of which is included in the exhibition.

Diagram of the four main lunar phases in Abraham bar Hiyya’s Tsurat ha-arets (Shape of the Earth). Byzantium, (now parts of Turkey and Greece), 15th century copy (Or 10721, f. 27v)

Visitors will be in for a treat, particularly as many of the exhibits have never been on public view. Moreover, as part of the recently completed Hebrew Manuscript Digitisation Project, digital access to all 39 Hebrew manuscripts on display is available on the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts website .

Other British Library platforms, with wide-ranging Hebrew manuscript content are:

• Explore Archives and Manuscripts
• The Polonsky Foundation Catalogue of Digitised Hebrew Manuscripts
• Discovering Sacred Texts

Hebrew Manuscripts: Journeys of the Written Word is open from 1st September 2020 until 11th April 2021. Follow the link for details about opening times, booking timeslots, etc.

We are extremely grateful to the Dr Michael and Anna Brynberg Charitable Foundation for generously supporting this exhibition. With thanks to the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, the Shoresh Charitable Trust, and The David Pearlman Charitable Foundation.

Further reading

The following posts feature manuscripts on display in the exhibition.

• A Judeo-Persian epic, the Fath Nama (Book of Conquest)
• The Kaifeng Torah Scroll: A British Library Treasure
• The First Gaster Bible: a fine Hebrew manuscript from a Muslim land
• Anglo-Jewish deeds from medieval England- a treasure trove for historians
• Autograph responsum of Moses Maimonides, pre-eminent Jewish polymath and spiritual leader
• Count your fingers: calendrical hand diagrams in Hebrew manuscripts
• Written in your palm, just read it!
• At the crossroads of cultures: a Hebrew manuscript of Johannes Sacrobosco’s De sphaera mundi
• The Tree of Knowledge: magic spells from a Jewish potion book

Ilana Tahan, Lead Curator Hebrew and Christian Orient Collections

ZEE JLF at The British Library returns to London for its sixth consecutive year from 14th-16th June, 2019, to celebrate books, creativity and dialogue, creative diversity and varied intellectual discourse.

The five-day ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, held annually in the Pink City of Jaipur, is a riot of colour, energy, ideas, and music against a backdrop of readings, dynamic discussions and debates.

This June, the spirit of the festival with its pervasive sense of inclusiveness and infectious camaraderie, will once again be at the heart of London as a caravan of writers and thinkers, poets, balladeers and raconteurs bring alive South Asia’s unique multilingual literary heritage at the British Library. You can book tickets through the British Library's box office.

Asian and African Studies Curators Malini Roy and Michael Erdman will be speaking in two of the panels:

Saturday, 15 June 2019: 13.45 – 14.45

Forgotten Masterpieces of Indian Art for East India Company

Malini Roy, Yuthika Sharma, Katherine Butler Schofield and Rosie Llewellyn-Jones in conversation with William Dalrymple

Reflecting both the beauty of the natural world and the social reality of the time, the Indian artworks commissioned by the East India Company’s officials in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offer a rare glimpse of the cultural fusion between British and Indian artistic styles. South Asian art expert and British Library curator Malini Roy, historian of South Asian art Yuthika Sharma, music historian and author Katherine Butler Schofield, historian on South Asian Art and British scholar and author Rosie Llewellyn Jones discuss this forgotten moment in Anglo-Indian history, with author and historian William Dalrymple.

Sunday, 16 June 2019: 16.15 - 17.15

From Hieroglyphs to Emojis

Irving Finkel, David Levy and Michael Erdman in conversation with Pragya Tiwari, introduced by Namita Gokhale

From carved stone inscriptions, medieval manuscripts and early printed works to beautiful calligraphy, iconic fonts and emojis, the written word has evolved in innumerable ways over the centuries. British Museum curator Irving Finkel, alongside technologist and calligrapher David Levy and scholar of Turkish historiography and one of the curators of the British Library’s exhibition Writing: Making Your Mark Michael Erdman deconstruct the act of writing and consider its future in the digital age, in conversation with journalist and editor Pragya Tiwari. Introduced by Namita Gokhale.

Presented by Bagri Foundation.

The full schedule is now available online: http://jlflitfest.org/zee-jlf-at-british-library/schedule.

‘South Asia Seriesʼ in Summer and Autumn 2019 is packed with exciting and diverse set of speakers and talks based on the British Library ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ Project and South Asia Collection. Subjects range from credit relationships in the South Asian countryside, archives and the circulation of circus histories and colonial animals, war-time experiences of workers at the Calcutta Port, Partition refugees and national development in India, women writers of the Progressive Movement in north India, Jagadish Bose and the politics of science in colonial India, letters and photographs from World War II, to screen-writing practices in the first Indian talkies and early modern masculine sexual health! The speakers include scholars and academics in the UK and elsewhere, who will share their original and cutting-edge research, followed by discussions facilitated by BL curators and other specialists in the field. The presentations will take place at the Knowledge Centre at the British Library, between 6.15-7.30pm and will be free for all to attend.

Agricultural Banks for India by W Wedderburn (Bombay, 1880?) (BL Asia, Pacific & Africa Tr. 621(i))

On 10th June 2019 Meghna Chaudhuri from New York University (NYU) will talk about credit relationships between 1870 and 1905. The talk entitled Cultivating Value in the South Asian Countryside will discuss how the colonial construction of the irrational peasant extends to the image of the “traditional” peasant which continues in contemporary development discourse. It reveals the significance of experimental financial interventionism in India from the 1870s to the global emergence of a discourse on incomplete integration of agrarian hinterlands to the global economy.

Fortified Land from 1793-1916 Report on the Hooghly River and its Head-waters: Vol 2 Maps and Plates. Calcutta, 1919, Map 17 (BL IOR/V/27/732/15)

On 17th June 2019, Debjani Bhattacharyya who teaches at Drexel University, Philadelphia will speak on the history of the growth and development of the city of Calcutta in the nineteenth century through the aspects of land-making and land-reclamation as urbanization. Taking the example of the growth and settlement of Calcutta in the swamps of Bengal, this talk will explore how we came to inhabit land-making and land-reclamation as urbanization through the nineteenth-century. In her talk  A History of Swamps, or How We Built Sinking Cities?, she will use a couple of case studies beginning from 1770s to argue that property and its many instantiations in law and economy became a tool for transforming the landscape and ecology of the delta in creating Calcutta.

Coolies loading coal at the Calcutta Port (BL Asia Pacific & Africa V 7883)

On 15th July 2019 we have Prerna Agarwal, a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE) speaking on The Political Potency of Wartime Experiences of Workers at the Calcutta Port. With the opening of China-Burma-India theatre of the World War II in the summer of 1942, Calcutta Port became one of the key ports for the Allies. This talk in focussing on the Port labour during the war will reflect on the everyday and momentous experiences of the labouring section of the population as they shaped labour politics in the crucial years before Indian independence.

Refugee Camp, New Delhi, 1947 (BL Document Supply m08/.29565)

Our first book salon within the South Asia series will bring together historian Uditi Sen (Nottingham University), Tanika Sarkar (JNU), Joya Chatterji (University of Cambridge) and others in a roundtable discussion entitled Partition Refugees and National Development in India on 29th July 2019. Uditi Sen’s recent book, Citizen Refugee, weaves together archival research and oral history to explore how the rehabilitation of Bengali refugees became the site of the evolution of a pan-Indian governmentality of rehabilitation. This roundtable discussion will explore the key insights and contributions of this study, ranging from the role played by caste and gender in moulding the experiences of refugees, to hitherto unexplored legacies of partition in patterns of governance, discourses of citizenship and in popular politics in India.

Shaukat Kaifi (1928-) (BL Asia, Pacific & Africa YP.2006.a.7145)

On 5th August 2019 we have Farha Noor from University of Freiburg/University of Heidelberg speaking on women writers of the Progressive Movement in north India. The talk entitled Witnessing History, Writing Nostalgia: the Progressive Women will investigate the entanglements of genre and gender while rethinking Nostalgia and its relationship with forms of life-writing. Furthermore, editorial intervention like processes of selection, collection and translation will be considered to probe into the concept of Witness and tease out the politics of text as performance. Yaad ki Rehguzar by Shaukat Kaifi, Hum Sath The by Hamida Salim and Humsafar by Hameeda Akhtar are some of the works that will be discussed in this talk.

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) (BL Asia, Pacific & Africa V 21994)

Later in the month Christin Hoene, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Kent, will be speaking on the philosophy of science in colonized India. The talk entitled, Jagadish Chandra Bose and the Politics of Science in India on 12th August 2019 will focus on Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), the Indian scientist and polymath, who first gained international reputation for his work as a physicist in the 1890s. Bose recalled in a speech at the University of Punjab in 1924, the prevailing prejudice in the west was that “no great contribution to exact knowledge could be made in India, since the Indian temperament was merely speculative and dominated by exuberant imagination”. He argued that imagination and science are not mutually exclusive, and criticised the strict disciplinary boundaries of western science and instead promoted a holistic philosophy of science, thus creating a philosophy of Indian science that was resolutely independent.

Sikh soldiers at practice on a defence range at Singapore (BL Asia, Pacific & Africa P/V 1099)

On 23rd September 2019 we have Diya Gupta from King’s College London speaking on World War II Letters and Photographs: Recovering Indian Experiences. Soldiers’ letters were written in Hindi, Gurmukhi, Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil, and often dictated to scribes by Indian non-literate sepoys. They were then translated for the censor, who compiled quotations from the letters into a report testifying to the Indian soldiers’ ‘morale’. This talk will examine the relationship between censorship and the text, particularly as the latter shifts from the verbal to the transcribed, Indian vernaculars to the English language. It will explore how we receive insights into the emotional lives of colonial soldiers through the censored word.

Silver Jubilee souvenir. (Indian talkie, 1931-56.) (BL General Reference Collection X.902/3119)

Rakesh Sengupta, a doctoral candidate at SOAS will be speaking on Screenwriting Practices during the First Indian Talkies on 21st October 2019. The widespread circulation of screenwriting manuals for amateurs constituted a pedagogical infrastructure separate from, but parallel to, the other infrastructural flow of ideas and professionals from the Parsi theatre into the Indian film industry. The autobiographical accounts of some of the first playwright-turned-screenwriters bear testimony to the spaces they negotiated for themselves in the talkies after a successful stint with the Parsi stage. The talk shall explore the practice and discourse of screenwriting during the first Indian talkies through a study of the margins of print, theatre and film history.

‘Yogini in the Court’s Majalis’, from Laẕẕat al-nisā’ (BL Add.MS.17489)

We will end our talks for this year on 28th October 2019 with Sonia Wigh from the University of Exeter speaking on Hungry Stomach, Heated Body: Exploring Early Modern Masculine Sexual Health. This talk will discuss Persian textual sources produced between c.1650-1750, to argue that impotence or lack of/waning desire, was one of the major anxieties embedded in early modern constructions of South Asian masculinities. It will demonstrate how individual sexual medical health was intrinsically linked not only with Indo-Persian humoral theories but with the desire to increase sexual power and vigour (quwwat-i bāh). The talk will also comment on the gradience in the production and consumption of sexual medical knowledge in the eighteenth century.

No advance booking is required, and the sessions are free to attend. For further information, please contact Dr. Priyanka Basu, Project Curator of ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’. Please do come along, listen and participate!

Priyanka Basu, Asian and African Collections ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’

The East Asian Uses of the European Past  project, funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area, in collaboration with the British Library, is proud to announce a one-day conference on 1 April 2019 to discuss the creation of historical knowledge between East Asia and Europe from 1600-1950.

In two thematic panels and two keynote talks, we will explore how ideas about the past circulated and were repurposed within East Asian networks of exchange. Some of the questions we will consider include: how did East Asian actors use their understanding of European expansion to burnish their own colonial aspirations? What does it mean to say the Chinese had a ‘Middle Ages’—originally a way of talking about the history of and for Europeans? How might the maritime narratives of East Asians challenge how the past of cultural others is viewed?

The event will run from 10am-5pm in the British Library Knowledge Centre, with a smaller reception from 5pm-7.30pm. You can register for the day event (10am -5pm) at our  Eventbrite page. There are also a smaller number of tickets available to our evening keynote and drinks reception from 5pm-7.30pm. You can register for this through our separate Eventbrite page.

Nagasaki ezu ‘An illustrated map of Nagasaki’. Printed c.1680 (British Library Or.75.g.25) 

The first panel, Oceans, Islands, and Imperial Expansion in East Asia, will explore how maritime expansion of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was understood by Chinese and Japanese actors.

Professor Leigh Jenco of the LSE will examine the earliest first-hand account of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, written by the seventeenth-century military advisor Chen Di. In contrast to both European and Chinese contemporaries, Chen showed how the lives of these people might be understood on their own terms rather than in contrast to an established yardstick of civilization.

Professor Martin Dusinberre of the University of Zurich considers the late-nineteenth century intellectual dialogue between the Cambridge professor J.R. Seeley and his young Japanese student Inagaki Manjirō (1861-1908). The result of this encounter was Inagaki’s articulation of a future ‘Pacific Age’ of Japanese expansion, modelled on the past expansion of the British Empire. Finally, Dr Birgit Tremml-Werner, also of the University of Zurich, examines how the late-nineteenth century Japanese translator and historian Murakami Naojirō used European sources to reconsider Japan’s history of maritime engagement in Southeast Asia as a model for its future expansion.

Jesuit-designed Chinese terrestrial globe, early 17th century (British Library Maps G.35)

Our first keynote speaker, Timothy Brook, of the University of British Columbia, will discuss Picturing the World: Chinese Uses of European Cartography. Sailing the oceans in the sixteenth century obliged Europeans to come up with new models to visualize the world. As these models reached China toward the end of the century, Chinese cartographers reacted not by abandoning their model of the world, but by importing features of European maps and adjusting their image of the world accordingly. The impact is not always obvious, and the results can be surprising, as we watch both cultures make their way along separate paths toward seeing the world in common.

Our second panel on Entangled Histories will explore how European ideas about the past were repurposed by East Asian actors to understand or reinterpret their own histories. Dr David Mervart of the University of Madrid will discuss how Japanese translations from the Dutch work History of Japan by Engelbert Kaempfer shaped understandings of Japan’s time as a ‘closed country,’ as well as of the merits and demerits of opening the country to outside trade.

Professor Joachim Kurtz of the University of Heidelberg reviews attempts by twentieth-century Chinese historians to use the concept of the “middle ages,” derived from European history, as a meaningful way of partitioning Chinese history.

Finally, Dr Lorenzo Andolfatto of the University of Heidelberg will examine historical conditions which give rise to utopian thinking, through a comparison of the sixteenth-century England of Thomas More and the late nineteenth-century China of the novelist Wu Jianren. He suggests that a fundamental rethinking of the world and England and China’s place in it helped to stimulate both authors’ works.

The day will close with a smaller keynote from Professor Megan Thomas of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Thomas will explore European Pasts in the Margins of Filipino History Making. In the late nineteenth century, when the Philippines was subject to Spanish sovereignty, young Filipino intellectuals imagining their country’s future turned to history. In writings now part of the British Library’s collections, these young men treated what they called the “pre-history” of the Philippine islands as well as the history of Spanish occupation, seeking to glean from the past what could illuminate the present and future.

Their subject was the Philippines, yet in the margins of their accounts were sometimes references to European history—not only the history of Spanish presence in the Philippine islands, but also references to the folklore, customary law, and political history of Europe. They did not look to Europe’s past for models, however; instead they thought that comparing elements of Europe’s past with the Philippines showed dynamic possibilities in the Philippine past, present, and future.

The one-day conference History from Between: Global Circulations of the Past in East Asia and Europe will run from 10am-5pm on 1 April 2019 at the British Library Knowledge Centre. For more information about the research underpinning this conference you can listen to our East Asian Uses of the European Past podcast series here.

Jon Chappell, London School of Economics