Among the most spectacular of the paintings in the recent British Library exhibition Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire were two of the latest known dated works of Ghulam ‘Ali Khan, showing the court of the last Nawab of Jhajjar, ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan, in 1849 and 1852.

Nawab ‘Abd al-Rahman in his court in hot weather with various musicians and courtiers.  By Ghulam ‘Ali Khan, May-June 1849. British Library, Add.Or.4680.

 
Nawab ‘Abd al-Rahman of Jhajjar in his court in cool weather with his two young sons and various courtiers and attendants.  By Ghulam ‘Ali Khan, dated January-February 1852. British Library, Add.Or.4681.

All the numerous inscriptions identifying the participants in these two durbars were given in the book accompanying the exhibition (see Losty and Roy 2012, pp. 231-32), as well as references to other known works of Ghulam ‘Ali Khan done for the Nawab of Jhajjar, but the identification of the young European officer seated to the left of the Nawab in the 1852 picture was left undecided. His name is given in Persian characters beside him: Alakzandar Hadarli sahib.  He is dressed in a blue coat and cap, and appears to be a political officer of the Bengal civil service dressed in undress military uniform.  Diligent searches, however, of the relevant India Office files and published biographical sources failed to find any mention of any Haderly or Hiderly in any capacity in the military or civil service in the Bengal Presidency.  However, purely by chance, while researching someone else in Beale’s Oriental Biographical Dictionary, my eye fell on the following entry:

‘AZAD, the poetical name of Captain Alexander Hiderley, in the service of the Raja of Alwar.  He was a good poet and left a small Diwan in Urdu.  His father’s name is James Hiderley and his brother’s Thomas.  He died on the 7th of July, , 1861, Zilhajj AH 1277, at Alwar aged 32 years.’

Here was the answer to the problem that had vexed me since the British Library acquired these two paintings in 1994.  Hiderley seated immediately to the Nawab’s left turns out to be good-looking young man of about 22 if Beale is to be relied upon.  Clearly he had no difficulty in sitting in the Indian manner, suggesting that he might not after all be a regular East India Company man.  But if he was in Alwar service as Beale indicates, what was he doing in Jhajjar? Despite his date of death being known, there was no mention of it in the relevant volumes of the Bengal almanacs and directories. 

Detail showing Alexander Hiderley, British Library, Add.Or.4681.

Beale also describes young Alexander as a Captain, which accords with his uniform in this picture.  His absence from the official East India Company records suggested that he was ‘country-born’ with an Indian mother and that he found employment with the nobility round Delhi such as the Maharao Raja of Alwar and the Nawab of Jhajjar.  His literary productions also awaited discovery.  There is for instance no mention of him in Garcin de Tassy’s Histoire or Sprenger’s catalogue of the libraries of Oudh.

Perhaps Beale was transcribing his name from Urdu records and hence was not certain of its exact spelling?  Following this train of thought, a clue was provided in a search of the BACSA records for the Alwar cemetery in the hope that he might have been buried there in 1861 (MSS Eur F370/1329), but this search yielded no Alexander Haderli but instead an Eva Heatherly.  She was buried there in 1892, the wife of a George Heatherly, who was Superintendent of Jails at Alwar and died in 1901 in Delhi aged 60.  Was Hiderly the same as Heatherly, only badly transliterated?  Online genealogical records confirmed this supposition and revealed that George was the son of a Thomas Heatherly, who was the elder brother of Alexander Heatherly Azad (1829-61), our poet and captain.  Thomas too was something of a writer, since a manuscript of his diary in Urdu for 1842-53 is in the Central Reference Library of Delhi University, where he describes himself as in the service of Nawab Qaisar ‘Ali Khan Sahib.  Their father was James Heatherly (1787-1859), as Beale indicates, who turned out to be one of the East India Company’s subordinate officials.  He is described in the East India Registers as a writer or clerk in the customs or commissioner’s office in first Meerut and then Delhi.  He was an uncovenanted civil servant, which suggests that he went to India unofficially as many did to make some kind of career for themselves there.  There were in fact ten children in all, so the elder Heatherly seems to have made himself very comfortable in Meerut with an unnamed Indian woman.

Alexander Heatherly Azad was in fact well known in Delhi poetical circles under his pen-name Azad as a pupil of ‘Arif and he took part in the musha’iras arranged by Bahadur Shah Zafar and the princes.  He is mentioned in Farhatullah Beg’s Dehli ki akhri shama, translated by Akhtar Qamber as The Last Musha’irah of Delhi, as sitting among the 40 poets gathered in the courtyard of a great house for a night of poetry presided over by Mirza Fakhr al-Din, Bahadur Shah Zafar’s favourite son and, under the name Ramz, a fine poet in his own right.  Azad was ‘one of the great poets of the Urdu language’ (Saksena 1941, pp. 73-4).

I quote from The Last Musha’irah (pp. 88-9): “The shama’ [lamp] now came to Azad.  Azad’s own name is Alexander Heatherly.  He is French by nationality [this is obviously wrong] but was born in Delhi.  It was in Delhi that he received his education and was commissioned as captain of the Arsenal in the Armed Forces station at Alwar.  He is about twenty-one years old and has some knowledge of medicine.  He is a great lover of poetry and is a shagird [disciple] of ‘Arif’s.  The moment he gets wind of a musha’irah he promptly arrives in Delhi.  He wears a military uniform and speaks such pure idiomatic Urdu that you would take him for an authentic Dehlivala.  His couplets are not bad either.  Please judge for yourself:

So hot and passionate a sinner am I on the course of life
That not a trace of moisture is left in my garment of sin.
Had you strength in your feet you could wander aimless in the wilderness;
And your hands would know the madness of tearing your pocket.
Azad, is there any limit to his absent-mindedness and oblivion?
On the day of Chehlam [the 40th day of mourning] he turns up to ask after the health of the deceased!”

Qamber adds that Heatherly’s father was in fact English and his mother an Indian Muslim, and that he used either Azad or Alec as his nom de plume.

As for Azad’s master, Maharao Raja Binay Singh of Alwar (reg. 1815-57) was a great patron of art, literature and architecture and transformed the town of Alwar as well as the royal collections.  He built the main palace in Alwar and a small and beautiful one called Moti Dungri or Banni Bilas a short distance outside.  His greatest work was the construction of a dam at Siliserh ten miles from Alwar which formed a lake from which water was brought to the town and its environs (Powlett 1878, pp. 23-23).  He enticed to his court painters, calligraphers, illuminators and bookbinders, including such artists as Ghulam ‘Ali Khan from Delhi and the Jaipur artist Baldev (see Hendley’s Ulwar and its Art Treasures, passim).  A rather fine portrait of Maharao Raja Binay Singh by Baldev is also in the British Library. 

Maharao Raja Binay Singh of Alwar by Baldev, c. 1840. British Library,  India Office Album 53, no. 5048.

He was apparently stricken with paralysis during the last five years of his life when the governance of the state passed into the hands of his Muslim ministers which caused much trouble during his son Sheodan Singh’s reign.  In 1857 he sent the flower of his army to assist the beleaguered garrison in Agra.  They were set upon at Achnera by revolutionary sepoys from Nimach and Nasirabad.  The Alwar Muslims including the artillery sided with the rebels but the Rajputs fought and many perished.  It is not recorded whether Captain Heatherly was with the artillery on that occasion, but he certainly seems to have survived until 1861.

Although it would seem that Heatherly wore his military uniform even at poetic gatherings, his official uniform of the Maharao Raja of Alwar’s service in the 1852 painting by Ghulam ‘Ali Khan suggests that he had come to Jhajjar not as a poet but as an envoy from the Alwar Raja.  He is seated on the Nawab’s left opposite to the Nawab’s chief minister Pandit Kedarnath Sahib, alongside whom are ranged the chief judge and court officials.  The documents which they are holding or which are on the ground before them are official documents and not books of poetry, so presumably the scene represents the amicable resolution of some border dispute.  The town of Jhajjar is some 50 miles west of New Delhi, but the state itself, before its abolition in 1857, on its southern boundary bordered the state of Alwar.

In 1857 Nawab ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan made the mistake of hedging his bets, and paid for it with his life, being put on trial in Delhi and hanged on 23rd December 1857.  His end is described in William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal (p. 417).  His estates were confiscated: most became part of the British district of Rohtak, although some areas were awarded to the loyal Sikh chiefs of Patiala, Nabha and Jind.  His moveable possessions were placed in the hands of the prize agents although Government did award pensions to his dependents. 

As for Alexander Heatherly Azad, caught between the two worlds and seeing the one that he had most identified with being brutally destroyed, he presumably retired to Alwar where he and his relatives continued in the service of the Maharao Raja.  Manuscripts of his poems might yet be found in the collections of the museum in Alwar and elsewhere in Rajasthan.

 

Bibliography
Dalrymple, W., The Last Mughal:  the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, Bloomsbury, London, 2006
Farhatullah Beg’s Dehli ki akhri shama, translated by Akhtar Qamber as The Last Musha’irah of Delhi, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1979
Hendley, T.H., Ulwar and its Art Treasures, W. Griggs, London, 1888
Losty, J.P., and Roy, M., Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire – Manuscripts and Paintings in the British Library, British Library, London, 2012
Powlett, P.W., Gazetteer of Ulwar, Trübner & Co., London, 1878
Saksena, Ram Babu, European and Indo-European Poets of Urdu & Persian, Lucknow, 1941


J.P. Losty, Curator of Visual Arts (Emeritus)

Two representatives from the British Library attended the recent conference, ‘The Digital Humanities + Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies’, hosted by the Middle Eastern Studies Department of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Organised by Dr Elias Muhanna and held on 24-25 October 2013, this conference sought to bring together for the first time researchers and librarians using digital technologies in innovative ways to create and disseminate knowledge in the fields of Islamic and Middle East Studies

Throughout the lively conference discussion, particular themes were pursued that are very relevant to our own work at the British Library. Professor Beshara Doumani, director of Middle East Studies at Brown University, opened the conference by posing a number of important ethical questions about digital scholarship. For example, what ‘acts of violence’ are done to texts in the process of digitisation, translation, transliteration and indexing? What effect does the political economy of funding for digital projects have on the production of knowledge?

Letter from ‘Abd al-‘Azīz bin ‘Abd al-Raḥmān bin Fayṣal Āl Sa‘ūd (Ibn Sa‘ūd) to Captain Percy Gordon Loch, British Political Agent at Bahrain, dated 17 Safar 1335 (13 December 1916), following his visit to Kuwait to meet Sir Percy Zachariah Cox. Digitised as part of the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership. British Library, IOR/R/15/2/33, f. 11.

These questions became a running theme throughout the conference and were picked up by Travis Zadeh (Haverford College) in his talk “Uncertainty and the Archive: Reflections on Medieval Arabic and Persian Book Culture in the Digital Age”. He demonstrated how important textual elements are lost in the modern proliferation of searchable digital forms of Arabic and Persian classical texts. Moreover, he showed how certain genres of literature, for example, manuscripts on the occult and magic, are often excluded from digitisation projects since they reflect a social history that is at odds with organisations that fund and produce these new digital archives.

Other highlights from the conference include the keynote speech of Dr Dwight Reynolds (Professor of Religious Studies, UCSB), who focused on the monumental Sirat Bani Hilal Digital Archive. This archive contains audio recordings of poets and musicians from Upper Egypt whose artistic legacy would otherwise be lost. This resource also constitutes a teaching tool, with English translations, written transcriptions from Arabic oral recitations of the thousand-year-old epic, and an explanation of the historical background of the text.

Dr Afsaneh Najmabadi (Harvard) presented her important project Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran in a talk entitled “Making (Up) an Archive: What Could Writing History Look Like in a Digital Age?”. She introduced ways in which technology can be used to document and disseminate objects central to social and cultural history that would not normally be accessible to researchers using administrative and national archives. These objects include women’s household items, dowry registries and marriage contracts, family letters and personal photographs, as well as oral history interviews.

Detail from the illuminated colophon of Tāj al-Salāṭīn, 'The Crown of Kings', a Malay guide to ethics for rulers, copied in Penang in 1239 AH (1824 AD).  British Library, Or.13295, f.191r (detail). 

The difficulties and possibilities of using text mining techniques for the querying of biographical dictionaries were presented in a talk by Dr Maxim Romanov (Tufts) entitled “Abstract Models for Islamic History”. Dr Romanov accessed 29,000 biographical records to search for names, toponyms, and dates that allow the researcher to trace cultural or religious developments over an extended period or large geographical expanse. You can download a full copy of his fascinating paper here.

Dr Kirill Dmitriev (St Andrews University) presented the Language, Philology, Culture: Arab Cultural Semantics in Transition project to develop The Analytical Database of Arabic Poetry which will include comprehensive data on the vocabulary of early Arabic poetry (6th-8th centuries AD) in the form of an electronic dictionary.

Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative’s partners, Princeton University Library and Free University, Berlin, to create the groundwork for the preservation of manuscripts in private libraries in the Yemen together with the Imam Zayd ibn Ali Cultural Foundation.


Serat Selarasa, Javanese manuscript digitised through the Ginsburg Legacy. King Kusywari attacks a Muslim sage who had interpreted his dream of three rainbows which burnt his palace as representing three princes who will overcome the country and become the new rulers. British Library MSS.Jav.28, f.19v.

This conference was an excellent opportunity for us to share information about the British Library’s major digitisation projects related to the Middle East, for instance the Endangered Archives Programme and the British Library’s partnership with the Qatar Foundation to digitise material related to the Persian Gulf and Arabic scientific manuscripts. We also had the opportunity to showcase current digitisation projects in the Asian and African Studies section of the Library, in particular, the Hebrew Manuscripts Project, Malay Manuscripts Digitisation Project and Persian Manuscripts Digitisation Project, as well as the smaller Southeast Asian Manuscripts digitisation project funded by the Ginsburg Legacy, all of which are expected to come to fruition in the next few years. These projects will make thousands of the British Library’s manuscripts freely available to the public on our Digitised Manuscripts website and greatly open up access to our collections.

Daniel Lowe, Gulf History and Arabic Language Specialist, British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership, @dan_a_lowe

Nur Sobers-Khan, IHF Curator for Persian Manuscripts

Malay manuscripts have been present in the British Library from the very earliest days of the institution.  When the British Museum was founded in 1753, among the 71,000 natural history specimens, objects, manuscripts and printed books bequeathed to the nation by collector extraordinaire Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) were a number  from the Malay world.  These include three palm-leaf documents in Javanese (Sloane 1035, Sloane 1403.A and Sloane 1403.E), an Arabic treatise on Islamic jurisprudence with interlinear translation into Javanese (Sloane 2645), several of the earliest Malay printed vocabularies and translations of the Bible, and two manuscript volumes in Malay.  Together with all the other books and manuscripts in the library of the British Museum, these items were transferred to the newly-formed British Library in 1973. 


Portrait of Sir Hans Sloane holding a book, detail of an engraving from The Newcastle Magazine, 1785-6.  British Library, P.P. 6077.d.

The two Malay manuscripts from the Sloane collection are very different from each other, in both content and form.  One is a legal text or undang-undang,  Sloane 2393, probably dating from the 17th or early 18th century.  Its physical form is highly unusual in that the text is written lengthwise across the page, parallel to the spine of the book.  This suggests that the manuscript may have originated in a region where palm leaf – with its horizontal format – was still the standard writing medium.  A few characters in Javanese script on the cover (see below) point to an origin in Java, or perhaps from the environs of the strongly Javanese-influenced courts of Jambi and Palembang in east Sumatra.  The text has been studied in detail by the Malaysian scholar Mohammed Jajuli Rahman, who found that it differs from most other Malay texts on Islamic law (fiqh) of the 16th to 19th centuries by focussing on criminal law (hukum jenayah).  The text introduces itself on the first page as Inilah bab takzir, ‘This is the section on punishment’, and presents definitions of and punishments for murder, injury, adultery, slander, theft and banditry, concluding with a final section on legal procedure, for example in dealing with witnesses.


Section discussing injuries to the head (Ini kitab pada menyatakan luka kepala), from Bab takzir, an early Malay text on punishments according to Islamic criminal law.  British Library, Sloane 2393, f.7r. 

Detail showing Javanese characters on the cover of Bab takzir.  British Library, Sloane 2393, f.21v (detail).

The term ‘Malay manuscript’ generally calls to mind a work from Southeast Asia produced in a Muslim milieu, written in Malay in the adapated form of the Arabic script known as Jawi, such as Sloane 2393 described above.  But as the technical definition of  ‘Malay manuscript’ essentially covers any item written by hand in the Malay language, it thus includes some very varied types of works, such as the second Malay manuscript owned by Sir Hans Sloane: a compilation of Christian hymns and the Psalms of David, as well as services for marriage and baptism, written in romanized Malay in a 17th-century Dutch hand (Sloane 3115).  On the flyleaf is inscribed the name Cornelius van der Sluijs, and a note in Dutch stating that in the year 1672 he sailed on the ship ‘The Coat of Arms of Alkmaar’ ('t Wapen van Alkmaar) to the East Indies, as a church representative to visit the sick. His arrival in Ambon on 10 July 1674 is recorded by François Valentijn in his monumental Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën (1726, p.75), who described 'Cornelius van der Sluis' as a doctor from Utrecht.  The note in the manuscript further records that Van der Sluijs took his final church exams in 1678, and was then sent to Ternate as chief church minister.  This manuscript was therefore probably compiled in the Moluccas, in eastern Indonesia.


The Psalms of David, in romanised Malay, late 17th century.  British Library, Sloane 3115, f.16r. 

Further reading
Mohamad Jajuli Rahman, The Undang-undang: a mid-eighteenth century Malay law text (BL Sloane MS 2393): transcription and translation. (Canterbury: University of Kent, Centre of South-east Asian studies, 1986).
Mohamad Jajuli Abd. Rahman, Teks undang-undang Melayu pertengahan abad kelapan belas (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1995).

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asian studies