Asian and African studies blog

(Sorry, but there’s no RnB to be found here; you’ll have to exit now if you’re looking for some Mary J. Blige)

The first page of a copy of Şah u Geda from a 17th century CE manuscript featuring illumination that was likely added in the 19th century CE. (Dukaginzade Yahya Bey, Şah u Geda, 26 Zulkâde 1020 AH [16 January 1612 CE]. Or 16422, f 1v)

Sometimes, large collections of data can only find their way into electronic databases through the mind-numbing, but essential, process of manual data entry. In the case of the British Library’s Ottoman manuscripts, the transfer of details by hand from acquisition slips into our online catalogue is the quickest means of making information about our holdings available to the widest number of people possible. There is, of course, an additional benefit to going through hundreds of these slips of paper. In doing so, I’ve been able to pick out patterns of acquisition, and to connect volumes of similar or identical content purchased by or bequeathed to the Museum or Library over the course of its history. In this blog, I’m going to explore one such group of items, all of which are in some way related to members of the Dukagjini family.

To be fair, the vast majority of the works in question are collections of poetry or prose by one Dukagjini, Dukaginzade Taşlıcalı Yahya Bey (Jahja bej Dukagjini in Albanian). Yahya Bey was born in 1498 CE in Taşlıca, today known as Pljevlja, Montenegro. The Dukagjin family were a fairly well-known Christian Albanian group in northern Albania and western Kosova. They are reputed to be descendants of the Progoni, founders of the Principality of Arbanon, the first state in Albanian history. While a branch of the family fled Ottoman rule and established themselves in the Venetian-controlled city of Koper (contemporary Slovenia), the rest stayed, gradually integrating into Ottoman suzerainty. A number of their children found their way to Istanbul in a pattern similar to that of Yahya Bey. Dukaginzade Ahmet Paşa achieved the rank of Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire in 1514-15 CE. His son, Dukaginzade Mehmet Paşa, went on to great feats too, becoming governor of Egypt in the mid-16^th century CE. Aleppo even has a Dukaginzade Mehmet Paşa Mosque complex, which is known in Arabic as al-Adiliyah Mosque (جامع العادلية).

Yahya Bey was brought to Istanbul as part of the Devşirme, an Ottoman institution of forcible recruitment through which non-Muslim boys were selected by Imperial authorities, taken from their families, converted to Islam, and then entered into Imperial service. Yahya Bey therefore moved to Istanbul at an early age. He originally trained to be an archer, but eventually impressed Kemalpaşazade (Şeyh-ül-İslam and author of the Tevarih-i Âl-Osman) with a kaside he had written. He thus began his path through Imperial educational structures and into the bureaucracy. He was known as a sâhib-i seyf ü kalem, or master of the sword and pen, meaning a man who was both a warrior and a poet. Apart from his prolific poetical oeuvre, which we’ll see below, he was also a respected soldier, participating in the Battle of Çaldıran in 1514, the Ottoman-Mamluk War in 1516-17 CE, and even the Siege of Szigetvár in 1566 CE. But luck could be fickle for Ottoman civil servants and warriors. When Yahya Bey wrote a poem elegizing Kanunî Süleyman's first-born, Şehzade Mustafa, Grand Vizier Rüstem Paşa, Mustafa’s murderer, lashed out at the poet. When the dust settled, Yahya Bey was exiled to the Balkans. Some say that he took up residence in Zvornik, in present-day Bosnia and Hercegovina. Others claim that he actually spent his final days in Timișoara/Temesvár, Romania. Wherever it might have been that Yahya Bey lived in exile, it was there that he eventually died at some point between 1575 and 1582 CE.

The first page of another copy of Şah u Geda, this time from a late 16th century CE manuscript. (Dukaginzade Yahya Bey, Şah u Geda, 998 AH [1590 CE]. Or 1159, f 1v)

The Library holds at least 15 different volumes containing works by Yahya Bey. Most of these are not combined with the works of other writers, although Add MS 7936 (ff 28v-106v, Gülşen-i Envar) and Or 1154 (ff 59-136v, Gencine-i Raz) are both mecmualar or codices containing poetry by Yahya Bey and other poets. The other volumes cover the breadth of his oeuvre, including his Hamse ( Or 1147 and Or 7222); Şah u Geda ( Or 1159, Or 7223, Or 7224, and Or 16422); Gencine-i Raz ( Or 37, Or 1162, Or 7225, Or 16390, Add MS 5979); Gülşen-i Envar (Add MS 19446); and Usul-name or Kitab-i Usul (Add MS 5978). The Hamse (which comes from the Arabic word khamsah خمسة, meaning 5) contains the other named poems, as well as a fifth work, Yusûf u Züleyha. The Library does not appear to hold separate copies of his other works, Edirne Şehrengizi and İstanbul Şehrengizi, and it is likely that other poems that feature in his Divan are scattered in various mecmualar forming part of the Library’s holdings, waiting to be catalogued in full and connected to his name.

The first two pages of Gülşen-i Envar from a Hamse-i Yahya Efendi, likely copied in the 17th century CE. (Dukaginzade Yahya Bey, Hamse-i Yahya Efendi, 17th century CE. Or 7222, ff 373v-374r)

Yahya Bey is well-represented within the Library’s holdings in part because of the high esteem in which he was held by contemporary literati and soldiers as well as by future generations of scholars. Even while in exile, he impressed the Ottoman soldier, poet and historian Mustafa Ali, then stationed in Bosnia, who was later inspired by Yahya’s story in writing his own poetic works. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, his popularity was encouraged by the English Orientalist E. J. W. Gibb , a prolific collector of West Asian manuscripts and a giant in Anglophone Ottoman Studies. The full impact of his and other British Orientalists’ collecting and analytical practices has been succinctly reviewed by Dr. Nagihan Gür in a number of her published papers. Gibb claimed that Yahya Bey was a particularly creative and innovative poet, borrowing and adapting themes and styles from Persian poetry. He further elevated the poet for his mastery of Istanbulite Ottoman Turkish, claiming that it was not possible to find any hint of Yahya’s Albanian origins in his use of the Ottoman language. As Gibb’s six-volume A History of Ottoman Poetry (OIF 894.351) became a staple of literary criticism for the Anglophone world in the 20^th century, so too would Yahya Bey find a place within the Orientalist pantheon of Ottoman poets established by European and American scholars.

A geometric diagram featuring Arabic letters and esoteric (?) symbols from the start of a Gülşen-i Envar text found in a late 16th century CE Hamse-i Yahya (Dukaginzade Yahya Bey, Hamse-i Yahya, Safer 988 AH [March-April 1580 CE]. Or 1147, f 1r)

In 1901 and 1909, the British Museum (whose text-based collections passed to the Library in 1973) received dozens of Ottoman Turkish (as well as Persian and Arabic) manuscripts from Gibb’s estate. It should be no surprise, then, that four of the Library’s holdings of Yahya Bey’s poetry and prose are from Gibb (Or 7222, Or 7223, Or 7224, and Or 7225). But there are, of course, other sources. Nine volumes pre-date Gibb’s bequest. Two were received from Hilgrove Turner (Add MS 5978 and Add MS 5979), while one (Add MS 7936) came from the Rich Collection, amassed by the Franco-British businessman and diplomat Claudius Rich. The copy of Gülşen-i Envar at Add MS 19446 entered the British Museum’s holdings thanks to H(endrik?) Edelman, and Or 37 was sold by George Cecil Renouard. In 1872, four volumes were purchased from the Polish-Russian diplomat and famed Orientalist (particularly within the realm of Kurdish Studies), Alexandre Jaba or Żaba. The volumes (Or 1147, Or 1154, Or 1159 and Or 1162) speak to Jaba’s broader interest in the languages and literary cultures of West Asia and the Caucasus, as well as the formation of a distinct school of Oriental Studies in the Russian Empire. His legacy, and that of the other scholars who worked on such texts within the Tsars’ realms, are taken up in The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies (ELD.DS.18320), edited by Dr. Michael Kemper and Dr. Stephan Conermann.

Two final pages from an early 17th century CE copy of the Gencine-yi Raz produced by Abdi İbn-i Mustafa of Demirtaş (Teymurtaşı), featuring numerous ownership seals, couplets and inscriptions in Ottoman Turkish. (Dukaginzade Yahya Efendi, Gencine-yi Raz, 1034 AH [1624-25 CE]. Or 7224, ff 83v-84r)

Another two items would join this list thanks to acquisition activities in the late 20^th century. Both Or 16390 and Or 16422 are works that were previously held by C. S. Mundy, another of Great Britain’s well-known Turkologists, this time resident at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. These men, of course, were the final stop for the manuscripts before they entered the Museum or the Library. Before them, countless Ottoman and other readers bought, enjoyed, shared, and sold these works. Some of them left their names or seals on the pages and fly-leaves of the volumes, attesting to the great popularity of a number of the items. Much research is still needed to understand just what paths these texts followed throughout their lives, and how such histories reflect reading and collecting habits of Ottoman audiences.

A copy of a letter written to Dukaginzade Osman taken from a collection of compositions attributed to Veysi. (Münşeat-i Veysi-yi Merhum, 18th century CE. Or 7466, ff 39v-40v)

The story of Ottoman Dukagjinis and the British Library’s Ottoman manuscripts does not end with Yahya Bey. Nor, apparently, did the story of the Dukaginzadeler in the Ottoman bureaucracy. Or 7466 is a münşeat of the late 16^th-century Ottoman poet Veysi, which was purchased from I. E. Gégou on 9 April 1910. A münşeat is essentially a collection of letters and other texts that can be used as models for future correspondence. The genre is fairly common within our holdings. The general idea was popular in many cultures until fairly recently; I remember having a French correspondence manual in the 1990s as a supplementary text for high school and university French class. In this particular volume, we find a copy of a letter addressed to Dukaginzade Osman (died 1603 CE), Kadı of Cairo. While Dukaginzade was not nearly as well-known as his relatives, his name does appear in a number of different münşeat held in various locations and penned by different authors. Most recently, he came up in the chapter “The law school of Mehmed II in the last quarter of the sixteenth century: a glass ceiling for the less connected Ottoman Ulema” by Dr. Baki Tezcan, found in Ottoman War and Peace (ZA9.9.a.6407(68)). The British Library’s own holdings, then, would appear to mirror the broader fortunes of the Dukagjini family in the ebb and flow of the Ottoman Imperial order.

As more of our acquisition slips enter the online catalogue, it is possible that further volumes of Yahya Bey’s work will be reconnected to those already identified. Perhaps items relating to other members of the Dukagjini family might be found too. Whatever happens, those manuscripts already documented paint a picture of how one extended family had a profound effect on Ottoman society and history in the 16^th century. They also show how collecting practices impact scholarship and our later understanding of the evaluation and appreciation of cultural products in Ottoman society. Finally, the Dukagjinis shine a light on the complexity of kinship, forcible recruitment, and ethnic origins in the Ottoman Empire. At times, statecraft and literary prowess are more than just learned skills; they’re a family affair.

Dr. Michael Erdman, Curator of the Turkish and Turkic Collections

I occasionally come across relevant materials in the British Library collection in connection with my original mandate on the Yorùbá print materials (see earlier blog post), even when they are not published in my target language, Yorùbá.

Recently, I stumbled on the materials on Ulli Beier, the German writer, editor, curator, and art scholar and enthusiast who lived in Nigeria between 1950 and 1966, and whose papers and other archives reside now in Osogbo at the Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding, and at the Iwalewa Haus at Bayreuth University in Germany.

The distance between Beier’s work and the Yorùbá collections at the Library isn’t much, in fact. The writer’s creative output during his stay in Nigeria includes a number of original writings in the Yorùbá, translations from and into the language, and the promotion of work of writers producing in the language to the rest of the world. His work of translation of traditional Yorùbá poetry, myths, and proverbs into English are some of the most notable works of documentation done by any one person during that period.

His interest was in art and oral literature, but also drama, performance, and written literature. He helped introduce to an international audience, some of Nigeria’s later successful writers and artists, from Wọlé Ṣóyínká to Chinua Achebe with both of whom he founded the Mbari Club in Ìbàdàn and the M̀bárí M̀báyọ̀ in Òṣogbo; Dúró Ládípọ̀; and many others he published in Black Orpheus, a literary and arts magazine he edited. His first wife, Susanne Wenger, remained in Òṣogbo and became a devotee of the river goddess, and artist. As a creative writer himself, Beier also often published under the Yorùbá pen name "Ọ̀bọ́túndé Ìjímèrè".

The following are some of his works — or works related to him — that I have found in the British Library Catalogue relating to Yorùbá.

• The Stolen Images (1976). A short story for children centered around art and performance, particularly the performance of Oba Koso by Duro Ladipo. It is fiction, but it blends a lot of elements from real life and the Nigeria of the 60s.
• Yorùbá Poetry: Traditional Yoruba poems collected and translated by Bakare Gbadomosi and Ulli Beier. With eight silkscreen prints and ten vignettes by Susanne Wenger. A special publication of “Black Orpheus”. (1959). This book, featuring translated Yorùbá poems about particular deities, food items, animals, and concepts, also includes original images painted by Susanne Wenger.
• Three Nigerian Plays (1967) This book is peculiar in that it not only includes the original text of Duro Ladipo’s Moremi, but also has The Scheme by Wale Ogunyemi and Born with the Fire on his Head by Obotunde Ijimere (which is the pen name that Beier often used).
• Yorùbá Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional Poems Compiled and Edited by Ulli Beier and Illustrated by Susanne Wenger (1970). This collection, like the earlier one, focuses on concepts, deities and ideas in Yorùbáland.
• Yorùbá Myths (1980). This book, illustrated by Beier’s second wife Georgina, has a collection of popular and obscure Yorùbá myths, gathered and translated into English from Yorùbá and in some cases from French. The original sources included Yemi Elebuibon, Ulli Beier, Bakare Gbadamosi, and Pierre Verger.
• Les masques Guèlèdè (1966) This is a short pamphlet, written in French, about the Gelede masks in Yorùbá art and religion. It also has a lot of drawings of masquerades wearing the mask during performances.
• Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art (1991) A collection of stories, narratives, photos, and memories of people who lived in Osogbo, interacted with the art movement of the sixties there, and worked with Ulli and Georgina Beier.

There are a number of other works about Beier, not particularly relevant to this write-up, just as there are a few dozen others about his work on Nigerian poetry in English as well as his work on Papua New Guinea. All these can be found in the British Library catalogue.

Here are a few more, including some published under his adopted Yorùbá penname “Ọ̀bọ́túndé Ìjímèrè”.

• Asiru: A New Yorùbá Artist (1965)
• Modern Poetry From Africa (1963) with Gerald Moore
• The Imprisonment of Obatala, and other plays. English adaptation by Ulli Beier.(1966)
• Contemporary Art in Africa (1968)
• Introduction to African Literature: An Anthology of Critical Writing from ‘Black Orpheus’ (1967)
• The fall of man. According to an ancient manuscript discovered in the sacred city of Ife, and believed to belong to one of the lost tribes of Israel. Deciphered by Obotunde Ijimere. (1973)
• The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger (1975)
• A Dreaming Life: An Autobiography of Twins Seven-Seven (1999)
• Omoluabi: Ulli Beier, Yorùbá Society and Culture (2003)

Researchers interested in the life and work of Beier will find a lot to benefit their work using the Library’s extensive collections on the man without whom a lot of what came to define Nigerian literature and art movements in the sixties and seventies may not have come to be.

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a Nigerian linguist and writer, author of Edwardsville by Heart, a collection of poetry. He is 2019/2020 Chevening Research Fellow at the British Library.
© CCBY

As one of the two 2019/2020 Chevening Research Fellows at the British Library, my work revolves around literature produced in Yorùbá.

Literature written by Africans in African languages existed before African literature in English (or other European languages). This fact, frequently overlooked, has coloured the discussion of what we talk about whenever we explore “African literature”. Some of the first writings we instinctively think or talk about when discussing African literature, for instance, are usually in English: Amos Tútùọlá’s Palm Wine Drinkard (1952), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana (1961), among others. But the history of writing and publishing literature by Africans in Africa started much earlier, and in other African languages.

You can find some earlier newspapers published in Yorùbá at the British Library.

On November 23, 1859, the first newspaper in Nigeria was published in Abeokuta, titled Ìwé Ìròhìn Fún Àwọn Ará Ẹ̀gbá àti Yorùbá. It was printed by the printing press of Henry Townsend, established five years earlier as an arm of the missionary endeavour he was involved in, and as a way to keep the few literate people in “high society” engaged in the day-to-day of society. The newspaper was published in both Yorùbá and English. It was published every fifteen days and sold for 120 cowries (about a penny at the time). Its readership rose to around 3000 subscribers before it went belly-up after the printing press was burnt during one of the skirmishes between the British visitors and the Ẹ̀gbá residents.

In 1891, another iteration of the paper resurrected in Lagos, retaining a version of the original name. Now it was called Ìwé Ìròhìn Yorùbá àti Èkó — the newspaper of Yorùbá and Lagos. The word “Yorùbá” at this point had just begun to be adopted as the general name for all the people who speak associated languages and dialect, and who live in South-western Nigeria. Before then, the word had only referred to the Oyo people. Others retained their own ethnic names: Ẹ̀gbá, Ìjẹ̀bú, Èkìtì, Ìjẹ̀ṣà, Yàgbà, etc.

Ìwé Ìròhìn Èkó (1891) was one of the first newspapers published in both Yorùbá and English. (1866.c.5.(18.))

Through these publications, many of which were printed in both Yorùbá and English, the educated elite found ways to learn about what was going on in other parts of the world. Through letters to the editor, they were also able to respond, and participate in ongoing civil and social debates. It was not surprising to read then, for instance, that many Africans had read, debated, and written rejoinders to the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884 which codified the demarcation of the continent. According to this Al Jazeera news opinion , “a week before it closed, the Lagos Observer declared that ‘the world had, perhaps, never witnessed a robbery on so large a scale.’" The Lagos Observer was another one of those newspapers at the time, established in 1882. (The British Library holds copies from 1882 to 1888 in microfilm).

In 1928, another one of those newspapers was founded, called Akéde Èkó (The Lagos Herald). It was edited by Isaac Babalọlá Thomas (1888-1963), journalist and writer. In 1929, he wrote what has been generally agreed upon as “the first Yorùbá novel.” The work, titled Ìtàn Ìgbésí Ayé Èmi Ṣẹ̀gílọlá Ẹlẹ́yinjú Ẹgẹ́ Ẹlẹ́gbẹ̀rún Ọkọ L’áíyé ( The story of my life; me, Segilola, one with delicate eyes and a thousand living husbands ), was published first as a serial, disguised as a letter to the editor by a dying old lady willing to spill the story of her exciting and sometimes tawdry adventures on the pages of the newspapers. When it was eventually published, with the author being credited merely as a custodian of the story by the “anonymous” lady, it caused some scandal in the new society not used to reading such open discussion of sexual relationships.

Print Culture and the First Yorùbá Novel” edited by Karin Barber. (Print culture and the first Yoruba novel : I.B. Thomas's 'Life story of me, Sẹgilọla' and other texts , edited by Karin Barber (Leiden: Brill, 2012). (YD.2012.a.5228)

There had been many pamphlets, religious texts, poems, tracts, etc. published before this time, some of them unattributed to anyone but religious organisations. But over the next decades, scores of literary works — short stories, novelettes, novels, travelogues, poetry and other personal narratives were published to limited audiences literate in Yorùbá and in the culture of the changing times. By the time the first notable English language novel The Palm Wine Drinkard was published in 1952, it had a whole generation of Nigerian Yorùbá literary oeuvre to longingly gesture towards, and borrow from.

The fame of the English language genre would come to eventually supplant and stunt the growth of Nigerian-language creative output in the subsequent generations. By the mid-eighties, long after the departure or nationalization of the earlier British establishment firms that had published some of the earlier Nigerian writers, including D.O. Fágúnwà, J.F. Ọdúnjọ and Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí, the creative output in the local language also seemed to gradually disappear. Today, there is no reputable institution publishing Nigerian language fiction or drama or poetry. There are still publications, but they are mostly self-publications with no peer review or professional vetting and critical appraising mechanism.

As a 2019/2020 Chevening Research Fellow, my work over this next year will examine the Yorùbá language collections in the British Library — containing over two hundred years of documentation and preservation — to draw patterns, find gaps, identify trends and relevant research directions for future researchers who will come to use the Library, and generally provide expert analysis of the Library’s Yorùbá language material holdings. And sometimes, non-Yorùbá texts of relevance will also come my way, as one did a few weeks ago when I discovered that the original typescript of Wọlé Ṣóyínká’s Ìdànrè, eventually published in 1965, resides in the manuscript section at the Library, still bearing the marking, handwritings and musical directions of the then 31 year-old-author.

I also happen to be a linguist, interested in the growth, development, and sustenance of the Yorùbá language (and other Nigerian languages) in literature, education, governance and technology in the 21st century. And so, I will be looking to better understand the evolution of the orthography of the language, through the texts that have carried it in literature from its early beginnings until today. The work of forbearers like Samuel Ajayi Crowther to Ayo Bamgbose stand as guiding lights, as do the work of faceless and notable writers of the Yorùbá language whose texts provide the most visible account of the language and its journey from just a spoken language to a medium of transmitting generations of stories, both in fiction and history, in the many written patterns and styles.

My thought process on these discoveries will be shared on the British Library blog as the year unfolds.

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a Nigerian linguist and writer, author of Edwardsville by Heart, a collection of poetry. He is 2019/2020 Chevening Research Fellow at the British Library.

On 30 June the Shubbak festival of contemporary Arab culture returns to the British Library with a day of literary events. The British Library has hosted the festival previously in 2015 and 2017. Recordings from these events can be accessed through the British Library’s Soundcloud (here and here). This year, in addition to panels on new feminist and queer writing, and historical fiction, the festival will also features spotlight sessions on specific authors, and two creative installations by Moroccan artist Aïcha El Beloui and Saudi design practice Bricklab. Details of the programme can be found below and tickets can be purchased through the British Library website.

THE ENDLESS WAVE: New Feminist Writing, hosted by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
12 pm–1.15 pm

What does it mean to be an Arab feminist in 2019? How does the legacy of previous generations intersect with current creative practice and globalised movements like #MeToo? Three artists using diverse artforms discuss and perform their work. French-Moroccan journalist, commentator and Prix Goncourt-winning novelist Leïla Slimani‘s recent nonfiction work on Moroccan women’s sexuality generated much debate. Award-winning Egyptian graphic novelist and web comic artist Deena Mohamed is the creator of the veiled female superhero Qahera. Badriah al Beshr is a Saudi journalist, chatshow host and novelist known for tackling women’s issues.

(Left to right): Lullaby by Leïla Slimani ; translated from the French by Sam Taylor (London : Faber & Faber, 2018). BL, H.2018/.9220. Shubbīk lubbīk : qiṣṣah muṣawwarah by Deena Mohamed (Cairo : 2017). BL, YP.2018.b.610. Mother of all pigs : a novel by Malu Halasa (Los Angeles, CA : The Unnamed Press, [2017]). BL, YD.2019.a.3105.

SPOTLIGHT: New Arab Writing from London with Malu Halasa, hosted by Jo Glanville
1.30–2 pm

Malu Halasa has co-edited five anthologies on Middle East culture and politics. Her debut novel, Mother of All Pigs, unveils contemporary life in Jordan, as one family confronts its secrets over the course of a weekend’s festivities. At times witty and energetic, compassionate and awe-inspiring, an Arabic translation is forthcoming in 2020. Malu Halasa reads from and discusses her novel and practice.

BOLD VOICES: New Queer Writing , hosted by Puck Khalaf
2.15–3.30pm

Building on Shubbak’s 2017 inaugural queer panel, Bold Voices brings together a new range of artists at the cutting edge of LGBT+ creative expression. Three artists from this exciting and defiant scene present their approach ranging from comics to storytelling and activism. From Beirut comes poet, playwright and actress Dima Mikhayel Matta, the founder of Beirut’s storytelling platform Cliffhangers. Syrian Swedish novelist Khaled Alesmael's Selamlik, a homoerotic depiction of Syria, has sold over 2,000 copies in Sweden. Joseph Kai, whose comics centre around the unspoken, marginalization and gender, is editor at the Lebanese collective Samandal.

(Left to right): Revenge by Samandal (Paris : Studio Fidèle, 2019). Kursī : riwāyah by Dima Wannous (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 2009). BL, YP.2012.a.2398. 

SPOTLIGHT: new Syrian fiction with Dima Wannous, hosted by Bidisha
4–4.30 pm

Damascus-born Dima Wannous is a writer and cultural journalist. She has written for multiple Arab and international newspapers, managed the cultural section of the online magazine Modon, and hosted a cultural TV show from 2008-18. Her second novel, The Frightened Ones, focuses on the notion of fear and how central it is to dictatorship. Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2018, the novel is about to be published in Elisabeth Jaquette’s English translation. Dima Wannous reads from and discusses her novel and practice.

SPOTLIGHT: New Kurdish fiction with Bakhtiyar Ali, host by Bonnie Gree
4.45–5.15 pm

Bakhtiyar Ali is a prominent Iraqi Kurdish novelist and literary critic, essayist and poet, awarded the prestigious Nelly Sachs Prize in 2017. His novel I Stared at the Night of the City was a bestseller in Iraqi Kurdistan and made history as the first Kurdish novel ever to be published in English translation. He is joined by his translator Kareem Abdulrahman, currently completing the translation of Ali’s next novel The Last Pomegranate, to read an exclusive extract and to discuss contemporary Kurdish literature in the Arab region and beyond.

(Left to right): I stared at the night of the city by Bakhtiyar Ali ; translated from the Kurdish by Kareem Abdulrahman (Reading : Periscope, 2016). BL, H.2018/8208. Ruqaya Izzidien. al-Nabīdhah : riwāyah by Inaam Kachachi (Beirut : Dār al-Jadīd, 2017). BL, YP.2018.a.5596.

TELLING THE PAST: Contemporary Arab Historical Novels, hosted by Laleh Khalili
5.30–6.45 pm

Many Arab writers create historical novels to recast fraught histories. What are their motivations and methods in approaching history through the creative lens? Twice shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Iraqi writer Inaam Kachachi‘s novels focus on contemporary Iraqi history. Iraqi-Welsh writer Ruqaya Izzidien‘s debut novel features Iraqi, Welsh and English characters in WWI Baghdad. Sudanese IPAF-shortlisted author Hammour Ziada‘s latest historical novel examines cycles of oppression through twentieth-century Sudan. Palestinian novelist Rabai al-Madhoun‘s IPAF winning Destinies, Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba is a four-part epic of the Palestinian exodus and right to return.

Installations:

Aïcha El Beloui: Morocco

Gathering personal narratives through interviews, researching the sound archives in the British Library and walking through West London’s streets, the artist discovered the agreements between Morocco, Spain and France as the catalysts to Moroccan presence in the city.

Ces cités: Marseille 2018 by Aïcha El Beloui

Drawing from this material she will create one of her distinctive maps. Seemingly simply rendered in black and white, they are filled with richly textured incident and associative connections. Charting routes between Morocco and London, and recognising original dreams and aspirations as well as today’s experiences of second and third generation young people, the artist invites the viewer to reflect on themes of citizenship and belonging.

Aïcha El Beloui’s map will be available in paper formats, digitally and as an installation, travelling to different sites across the city.

Aïcha El Beloui is a Casablanca-based illustrator, graphic designer, and creative director. Trained as an architect, she worked originally for UNESCO in heritage preservation. She regularly works with communities to discover a neighbourhood and filters her observations into maps and illustrations.

Bricklab: Geographical Child’s Play

Bricklab, the designers of the first Saudi pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale, create a new pop-up sculpture especially for Shubbak. 22 brightly coloured units equalling in number the 22 states of the Arab League are arranged in different constellations to offer new viewpoints of geographies, nations and the power to imagine other realities. No unit can stand on its own, but has to be grafted onto others. Some constellations seem hierarchical, others more egalitarian. Geographical Child’s Play conjures up poignant and surprising alignments and dependencies. Stretching nearly 10m as a line or barely 3m as a circle, Geographical Child’s Play is Bricklab’s most public and engaging sculpture so far.

Abdulrahman and Turki Gazzaz.

The bright colours and low level hint at nursery furniture or playground equipment. It is an invitation to imagine geopolitics through the lens of play and a deliberately naïve hope.

Established in Jeddah in 2015 Bricklab (Abdulrahman and Turki Gazzaz) quickly established itself as one of the most dynamic current design practices in Saudi Arabia. Their work has been shown at 21,39 Saudi Art Week, Alserkal Avenue in Dubai and Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2018 they took part in the British Council and V&A International Designers Workshop.

Daniel Lowe, Curator for Arabic

#Shubbak2019
@shubbakfestival

            June is Pride Month, which means we celebrate the histories and experiences of LGBTQQ2SA+[1] people. A common complaint that we hear during the month is that the acronyms attached to it are unwieldy and incomprehensible; a criticism that’s easily dispelled through a quick explanation of each letter or symbol. But this discussion obscures a far more complex, and trickier, question: what does it mean to be gay (or, for that matter, lesbian, trans, queer or two-spirit)? Is it just a matter of who you fancy, or is it much deeper, a nexus of desire, outlook, self-image and social relations? Answers aren’t always easy to give for those of us who live in the post-Stonewall era, and they’re even thornier when we try to apply contemporary terms to historical content.

   
Stamped and gilded binding of the Hamse-i Atā’ī (Or. 13882), alongside f. 1v with one of its magnificent ‘unvāns.

            That is, in essence, one of the most perplexing issues in dealing with Or. 13882, an 18^th-century Ottoman recension of the Hamse-yi ‘Atā’ī, ‘Atā’ī’s four extant mesnevis. The work is a beautiful specimen of the Ottoman arts of the book, featuring four illuminated ‘unvāns, thirty miniatures, marbled end-papers and black and maroon morocco binding that has been stamped with gilded cartouches and rope patterns. The presence of two seals and three inscriptions attest to the circulation and desirability of this particular volume; hardly surprising, given its beauty and the slightly scandalous nature of the content. The poetry itself is an oblique response to the earlier Khamsah of Nizami, but takes up local themes. Wine and music in the Imperial court; moral and ethical issues; and social mores and values such as heroism are treated in the first three mesnevis, the ‘Alemnüma, the Nefhatül’Ezhar and the Sohbet-ül-Ebkar. While these topics were often raised in mesnevis for the purpose of Sufi education and instruction, it does not appear that this was always the case in ‘Atā’ī’s work. The fourth mesnevi, Heft Han, is perhaps the most interesting for our purposes. Gibb, in the third volume of his A History of Ottoman Poetry, described it as follows: “The Heft Khwán or Seven Courses is more purely mystical in tone… I have never seen this poem, but Von Hammer describes it as a most unhappy work, consisting simply of a series of trivial stories and trite moralities.”[2] As Andrews and Kalpaklı explain in The Age of Beloveds, it contains seven accounts, the first six of which are moralistic tales, while the seventh relates the story of two male lovers. This final installment tells of the two young men’s “frolics” in Istanbul, of their eventual capture and enslavement by Europeans during a pilgrimage by sea to Egypt, and of the two European men who in turn fall in love with them.[3] This is a fairly original text, an example of ‘Atā’ī’s creativity and imagination.[4]

Examples of the colourful, dynamic illustrations of the Bosphorus (left) and of a a group of men in a mosque, gathering around the minbar.

That, however, is the beginning, rather than the end, of this queer tale. The British Library’s acquisition record for the item reads: “Some [miniatures] illustrate historical events and scenes, others various anecdotes. Those on folios 103r, 108v, 158r and v, 161r, 166r and v are of a pornographic nature. The double miniature depicting the Bosporus, ff. 68v-69r, is of fine quality.” Given that the manuscript was purchased in 1979, this mention of “pornographic” material likely relies on an understanding of the term closer to our own usage, rather than that of the Victorian age. Of course, the line between pornography and art is a blurry one. In 1964, it caused US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to explain that a precise definition of the boundary was unnecessary, as “I know it when I see it.” The American philosopher and writer Susan Sontag was perhaps more helpful when, writing about morality and artistic expression, she argued that art appealed to contemplation, while pornography, in turn, sought to excite.[5]

        Whether according to Stewart’s guidelines, or those of Sontag, a quick view of some of the illustrations included in the Hamse make it clear that these images would likely be kept behind the 18+ bar of any corner store’s magazine rack. Those highlighted in the acquisition slip contain graphic depictions of female and male genitalia; masturbation and vaginal and anal penetration; and sex between couples and in groups. Of importance for this article, a number of the illustrations narrate encounters between men; some bearded, others not. The pictures themselves often tell a story. One pair shows five men seated to eat together, after which three of them are engaged in a menage-à-trois. Another depicts two men having sex while a large group of onlookers spy on the lovers, ultimately exposing them to the authorities. Given what we know of the plot, these images are doubly queered: first, because they involve sex between men; and secondly, because everyone in them is in Ottoman costume, despite the setting of the tale in Europe. Boone interprets the Heft Han as, partly, an allegorical tale about morality and policing of sexuality in the Ottoman Empire (rather than Europe), and this geographical displacement might be the most visual evidence yet supporting his claim.[6]  

Two horsemen, part of one of the other tales in the Hamse, along with the first part of the infamous dinner scene from the Heft Han.

            Moreover, the images raise important questions about sexuality and identity in 17^th- and 18^th- century Ottoman circles. Were the characters depicted in these stories gay? Were their sex acts deemed to be indicative of their identities and self-perceptions? What of the male readers: can we infer anything about their desires? Did a female audience enjoy these stories too, and how does that inform our understanding of their sexuality? Such questions are hard to answer without the input of the individual readers themselves, highlighting the intensely personal and subjective nature of identity in the first place. What’s more, as Serkan Delice has shown in his work “‘When female friends increase, lovers decrease’: Gender, Sexism and Historiography in the Ottoman Era”, such questions can easily become fodder for those with political agendas about contemporary citizens.[7]  

            The act of asking such questions isn’t without its pitfalls. To start with, 16^th-, 17^th- and 18^th-century European observers were apt to insist upon a widespread Ottoman practice of pederasty, despite a lack of firm evidence to suggest that it was any more common than in Western Europe.[8] This Islamophobic trope has survived in contemporary discourse, but it was tempered in 19^th- and 20^th-century scholarship by another trend: that of erasing sexual non-conformity. Translators and commentators have played down the presence of same-sex desire in Ottoman poetry. They instrumentalize authors’ predilection for allusion and allegory, as well as Turkish’s lack of gendered pronouns, to gradually nudge English versions of classical Ottoman poems into the realm of heterosexual love.[9] Similar dynamics are just as visible in 20^th-century Turkish scholarship.[10] To paraphrase Shakira, however, these pics don’t lie. Both figurative and literal imagery pointing to same-sex desire and intercourse motivated scholars in the latter part of the 20^th century to begin discussing more openly homosexual themes within the Ottoman canon. This is no niche field: a whole genre of Ottoman poetry, the şehrengîz, contains plenty of examples of the male poet’s love or lust for another man. It was interwoven into broader Sufi schools of expression and enunciation, a genre that is not as easily tied to specific segments of the population or identities as would be contemporary LGBT fiction.[11]

An unlucky ship on the rolling waters of the Mediterranean, alongside the manuscript’s colophon, including date it was copied: 10 Rebiülahir 1151 AH / 28 July 1738 CE).

            This leads us back to our original question: is it gay? Who knows if a definitive answer that satisfies everyone will ever be formulated. In some ways, even posing the question says more about us than it does about 17^th- or 18^th-century Ottomans. Identity is something intensely personal, and the categories that we choose or that we have chosen for us never manage to capture in full the reality of our existence. What is clear, though, is that sexual diversity is not something new; nor is it something that has been enjoyed only in recent years. As the miniatures of this version of the Hamse-i ‘Atā’ī demonstrate, desire has long come in many shapes and forms. As long as we avoid any ill-fated journeys by sea, it’s up to us to describe and celebrate it in any way we choose. 

Dr. Michael Erdman, Curator of Turkish and Turkic Collections, @BLTurkKoleksyon

[1] LGBTQQ2SA+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Questioning, 2-Spirit, Allies and Others.

[2] E. J. W. Gibb. A History of Ottoman Poetry by the Late E.J.W. Gibb: Volume III. Ed. Edward G. Browne (London: Luzac & Co., 1904), p. 234.

[3] Joseph Allen Boone. The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 10-16.

[4] Rukiye Aslıhan Aksoy Sheridan. “Anlatıcının Rekabet Taktikleri: Nev’i-zade Atâyî’nin Heft-Hân Mesnevisine Anlatıbilimsel Bir Bakış,” in Prof. Dr. Mine Mengi Adına Türkoloji Sempozyumu (20–22 Ekim 2011) Bildirileri (Adana: Çukurova Üniversitesi, 2004), pp. 3-13).

[5] Susan Sontag. “On style” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2009), pp. 26-27.

[6] Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism, pp. 10-16

[7] Serkan Delice. “‘Zen-Dostlar Çoğalıp Mahbûblar Azaldı’: Osmanlı’da Toplumsal Cinsiyet, Cinsellik ve Tarihyazımı” in ed. Cüneyt Cakırlar and Serkan Delice, Cinsellik Muamması: Türkiye’de Queer Kültür ve Muhalefet (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2012), pp. 329-363.

[8] Stephen O. Murray. “Homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire,” in Historical Reflections, vol. 33, no. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 103-105.

[9] Stephen O. Murray. “Homosexuality in the Ottoman Empire,” in Historical Reflections, vol. 33, no. 1 (Spring 2007), p. 106.

[10] Tunca Kortantamer. Nev’î-zâde Atâyî ve Hamse’si (Izmir: Bornova, 1997).

[11] İrvin Cemil Schick. “Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Ottoman and Turkish Erotic Literature,” in The Turkish Studies Association Journal, vol. 28, no. 1/2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 88-90.

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.

One of the most important items in the British Library’s Japanese collections is a small, rather ordinary-looking, leather-bound volume, generally known as Feiqe monogatari (BL shelfmark Or.59.aa.1). Despite its appearance, it is, in fact, a remarkable work in a number of ways. Firstly, it was one of the earliest books printed in Japan using movable type rather than the traditional woodblocks, secondly, it is the first non-religious text printed in colloquial Japanese transcribed into the Roman alphabet, offering valuable insights into the phonology of the Japanese language in the 16^th century, and thirdly, it is the world’s only extant copy.

Now, thanks to a collaborative project between the British Library and the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), Tokyo, a fully digitised version of this unique work is available online along with transcriptions, as part of NINJAL’s  Corpus of Historical Japanese, Muromachi Period Series II : Christian Materials.  In addition to a full set of images, NINJAL has also provided transcriptions of the Romanised text and in mixed Japanese kanji/kana script.

The book contains three different texts bound together: Feiqe monogatari a version of the Heike monogatari 平家物語 or Tale of the Heike, a famous medieval epic about the rivalry between the Taira and Minamoto clans, Esopo no fabulas the first Japanese translation of Aesop's Fables, and an anthology of maxims, drawn from Chinese classics, called the Qincvxv (Kinkūshū 金句集).

First page of Feiqe monogatari (Or 59.aa.1, p.3)

First page of Esopo no fabulas (Or 59.aa.1, p.408d)

First page of Qinquxu (Or 59.aa.1, p.507)

All three were printed on the Japanese island of Amakusa by Jesuit missionaries using a movable-type printing press in late 1592/early 1593. Feiqe monogatari has a preface dated 10 December 1592, the title page of Esopo no fabulas is dated 1593 and a general preface added at the front of  the volume was completed on 23 February 1593.

The three texts are accompanied by a printed glossary of ‘words difficult to determine’ (funbetsv xinicuqi cotoba) found in Feiqe monogatari and Esopo no fabulas.  At the end of the book is a handwritten Japanese-Portuguese vocabulary.

Handwritten Japanese-Portuguese dictionary (Or.59.aa.1, p.597)

From the preface of Feiqe monogatari we know that it was the work of the Christian convert - and later apostate - Fabian Fucan (Fukansai 不干斎, c. 1565–1621). Fabian was baptised in 1583 and joined the Jesuits in 1586, teaching Japanese to missionaries in the Jesuit College in Amakusa. He later rejected Christianity and in 1620 published the anti-Christian tract Deus Destroyed (Ha-Daiusu 破提宇子).

When the first Christian missionaries arrived in Japan in the 1540s they immediately set themselves to learning the Japanese language. Their aim, of course, was to convert the population to Christianity and to do this they needed to be able to communicate its teachings in the local language. They made rapid progress and with the help of Japanese converts, soon began translating Christian texts into Japanese. To assist with their work, Alessandro Valignano, head of the Jesuit Mission in East Asia, had a movable-type printing press brought from Portugal. It reached Japan via Goa in July 1590 and was set up at the Jesuit College in Kazusa 加津佐, on the Shimabara Peninsula, where the first work, a life of the apostles and saints entitled Sanctos no gosagyveono vchi nvqigaqi (Sanctos no go-sagyō no uchi nukigaki サントスの御作業の内抜書), was printed in 1591. Shortly afterwards, in the face of official persecution, the College and press were moved to the more remote and safer location of Amakusa 天草 where printing resumed in 1592. The College on Amakusa was suppressed by the Japanese authorities in 1597 so the Jesuits moved again, this time to Nagasaki, taking the press with them and books continued to be printed there from 1598 to 1611.

The books produced by the Jesuit Mission Press in Japan between 1591 and 1611, almost exclusively religious in content, are known collectively in Japanese as Kirishitan-ban or “Christian publications”. The majority were translations of Christian texts widely read in Europe such as Doctrina Christaã, Guía de pecadores and parts of Introducción del símbolo de la fe, in some cases adapted to the Japanese context with additional explanations or omission of doctrines which might have provoked controversy.

The Japanese authorities increasingly came to regard Christianity as subversive and, following a series of repressive measures, it was eventually suppressed and all remaining missionaries expelled from Japan in 1639.

The precise number of Kirishitan-ban titles printed in Japan is not certain.  With the suppression of Christianity and the destruction of images and artefacts connected with it, most of the Jesuit printings were lost.  In his pioneering work The Jesuit Mission Press in Japan, 1591–1610 published in 1888, Sir Ernest Satow identified 14 titles. Kirishitan Bunko: A Manual of Books and Documents on the Early Christian Mission in Japan (1940) by Johannes Laures, identifies 30 books published by the Jesuit Mission Press but this includes 5 printed in Macao, Goa or Manila. A more recent publication, Kirishitan to Shuppan (2013), lists a total of 41 Kirishitan-ban (including 5 fragmentary texts) with 92 extant copies identified worldwide, 7 of them in the British Library.  For the 35 works published in Japan, it lists a total of 72 known copies.

Besides its rarity, Feiqe monogatari is important in that it is a literary rather than a religious text..  It was not intended for the education of Japanese Christians but for the missionaries themselves as an aid to learning the language and to understanding the history and values of the Japanese for whom the warrior code (bushidō), reflected in Heike monogatari, and the Chinese classics represented by Kinkūshū had great significance.

First page of preface to Feiqe monogatari (Or 59.aa.1, ftpr)

The spelling conventions of Portuguese, together with differences in pronunciation of the time, mean that the Romanised texts appear unfamiliar to those used to Hepburn, Kunrei-shiki and other later systems. For example, comparing spellings to the Modified Hepburn transliteration system most widely used today: ‘c’ and ‘q’ are used instead of ‘k’ depending on the following vowel (‘c’ before ‘a,’ ‘o’ or ‘u’, ‘q’ before ‘e’ and ‘i’), while ‘x’ represents ‘sh’ before ‘’i’ and, unlike modern standard Japanese, also before ‘e’. The letter ‘v’ can represent either the vowel ‘u’ or the semivowel ‘w’. The bilabial fricative sound now Romanised as ‘h’ (or ‘f’ before a ‘u’) is written as ’f’ in all positions, presumably reflecting the pronunciation of the time. ‘tçu’ is the equivalent of ‘ts’. As in Portuguese spelling, ‘u’ is inserted after ‘g’ to maintain a hard sound before ‘e’ or ‘i’.

The opening sentence on the first page reads: Nifon no cotoba to historia uo narai xiran to fossvrv fito to tameni xeva ni yavaragvetarv Feiqe no monogatari [The Tale of the Heike made easy to help those wishing to learn the language and history of Japan] which would be written in Modified Hepburn as Nihon no kotoba to historia o naraishiran to hossuru hito no tame ni sewa ni yawaragetaru Heike no monogari, or in Japanese script as 日本の言葉とhistoria [歴史]を習い知らんと欲する人の為に世話に和らげたる 平家の 物語.

Another interesting aspect of Feiqe monogatari is that while not the oldest, it was the first book in the British Museum/British Library’s Japanese collections. The preliminary pages of the volume bear a succession of shelfmarks and annotations from which it appears that the book was acquired by the eminent collector Sir Hans Sloane (1662-1753) in the first years of the 18th century. The earliest number is R3594, one of many sequences used by Sloane. Research published by Amy Blakeway in The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organization, and Functions (http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2011articles/pdf/ebljarticle162011.pdf), suggests that the R-sequence was used for a rather random can be dated to between 1712 and 1723.  Sloane has also added the erroneous description in his own hand “Fables in the Language of Tonquin” (i.e. Vietnam). After Sloane’s death his vast collections became the foundation of the British Museum and its library and were installed in Montagu House. The number on the titlepage (3Ib) is a Montagu House location, showing that the book was stored in room 3, press I, and on shelf b with other works on Mythology. The book was given the general shelfmark 1075.e. but was later considered to be important/valuable enough to be moved to a case pressmark C.24.e.4.  A subsequent reorganisation of the British Museum Library saw it being transferred to the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books (OMPB) where shelfmarks beginning “Or.” were assigned - Or.59.d.6 and, later, its current number Or.59.aa.1.  As part of OMPB Feiqe monogatari passed to the custodianship of the British Library in 1973.

Its role as a teaching tool for non-Japanese missionaries gives Feiqe monogatari is greatest significance today - that it is written in colloquial, rather than literary Japanese and is printed in the Latin alphabet, not in Japanese script.  The Japanese written language was, and is, extremely complicated combining many thousands of Chinese characters and two different syllabaries.  Using the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet made the task of writing and printing much simpler and meant that the text was easier for the Jesuits to read.  Since at that time there was no standard way of transcribing Japanese, the missionaries simply wrote down what they heard often using the spelling conventions of their native Portuguese.  For the study of Japanese historical linguistics, therefore, Feiqe monogatari is a very valuable source of information for how the language was actually spoken and pronounced in the late 16th century.

In a way that will be familiar to all who have ever tried to learn a foreign language, whenever they were unable to find the correct Japanese translation of a word the missionaries and their Japanese helpers seem to have simply used the Portuguese word instead. So "Aesop's Fables" becomes "Esopo no fabulas” and “history” is “historia” rather than the expected Japanese words gūwa 寓話 and rekishi 歴史respectively.

Successive shelfmarks used for Feiqe monogatari (Or.59.aa.1, preliminary pages)

Sadly, no record has been found of how Sloane acquired the book or from whom. Between 1723 and 1725, Sloane purchased a substantial collection of Japanese books, manuscripts, natural history specimens and other material from the family of the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716) who had lived in Japan from 1690-92 as physician in the Dutch East India Company’s trading base in Nagasaki. However, as noted above, a study of the shelfmarks and other annotations suggest that Feiqe monogatari was acquired by Sloane before the Kaempfer collection. It is known that the Jesuits sent some of their publications back to Europe – either to Rome or to their influential benefactors. Recent research by Peter Kornicki has shown that Japanese books reached England during the 1620s, sent to wealthy patrons by the East India Company through its trading factory in Hirado. Dutch traders also continued a supply of books back to Europe, some of which would have circulated among collectors like Sloane.

One final mystery is the illustration on the front page of the volume which depicts a crowned classical figure in a chariot pulled by lions. Neither the image nor the Latin inscription have no obvious connection to the content of any of the contained works. Perhaps this was an etching or woodcut that had been used in another work and was simply inserted here as decoration. If any readers of this blog recognise it, I would be delighted to hear from them.

Hamish Todd,

Head of East Asian Collections

With thanks to Dr Karen Limper-Herz, Lead Curator for Incunabula and 16^th Century Books, British Library.

References

Blakeway, Amy, “The library catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: their authors, organization, and functions”. eBLJ (2011). http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2011articles/pdf/ebljarticle162011.pdf

Elison, George, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan, Harvard University Press, 1973.

Kornicki, Peter, Umi o watatta Nihon shoseki : Yōroppa e, soshite Bakumatsu, Meiji no Rondon de 海を渡った日本書籍 : ヨーロッパへ、そして幕末・明治のロンドンで. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2018.

Laures, Johannes, Kirishitan Bunko: A manual of books and documents on the early Christian mission in Japan. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1940.

Orii, Yoshimi, “The dispersion of Jesuit books printed in Japan: Trends in bibliographical research and in intellectual history”. Journal of Jesuit Studies 2 ; 2 (2015).  https://brill.com/view/journals/jjs/2/2/article-p189_2.xml?lang=en

Satow, Ernest., The Jesuit Mission Press in Japan, Privately printed, 1888.

Toyoshima, Masayuki 豊島正之 (ed.), Kirishitan to Shuppan キリシタンと出版. Tokyo: Yagi Shoten,

Asia and African Collections at the British Library (BL) are pleased to announce an exciting line-up of talks in their new 'South Asia Series', October-December 2018, featuring a diverse array of subjects from 'Theosophy and Bengali spirituality' to 'Miyan Himmat Khan and the last Mughal emperors'! This is a series of talks based around the British Library’s project ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ and its South Asian collections. The speakers include scholars and academics from the UK and elsewhere who will share their original research followed by an open discussion. The presentations will take place on Mondays at the Foyle Learning Centre at the British Library, between 5.30-7.00pm.

The Bhagavad Gita translated by Mohini Mohun Chatterji (1887) (BL 14065.e.25)

On 1st October 2018, Mriganka Mukhpadhyay from the University of Amsterdam will talk on theosophy and Bengali spirituality, focusing on the works of Mohini Mohun Chatterji (1858-1936), a member of the Bengal Theosophical Society (from 1882) and a significant member of the Theosophical Movement. His talk 'Theosophy and Bengali Spirituality: Mohini Mohun Chatterji’s Works' will discuss how Chatterji’s translations of Sanskrit philosophical texts, original essays and his public lectures shaped the Western world’s understanding of oriental spirituality. More importantly, as a Bengali theosophist and philosopher, he became a major figure in the history of transcultural spirituality in the modern world. This talk will discuss how Chatterji’s publications created a distinctive identity for modern Hindu spirituality in the Western intellectual world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.


Indian Music and Rabindranath Tagore by Arnold Bake (1932?) (BL P/V 2339)

Moushumi Bhowmik, a singer, writer and music researcher based in Kolkata who works in India, Bangladesh and the UK, will talk about the Bake-in-Bengal archives. In her talk 'The Bake-in-Bengal Archives, and Beyond' on 8th October 2018 she will focus on the works of Arnold Bake both in the British Library Sound archives as well as from her fieldwork experiences in Bengal in collaboration with audiographer Sukanta Majumdar. In this presentation Moushumi will talk about the fascinating sonic maps of Bengal, their process of map-making, tracing contour lines from listening and recording, to listening to recordings, and to recording the act of listening. The talk addresses several questions including what was at the source of the motion: the Bake-in Bengal archives scattered in many places, or what lies beyond?

A European, probably Sir David Ochterlony, British Resident to the Mughal court 1803–06 and 1818–25, watching a nautch in his house in Delhi (c. 1820) (BL Add. Or. 2)

On 22nd October 2018, Katherine Butler Schofield, a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the colonial Indian Ocean based in King’s College London will take us through the financial accounts of the East India Company that are alive with details of music and dance in Jaipur state in nineteenth century India.  Her talk 'Mayalee Dancing Girl versus the East India Company' will focus on a particular musician who stands out in these accounts as an exceptional, Mayalee “dancing girl”, an important courtesan. Little exculpatory notes in the margins of successive accounts reveal that Mayalee successfully resisted the Company’s attempt to force her to give up her salt stipend in exchange for cash. This talk looks at what official British records yield about Indian musicians and especially courtesans.

I Spy with My Little Eye by Humphry House, Calcutta 1937 (BL P/T 2530)

On 5th November 2018 we have Supriya Chaudhuri, Professor Emerita, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, who will talk about a modernist community in 1930s Calcutta formed around the literary journal Parichay. The Parichay group included not only writers and artists, but also scientists, historians, politicians, philosophers, and spies. Its contacts extended to a number of disaffected colonialists in Calcutta: the geologist John Bicknell Auden, brother of the poet Wystan, the Dickens and Hopkins scholar Humphry House, the colonial official Michael Carritt, ICS, and Michael Scott, Chaplain to the Bishop of Calcutta, the last two being spies for the Communist Party of Great Britain. In this talk entitled 'Modernist Communities in 1930s Calcutta: Print, Politics and Surveillance', she will trace the network of connections through the Parichay archives, through other digitized records held at Jadavpur University, and through British Library holdings (for example Michael Carritt’s papers).

(Secret) Government of Bengal: Home Department Political: District Officer’s Chronicle of Events of Disturbances, August 1942-March 1943 (BL IOR/R/3/1/358: 1943)

Anwesha Roy, Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of History, King’s College London will focus on the years 1940-1942 before the Quit India Movement in Bengal in her talk 'Prelude to Quit India in Bengal: War Rumours and Revolutionary Parties, 1940-42' on 12th November 2018. She will discuss how war-time colonial state policies created annoying disruptions and intrusions in various ways in the day-to-day lives of the people of Bengal, building up mass discontent up to the edge, which, coupled with war rumours, reconfigured the image of the colonial state in Bengal. This talk taps into the psyche of the colonised mind, which was increasingly and collectively coming to see the hoax of British invincibility in the face of serious reverses in the Eastern Front and Japanese victories.


Bodhan by Kazi Nazrul Islam in the periodical Moslem Bharat (1920) (BL 14133.k.2)

On 20th November 2018, Ahona Panda, doctoral candidate, University of Chicago, will focus on the National Poet of Bangladesh, Kazi Nazrul Islam in her talk 'Kazi Nazrul Islam and the Partition of Bengal: A Language of Unity, a Language of Loss'. This talk will explore how Nazrul tried to create a new Bengali language single-handedly. Using a large number of periodicals from the British Library’s collection, and drawing from extensive research in Bangladesh, this talk reconstructs Nazrul’s early years in journalism in which as writer and editor, he forged a new literary register for the Bengali Muslim community and crafted a political language that was anti-separatist, socialist whilw referring to a philological landscape including centuries of Islamic and Hindu literary traditions. The talk will conclude with how Nazrul found new life in the language movement in East Pakistan in the 1950s, in the years leading up to the Liberation War of 1971.

Miyan Himmat Khan kalāwant, chief hereditary musician to the last of the Mughal emperors Akbar Shah and Bahadur Shah Zafar. From James Skinner’s Tashrīh al-Aqwām, Hansi (near Delhi) (1825) (BL Add. 27,255, f. 134v)

We end our autumn/winter talks for 2018 with Katherine Butler Schofield from King’s College London talking about musicians in the Mughal court in her talk 'Miyan Himmat Khan and the Last Mughal Emperors' on 3rd December 2018. This talk focusses on contemporary Indian writings on and a portrait of Miyan Himmat Khan kalāwant (d.c.1845), chief hereditary musician to the last Mughal emperors Akbar Shah (r. 1806–37) and Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837–58). In this talk she will also make sense of the divergence of these competing lineages of musical knowledge in Persian, Urdu and English c. 1780–1850, by considering them side by side. It will show how viewing proto-ethnographic paintings and writings against a remarkable new wave of music treatises c. 1793–1853 reveal an incipient indigenous modernity running in parallel with colonial knowledge in the most authoritative centres of Hindustani music production, Delhi and Lucknow.

No advance booking is required, and the sessions are free to attend. Please do come along, listen and participate!

Priyanka Basu, Project Cataloguer of ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’