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On the 21 November 1903, George Curzon, the Viceroy of Britain’s Indian Empire, held an ostentatious ceremony aboard the Argonaut while anchored of the coast of Sharjah in the Persian Gulf. In attendance were all the rulers of the Trucial Coast (now the United Arab Emirates) along with other guests from the region. The Durbar (Persian darbār 'court'), as such performances were known, was part of a tour of the Gulf that was conceived by Curzon as a way of shoring up the frontiers of the Indian Empire against the threat of the other European powers.
 

Lord Curzon’s Durbar aboard RIMS Argonaut, Sharjah (British Library, Photo 49/1(7))

This kind of ritual was a feature of rule borrowed by the British from the Mughal emperors they had replaced in India. It was an act of royal incorporation, designed to establish, legitimise, and entrench the hierarchies of empire. A photograph from the Dane collection at the British Library shows Curzon, enthroned at centre stage, surrounded by the symbols of Indian (the carpets, the guard of men behind) and British monarchical (the crowns in the roof of the tent, the Christian cross) authority. To the Viceroy’s right sit the Arab dignitaries. Some, deprived of chairs, are kneeling or sitting on the floor.

Curzon had held a much grander version of the durbar in Delhi earlier that year to mark the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra as Emperor and Empress of India. The ‘Official Directory of the Delhi Coronation Durbar ’ tells us that, from the Gulf region, only the Sultan of Muscat’s son and some of the tribal leaders of the Aden Protectorate attended this lavish expression of imperial rule; a reflection of where the Gulf and its rulers stood within the colonial order.

Shah Jahan, Mughal Emperor, in durbar in the Diwan-i-Am at Delhi (British Library, Add.Or.3853)

Several years later, the Government of India wrote to the Political Residency at Bushire requesting that they revise the ‘extracts from the Alqabnamah’ that relate to the Gulf. The Alqabnamah (Persian alqābnāmah 'book of titles'), first compiled in 1865, was a register of Indian princes containing information on the correct title and form of address to be used for each. It included such details as the number of guns in a ruler’s salute and the material used for the bag that carried their correspondence.

The 1935 edition of the Alqabnamah (British Library, IOR/R/15/1/734)

Between 1912 and the end of British rule in India in 1947, numerous revisions of the Alqabnamah were made. The discussion over these revisions reveals how the British viewed the political landscape in the Gulf. The evolution of the list shows the shifts in that landscape. From early on there is a clear hierarchy that is reflected in the distinctions accorded to each ruler, such as the terms of address used and with whom they could correspond with.

In 1912, Muscat was the only authority that could receive a letter from the Viceroy himself. This honour was granted to Bahrain and Kuwait five years later. The highest ranking officer that Qatar and the Trucial shaikhs would ever receive letters from was the Political Resident.

The wording used when addressing these rulers was also a matter that warranted much attention. During a clean-up of the register in 1925, Francis Prideaux, the Political Resident, initiated a discussion over the use of the term sa‘ādah, equivalent to ‘excellency’ or ‘grace’. Mirza ‘Ali, a Residency assistant, suggested that the word be used for Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. However, James More, the Political Agent at Kuwait, questioned whether Qatar qualified as an ‘excellency’. The Agent at Bahrain, Clive Daly, balked at the idea that the term be used for the Trucial shaikhs, arguing that their ‘position and political importance’ was ‘considerably less’ than that of the rulers of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, and that it would be ‘unnecessarily flattering’. By 1935 Bahrain and Kuwait were being addressed as ‘Your Highness’ while Qatar remained ‘Your Excellency’.

Extract from a letter from James More, Political Agent at Kuwait, outlining his suggestions for the correct forms of address for the rulers of Najd, Muscat, and Kuwait, 21 February 1926 (British Library, IOR/R/15/1/237, f. 80)

This order of importance can be explained by the political situation in the Gulf at the time. Bahrain was of economic significance to the British and its position made it an important transit point and base for naval operations. Up until the end of the First World War, Kuwait had an ambiguous relationship with Ottoman Turkey and it remained a potential entry point into the Gulf for other powers that the British wished to exclude. The promise of oil in all three countries was also a major factor.

The number of guns in a ruler’s salute reflects this same order. The Sultan of Muscat enjoyed the rare privilege of a twenty-one gun salute, putting him on a par with the most senior of Indian princes. Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar were each given seven guns. The Trucial Shaikhs, safely bound by century-old treaties and not deemed powerful enough to either be a problem or to offer any sort of advantage, were given the lowest salute of three guns each (except Abu Dhabi, which received five guns).

Extract from the 1935 edition of the Alqabnamah, showing the Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar entries (British Library, IOR/R/15/1/734)

Political changes in the region can also be detected in changes to the register. The Shaikh of Mohammerah (now Khorramshahr), for example, appears early on. At a time when Britain was seeking to maintain their economic dominance of south-western Persia, the Shaikh was given honours equivalent to those of Bahrain and Kuwait, sometimes higher. In 1926, however, following political centralisation under Reza Shah, the Shaikh lost most his power and the British lost their foothold in the area. Mohammerah was subsequently removed from the list.

Curzon’s tour of the region and the inclusion of its rulers in the Alqabnamah were both part of a process of locating the Gulf within Britain’s Indian empire. They are incidences of the Gulf’s incorporation into a system of ‘indirect rule’ that was born after the Great Rebellion of 1857 and was based upon more ‘traditional’ and ‘ancient’ articulations of authority. They placed each ‘princely state’ of the Persian Gulf within the colonial hierarchy, and helped to establish and normalise a regional order that reflected the political changes that occurred.

Many of the documents and photographs mentioned here, including copies and extracts from the Alqabnamah, are being digitised as part of the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership and will be available online through the Qatar Digital Library.

Primary Sources
British Library: India Office Select Materials, Dane Collection: ‘Photographs of Lord Curzon’s tour in the Persian Gulf, November, 1903’, India Office Records and Private Papers Photo 49/1
British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, ‘File 13/166 Forms of addresses while corresponding with native chiefs in the Gulf’, IOR/R/15/1/237
British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, ‘List Showing the Names, Titles and Modes of Address of the More Important Sovereigns, Ruling Princes, Chiefs, Nobles etc., Having Relations with the Indian Governmen, Alqabnamah’, IOR/R/15/1/734
British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, ‘Official directory of the Delhi Coronation Durbar: 3 copies’, Mss Eur F112/466

Further Reading
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, (London, 2001)
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, (Princeton, 1996)
Encyclodædia Iranica, ‘ALQĀB VA ʿANĀWĪN: titles and forms of address, employed in Iran from pre-Islamic times’
Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (The New Cambridge History of India), (Cambridge, 1995)
Kristopher Radford, ‘Curzon’s Cruise: The Pomp and Circumstances of Indian Indirect Rule of the Persian Gulf’, The International History Review, Vol. 35, Iss. 4, (Jul 2013)
John M. Willis, ‘Making Yemen Indian: Rewriting the Boundaries of Imperial Arabia’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 41 (2009), pp. 23-38

John Hayhurst, Project Officer – Gulf History Specialist, BL/QF Partnership
[email protected]

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George Percy Churchill’s Biographical Notices of Persian Statesmen and Notables

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Three interesting portraits on ivory of Mughal ladies of the imperial zenana were acquired by the Visual Arts section in 2012, now numbered Add.Or.5719-5721.  All three were mounted in one frame with pasted down inscriptions below relating to the subject and the artist, while attached to the back of the frame were three envelopes which once contained the miniatures and which were written further particulars.  The paintings were sold in Delhi in these envelopes in 1900 by Sultan Ahmad Khan, who styles himself the son of one painter Muhammad Fazl Khan and grandson of another painter Muhammad ‘Azim, both of whom are named as artists in the inscriptions.  The purchaser must have put them into their present gilt frame and fortunately also preserved the various inscriptions and attestations.  All three are supposed to be portraits of some of the wives of the Mughal Emperor Akbar II (r. 1806-37).  For a more correct appreciation of who they might be, we rely on that invaluable on-line resource, The Royal Ark.  None of these ladies’ names unfortunately appears among the numerous wives of Akbar II, but that does not necessarily detract from the validity of the inscriptions of artistic interest. 

A lady meant to be Shaukat Begum, perhaps the great-granddaughter of Akbar II.  By Muhammad ‘Azim, Delhi, c. 1840-50.  Watercolour on ivory.  106 x 85 mm.  British Library, Add.Or.5719

The first portrait is a half-length of a Mughal lady facing the viewer holding a rose and draped in a red Kashmiri shawl, standing on a terrace with a column and balustrade behind overlooking the trees of a garden.  It is inscribed on the front: Portrait of Shaukat Begum of the harem of Akbar II.  Painted by Mohammed Aizim.  Original picture guaranteed by his grandson Sultan Ahmed Khan.  And on the back: Original picture by Mahommad Aizim artist who died about 1850.  Picture of Shaukat Begum of the harem of Akbar II. Sold and guaranteed by Sultan Ahmed Khan son of Mohommud Fuzul Khan & grandson of Mahomud Aizim Delhi 25 Jan 1900.  The details of the guarantor are also noted in Urdu.  The naturalistic viewpoint and the general setting of the portrait are of course derived from British portraits of the early 19^th century which by this time had been seen in Delhi in considerable numbers.  What the Delhi artists contributed is their exquisite refinement of features and of details of clothing and jewellery.

There seems to be no Shaukat Begum listed among the wives of Akbar II.  However, Nawab Shaukat Sultan Begum Sahiba is listed as a daughter of Mirza Mahmud Shah, the second son of Mirza Babur (1796-1835), who was the seventh son of the Emperor Akbar II.  A very similar portrait on ivory but in an oval frame is in the V & A (IS.529-1950, Archer 1992, no. 259/7), where it is thought to be dated 1860-70, one of a set of portraits depicting Mughal ladies, all unfortunately without inscriptions.  For the artist, see below.

A lady meant to be Akhtar Mahal., one of the wives of Bahadur Shah Zafar.  By Muhammad Fazl, Delhi, c. 1850.  Watercolour on ivory.  Oval, 109 x 85 mm.  British Library, Add.Or.5720

The second of these images is an oval bust portrait of a lady holding a kitten.  Her loose hair is dressed in a rather European manner and she has no veil covering it.  It is inscribed on the front:  Portrait of Aktar Mahal Persian wife of Akbar.  Painted by Mahommed Faizul artist Delhi about 1825.  And on the back: Painted by Mahomed Fuzal portrait of Persian wife of Akbar [damage A]ktar Mahal.  Portrait is painted by Mohommed Faizal painter Delhi.  Zoolfkar Khan miniature painter Delhi [this last seems to be an attestation].  Nawab Akhtar Mahal Begum Sahiba is listed as the eighth wife of Akbar’s son and successor the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837-58), whom he married in 1847.  She was previously a concubine named Man Bai, which seems to be reflected here in her pose and attire.  Rather than the traditional format as seen in the other two portraits, the artist has been influenced by a more sentimental type of Victorian portrait.  Muhammad Fazl is not an artist about whose work anything is presently known.

A lady meant to be Sharafat al-Mahal, one of the wives of Bahadur Shah.  By Amir al-Din, c. 1850-60, after an original by Muhammad Fazl.  Watercolour on ivory.  87 x 68 mm.  British Library, Add.Or.5721

The third portrait is a half-length of a lady seated before a large cushion holding a necklace of pearls which she has taken from a jewel box.  Behind her are the standard curtain drape and the sky without an intervening balustrade.  It is inscribed in front:  Portrait of Asrafat Mahal wife of Akbar.  From original by Mahommed Faizul by his pupil Amiruddin.  And on the back: Picture of Ashrafat Mahal copy of original copied by Amiruddin pupil of Mahomed Fuzal son of Mahomud Aizim who died about 1850 [with the same guarantor’s details in English and in Urdu as Add.Or.5719 above].  A Nawab Sharafat al-Mahal Begum Sahiba [Moti Begum], a Sayyidani, is listed as the third wife of the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar.  She was the mother of Mirza Mughal (1817-57), one of Bahadur Shah’s sons most active in the events of 1857 and who was one of the princes shot by Major Hodson on 22 September 1857.  Again the artist’s name is unknown.

Delhi artists in the first half of the 19^th century were catering to a voyeuristic market and many imperial Mughal ladies from Nur Jahan onwards had iconographies set by these artists in this period.  Their features scarcely change from lady to lady – here Shaukat Begum and Sharafat Mahal look very alike with their pale oval faces, long dark hair and similar eyes, noses and mouths – and these features were also used for portraits meant to be of Mumtaz Mahal, Akbar II’s favourite wife and mother of his favourite son Mirza Jahangir, and were continued in portraits meant to be of Zinat Mahal, the favourite wife of the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837-58).  Earlier Mughal ladies were also given the same treatment – see Archer 1992 pp. 218-23 for the many examples in the V&A.  Those in the India Office Library’s collections are listed in Archer 1972 (pp. 204-08).  Their numbers have been added to since then and will be the subjects of future blogs.

Sultan Ahmad Khan’s inscription in 1900 tells us that he was the son of the artist Muhammad Fazl Khan, whose name is not otherwise known, and the grandson of Muhammad ‘Azim, about whom we know a lot more.  Emily Eden met this artist when travelling with her brother the Governor-General Lord Auckland to Lahore in 1838-39.  On her return in 1839 with her sketchbook full of portraits of the Sikhs she had met at Lahore, she records:  ‘I have had two Delhi miniature painters here translating two of my sketches into ivory, and I never saw anything so perfect as their copy of Runjeet Singh.  Azim, the best painter, is almost a genius;  except that he knows no perspective, so that he can only copy.  He is quite mad about some of my sketches, and as all miniatures of well-known characters sell well, he was determined to get hold of my book’ (Eden 1866, vol. 2, pp. 73-74).  The other painter is Jivan Ram, some of whose work in both oils on canvas and watercolour on ivory has surfaced in recent years and is the subject of a previous blog post and also of a forthcoming article by the present writer.

Miss Eden’s ‘Azim’ is possibly the same as the artist Shaikh ‘Azim, who produced a portrait on ivory of Kate Ford taken on the occasion of her marriage in 1845, and acquired in 2009.  It is inscribed on a backing sheet in English:  ‘Kate Ford. Taken by Sheikh Azim, Delhi, Nov. 13th 1845’; and in faint Persian in red:  kamtarin-i Shaykh ‘Azim musavvir sakin-i Dihli (‘the insignificant Shaykh ‘Azim the painter, resident of Delhi’).  The sitter is Catherine Margaret Ford, daughter of Major-General John Anthony Hodgson (1777-1848), Bengal Army 1800-48, and Surveyor-General of India.  Born in 1823, she was married in Delhi in 1845 to William Ford (1821-1905), Bengal Civil Service 1843-69.  She is seated dressed in a low cut dark blue gown with a Kashmir shawl draped around her.  Her hair is looped in front of her ears in the early Victorian fashion.  A vase of flowers stands on a table behind her.  All this is in the latest taste for female portraiture.

Mrs Catherine Ford, née Hodgson (b. 1823).  By Shaikh ‘Azim, Delhi. 1845.  Watercolour on ivory.  85 x 70mm.  British Library, Add.Or.5641.

This portrait is in a very different style and although Delhi artists were able to change their style at will to suit their patron’s taste, it is possible that it is by a different artist.  There were several artists with similar names working in 19^th century India and further inscriptions need to be discovered on other paintings to verify or disprove this identity.

J.P. Losty
Curator of Visual Arts, Emeritus

Further Reading:

Archer, M., Company Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1972

Archer, M., Company Paintings:  Indian Paintings of the British Period, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1992

Eden, Emily, Up the Country: Letters written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India, London, 1866

Losty, J.P., ‘Raja Jivan Ram:  a Professional Indian Portrait Painter of the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Electronic BLJ, forthcoming

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2014/01/a-new-portrait-miniature-by-jivan-ram-acquired.html

http://www.royalark.net/India4/delhi19.htm

This month sees a new upload of 20 Persian manuscripts (8588 images) to the Library's Digitised Manuscripts, generously funded by the Iran Heritage Foundation, the Barakat Trust, the Friends of the British Library, the Soudavar Memorial Foundation, the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute and others. These works have been selected for their artistic, historical and cultural importance and are among the most treasured of the Library's Persian manuscripts. Bringing this work to fruition has been one of the most rewarding tasks I have done: being able to look deep into the detail of a painting, examining minute annotations and studying the text itself is a luxury which was previously only possible to the priveleged few who could make it to the Library's reading room. Now you can do it from your desk, on the bus, or even in the dentist's waiting room!

The works in this recent upload include:

Add.18188  Firdawsi's Shāhnāmah ('Book of kings'). Copied in 1486 by Ghiyas al-Din Bayazid Sarraf and illustrated with 72 miniatures, Turkman/Timurid style.

Add.27262  Saʻdi's Būstān ('Orchard') dated at Agra in November 1629 and illustrated with ten miniatures. The calligrapher was the well-known physician and poet Hakim Rukn al-Din Masʻud, known as Hakim Rukna, who emigrated from Iran to India in the reign of Akbar and subsequently became one of Shah Jahan’s favourite poets.

The poet Saʻdi and his companions meet a young man whose sheep was tamed by kindness (Add.27262, f. 37r)


IO Islamic 137  The Ẓafarnāmah, a history of the conquests of Timur by Sharaf al-Din Yazdi completed ca. 1424. Illustrated with 30 miniatures in the 16th century Shiraz style.

The defeat of Damascus. Timur watches the flames as the city burns (IO Islamic 137, f. 358r)

IO Islamic 138  The only known copy of the Khamsah ('Five poems') composed by the poet Jamali who lived at the beginning of the 15th century. Dated 1465 at Baghdad and illustrated with six miniatures.

IO Islamic 3214  The Sindbādnāmah, an anonymous version of the adventures of Sindbad in Persian verse. It was probably copied in Golconda, India, around 1575, and contains 72 illustrations.

The vizier’s tale of the confectioner, his unfaithful wife, and the parrot (IO Islamic 3214, f. 36v)

IO Islamic 3558
The Dīvān-i Khāqān, a beautifully illuminated copy in calligraphic shikastah of the poems of  Fath ʻAli Shah Qajar, Shah of Iran (r. 1797-1834), who wrote poetry under the name Khaqan.

The Shah hunting and a floral arrangement on the inside and outside of the contemporary lacquer binding of Fath ʻAli Shah Khaqanʼs Dīvān (IO Islamic 3558, inside and outside front cover)

Or.166  The Aḥvāl-i Humāyūn Pādshāh. Princess Gulbadan Begam's autobiographical account of the reigns of her father, the Mughal Emperor Babur, and his successor, her brother Humayun. Although this manuscript probably dates from the early 17th century, it is the only known copy to have survived.

Or.343   Futūḥ al-Ḥaramayn, a poetical description of the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina and the rites of pilgrimage by Muhyi Lari (d.1526 or 1527). Includes 17 miniatures dating from the 17th century.

Or.2839  Sūz va Gudāz (‘Burning and melting’) by Nawʻi Khabushani, the story of a bride whose betrothed was killed by a falling wall on his way to the wedding and her subsequent suicide on his funeral pyre. It was commissioned by Akbar's son Prince Danyal (1581-1614) who requested a change from traditional tales. It contains three miniatures and dates from the early 17th century.

Or.3714  Vāqiʻāt-i Bāburī, the memoirs of the Mughal Emperor Babur (r. 1526-30), originally written in Chaghatai Turkish and translated into Persian at his grandson Akbar’s request by Mirza ʻAbd al-Rahim Khan in 1589. This imperial copy, containing 143 illustrations, mostly by attributed artists, was completed c. 1590-93.

Babur with birdcatchers near Kabul, in 1504. Artist: Shiyam (Or.3714, f. 190r)

Or.5302  Saʻdi's Gulistān ('Flower garden') copied in 975 (1567/68) in Bukhara (Uzbekistan) and ascribed in the colophon to the famous calligrapher Mir ʻAli Husayni. It includes six Bukhara-style paintings which were commissioned at Akbar's request. The manuscript was 'improved'  in India in Jahangir's reign when seven more paintings were added, probably between 1605 and 1609.

Chaos in the classroom: the story of the schoolmaster who became infatuated with one of his pupils  (Or.5302, f. 80r)

Or.5637  Muʼnis al-arvāḥ ('The confidant of spirits'), an autograph copy by Princess Jahanara (1641-81), daughter of Shah Jahan, of her biography, composed in 1640, of the Sufi saint Muʻīn al-Dīn Chishtī (see blog: Princess Jahanara’s biography of a Sufi saint).

Or.7043  The Salīm Khānnāmah, a poetical history of the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Selim II (r.1566-1574) composed by Luqman in 1580. Copy dated 1099 (1687-88) containing eight miniatures, Ottoman

Or.7573  The Dīvān of Hafiz copied in Akbar’s reign in 990/1582-3 by ‘Abd al-Samad Shirin-qalam and enhanced by Jahangir c. 1611 with nine miniature paintings. Panels containing pairs of birds separate the verses thoroughout the volume. The final part of the manuscript including the colophon and one miniature is preserved at the Chester Beatty Library Dublin (see blog: Jahangir’s Hafiz and the Madrasa Jurist).

Or.8193  The 'Yazd' anthology, a collection of Turkish works written in calligraphic Uighur script in Yazd in 1431 with the addition of the Persian Dīvāns of Kamal-i Khujand and Amiri in the margins.

Facing pages with the Uighur text in the central panels and the Persian poems in the margins (Or.8193, ff. 46-47)

Or.11846  The Dīvān of Hafiz Saʻd copied by Shaykh Mahmud Pir Budaqi at Shiraz for the library of the Qaraqoyunlu prince Pir Budaq (d.1466).

The opening shamsah with a dedication to Abu'l-Fath Pir Budaq Bahadur Khan (Or.11846, f. 1v)

Or.12208  The emperor Akbar's copy of Nizami's Khamsah, dated between 1593 and 1595 and copied by ʻAbd al-Rahim ʻAnbarin-qalam. It contains 38 illustrated folios attributed to the major artists of the imperial Mughal studio and an original lacquered binding.

A scene from the Haft paykar in which the king escaped from a tower, carried off by magical bird. Artist: Dharamdas (Or.12208, f. 195r)

Or.12857  ʻAbd al-Karīm al-Qādirī Jawnpūrī's Javāhir al-mūsīqāt-i Muḥammadī, a musical treatise dedicated to Muhammad ‘Adil Shah (r.1626-56) dating from the 17th century which includes 48 Deccani miniatures from an earlier Dakhini manuscript dating from around 1570 (see blogs: Indian Music in the Persian Collections: the Javahir al-Musiqat-i Muhammadi (Or.12857). Part 1 and Part 2).

Or.12988  An imperial copy of the first volume of Abu'l-Fazl's history of the reign of Akbar, the  Akbarnāmah. Completed ca.1602, it contains 39 paintings and inscriptions (unfortunately pasted over during a previous refurbishment and now only visible with infrared photography) by Jahangir and Shah Jahan.

The baby Akbar and his mother Hamidah Banu Maryam Makani. Artists: Sanvalah and Narsingh (Or.12988, f. 22r)

Or.14139  The Dīvān of Hafiz, copied at Herat or Mashhad ca. 1470 by, according to Shah Jahan’s note on folio 1 , the famous calligrapher Sultan ʻAli Mashhadi. The whole work was refurbished and remargined at the Mughal court ca. 1605 with cartouches containing images of animals, birds, musicians, workmen, soldiers etc. 

The opening of the Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, copied by Sultan ʻAli Mashhadi (Or.14139, f. 1v)

More details about these manuscripts, together with links to catalogue descriptions and related literature, can be found at Digital Access to Persian Manuscripts. This page is very much a 'work in progress' page to which we add continually, so please keep looking there to follow new developments.

Ursula Sims-Williams, Asian and African Studies

Related articles

15,000 images of Persian manuscripts online

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A Khamsah ascribed to the painter Bihzad (Add. 25900)

An illustrated 14th century Khamsah by Khvaju Kirmani

The second of two posts on the Bijapur manuscript Javāhir al-mūsīqāt, c.1570/c.1630 by guest blogger Katherine Butler Schofield of King’s College London. This manuscript has now been digitised and is available to read online on British Library Digitised Manuscripts. Follow the links below to go directly to the relevant folios.

The replacement frontispiece of the Javāhir al-Mūsīqāt-i Muḥammadī, reused from elsewhere. (British Library Or.12857, f. 1v)

In my last post, I concluded that Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim’s musical masterwork, the Javāhir al-Mūsīqāt-i Muḥammadī, is a multilingual palimpsest of three treatises: a translation c. 1570 of the 13^th-century Sanskrit Saṅgītaratnākara into 16^th-century Dakhni, probably for ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah of Bijapur (r.1558-80), which was split apart and its paintings reused by Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim to form the central thread of a more elaborate 17^th-century Persian translation dedicated to ‘Ali’s great-nephew, Muhammad ‘Adil Shah (r.1626-56). This unique work is culturally significant for several reasons. For one thing, when placed in wider geographical context it testifies to a significant vernacularisation of Sanskrit music theory in the 16th century, preceding by nearly a century its recodification in Persian under the Mughals (see Brown below).

Deskar, the fourth rāginī of Megh (British Library Or.12857, f. 119r)

A number of other noteworthy vernacular music treatises made their appearance in this century: e.g. a miniature Awadhi verse treatise inserted into Qutban’s Sufi romance the Mṛgāvatī (1503) produced in Jaunpur (Behl, pp. 131-133); a Braj rāgamālā called the Mānakutūhala, traditionally attributed to Raja Man Singh of Gwalior (d.1516)[1]. ; and a Marathi translation of the Saṅgītaratnākara with paintings of very similar style and date to the Jawāhir (Zebrowski, pp. 60-4). The production of a substantial Dakhni recension of the Saṅgītaratnākara in Bijapur thus confirms a growing picture of a vernacularising 16^th century in north and central India’s independent courts.

But a major reason this work is of importance to music and cultural history is Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim’s systematic integration of ideas from the Islamicate sciences about the power of sound and its effects in human affairs into a work of Indic musicology. We already know from work done on the great astrological treatise written in Persian for ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah, the Nujum al-‘ulūm (1570) – whose paintings are used to date the Jawāhir’s – that ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah, and later Ibrahim ʻAdil Shah II (r.1580-1626), freely mixed Hindu and Muslim symbology and theories of supernatural power, including those associated with music, and incorporated them into their courtly ideologies (see Flatt; Leach, v.2, pp. 819-89; Hutton, pp. 51-2 and fig. 2.14; Zebrowski, pp. 60-4).

Asavari, the second rāginī of Malkausik (British Library Or.12857, f. 102r)

Although Muhammad ʻAdil Shah is sometimes characterised as more narrowly orthodox, this generous attitude remains primary in Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim’s vision. Strikingly, with respect to music’s origin myths and explanations of its power to regulate the universe, he treats the philosophies of “ ‘Arabia, ‘Ajam and Hind” as effectively equal in truth value (f. 5v).

More important, though, is his systematic appropriation of the Indian rāgas into the Greco-Islamicate system of humoral medicine known as Unani ṭibb. Every rāga and rāginī in the Indic system is supposed to have a specific effect on the listener’s psychological state, their physical wellbeing, or indeed on the wider natural world. Rāginī Dhanashri, for example, is supposed to evoke feelings of loss and longing caused by the absent beloved. Rāg Megh, one of the six main rāgas, has the power to bring the monsoon rains; the coming of the rains is furthermore associated with the joy of union with the beloved.


Rag Megh, the third rāga (British Library Or.12857, f. 112v)


In Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim’s rāgamālā he systematically attributes the essential emotional flavour of every rāga to one of the four elements of Islamicate natural sciences – fire, earth, air and water. He furthermore describes the effect of each of the four kinds of rāga on the physical and mental state of the listener in terms borrowed from Sufi teaching and ethical literature (akhlāq): fiery rāgas ignite passionate love (‘ishq) in the listener’s heart; earthy rāgas enlighten the listener with the mystical knowledge (‘irfān) of their true selves; airy rāgas overwhelm the listener with longing for the absent beloved (firāq); and watery rāgas annhilate the listener in union (viṣal) with the great Existence (ff. 66v-8r). 

The iconography of rāgamālā paintings is supposed to intensify and enrich the rāgas’ affective associations using visual and imaginative rather than aural means. The c.1570 rāgamālā paintings of the Javāhir belong to a time when rāga-rāginī sets were clearly not yet standardised. Although it uses the same six rāgas as the contemporaneous “Painters system” – Bhairav, Hindol, Megh, Malkausik, Shri and Dipak – I have not before encountered its particular configuration of rāginīs. In addition, the classic iconography we are accustomed to was clearly not yet settled. Some rāgas had already acquired their standard form. Rag Megh, for example, is of course watery in essence, and listening to it engenders loving union; singing this rāga may cause clouds to gather in the heavens or rain to fall, powerful lightening to strike and frogs to start croaking. In the rāgamālā text and painting Megh is depicted as a dark-skinned lord dressed in green and riding a black buck, with the monsoon rainclouds gathering above his head and two pied cuckoos in the background.  Ragini Dhanashri, on the other hand, is not depicted in her now customary form: a woman consumed with longing, gazing at a portrait of her absent beloved as she is consoled by her girlfriends.  The mood of viraha or firāq is nonetheless sustained in the Javāhir pictorially by Dhanashri’s loose dishevelled hair, her chin resting disconsolately on her hand as she sits on a bed waiting for her lover’s return. And Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim makes it explicit in the Persian text: Dhanashri is an airy rāginī, and thus listening to her overwhelms the listener with longing (ff. 99r-100r).  

Dhanashri, the first rāginī of Malkausik (British Library Or.12857, f. 100r)

In this way the rāgas and their rich aesthetic and affective powers are here recruited to the service of Sufi devotion and appropriated as medicinal and supernatural formulae, thus giving excellent grounds for a Muslim ruler like Muhammad ‘Adil Shah to use the rāgas in regulating and maintaining order in the body politic. It is important to note that the elemental associations of the Javāhir rāga descriptions are not in the Dakhni text. Their relation to the paintings is thus an early- to mid- 17th-century interpretation, undertaken in a more Persianate universe. I thus want to speculate in conclusion about the impact this text, and perhaps other Bijapuri treatises like it, now lost, had on the Mughal recodification of śastric music theory in Persian during the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (1658-1707) (see Schofield below).

The evidence is circumstantial, but cumulative and therefore tantalising. From the first brief Mughal formulation of saṅgītaśāstra in Persian, Abuʼl-Fazl’s chapter on saṅgīt in the Ā’īn-i Akbarī (1593),  Mughal music theorists all venerated the south and especially the Deccan as the arbiter of authority in Indian music.  Political and cultural emissaries were sent regularly between the Mughal and Bijapur courts from the time of ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah, and in the first decades of the 17th century the two powers came into direct conflict, and then more peaceful accommodation, over the collapse of the Nizam Shahi state of Ahmadnagar.  Akbar and Jahangir certainly knew of Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah’s musical prowess; Jahangir even made note of Ibrahim’s famous song collection, the Kitāb-i nauras, in his memoir, and welcomed one of his musicians to the Mughal court.  And Ibrahim in turn was fascinated by Akbar’s great musician Tansen and the quality of Akbar’s relationship with him. 

What, then, of Muhammad ‘Adil Shah and his connections with his exact Mughal contemporary Shah Jahan (r.1628-58) and his Deccan viceroy Aurangzeb, the future emperor ‘Alamgir? Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim portrays Muhammad ‘Adil Shah as a great lover and connoisseur of music  – and to my knowledge, the Javāhir is the earliest extant full-scale Persian work of Indian musicology from the Mughal period. Why write it in Persian not Dakhni? We know that the miniature paintings of Muhammad ‘Adil Shah’s reign draw to an unprecedented extent on Mughal inspiration, which included importing Mughal artists.  Did Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim’s choice to write a great treatise in Persian similarly reflect his patron’s aspirations to Mughal recognition, in a subject in which Bijapur was already renowned as the authority? Conversely, what impact did the Javāhir’s unapologetic mixing of Indic musical science with Islamicate natural and esoteric sciences and mystical and ethical teaching have on the explosion of music theory in Persian at ‘Alamgir’s court in the 1660s and 70s? It is suggestive that the first full-scale Indian music treatise in Persian for a Mughal emperor – Qazi Hasan’s Miftāḥ al-surūd (1663-4) – was written in Daulatabad for ‘Alamgir, and has many similar features.  More importantly, the humoral explanation of the rāgās’ potency is fundamental to several treatises written at ‘Alamgir’s court itself. 

We do not have the evidence to say definitively that Mughal connoisseurs and intellectuals were inspired to translate Indian music theory into Persian by what they saw coming out of Bijapur. What we can say is that the Javāhir al-mūsiqāt-i Muḥammadī is a precious landmark in Indian musicology: the earliest known musicological work in Dakhni, and the earliest full-scale Persian work on Indian music from the Mughal period still extant. Yet it is just one of hundreds of Indian musical treasures held today in the British Library’s collections.

Further reading

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Indian Music in the Persian Collections: the Javahir al-Musiqat-i Muhammadi (Or.12857). Part 1

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The first of two posts on the Bijapur manuscript Javāhir al-mūsīqāt, c.1570/c.1630 by guest blogger Katherine Butler Schofield of King’s College London. This manuscript has now been digitised and is available to read online on British Library Digitised Manuscripts. Follow the links below to go directly to the relevant folios.

The third type of the ād-sanj position (British Library Or.12857, f. 171r)

The dancer sinks into a deep plié, both heels raised with her toes planted on the ground, her shins at a distance of one hand span above the floor, both shoulders parallel with her knees, and the thumb and forefinger of each hand completing the circle of the haṃsāsya hand gesture, the “wild-goose beak”, as she demonstrates the third of three ād-sanj positions[1]. As the dancers who follow her show more taxonomically, this scene is straight out of the Saṅgītaratnākara, the greatest Sanskrit music treatise of the second millennium CE, which the Kashmiri pandit Śārṅgadeva wrote for the Yadava king Siṅghaṇa (r.1210-47) at his court of Devagiri, now Daulatabad, in the Deccan. Śārṅgadeva’s work was considered seminally important in both North and South Indian musical traditions in the 16th century when this dancer was painted – a mārga (universal) treatise for all times and places. Yet the page across which she dances is also rooted in a particular desh (region): the text is Dakhni and in Arabic script, betraying its regional roots in the Muslim Deccan; and the dancer is indisputably trained in South Indian traditions. Not for her the flowing ankle-length robes and pajamas and cypress-like stance of her counterparts at the Mughal court. Bare-legged and sharply angled, she wears a short wide skirt like Baz Bahadur’s Mandu dancers, forced to perform in captivity for Akbar in 1561; and the longer skirts of her sisters in subsequent paintings are pulled up between their legs like trousers, in a manner reminiscent of today’s Bharatanatyam dancers. Both costumes are designed to accommodate legs bent wide in plié – still the iconic basic posture of South Indian dance today.

The first and second of the “single hand” gestures as established in the Saṅgītaratnākara: patāka “flag” and tripatāka “three-finger flag” (British Library Or. 12857, f. 174v)

She may be dancing her way through a Sanskritic taxonomy of mudrās and maṇḍalas (hand gestures and body postures), but her male companion is dressed in visibly Persianate robes and is sporting the tight conical turban characteristic of the 16th-century Muslim Deccan, specifically the ‘Adil Shahi court of Bijapur. This figure is slightly more difficult to interpret: is the rod in his right hand indicative of authority, perhaps of instruction? That he is apparently exemplifying the haṃsāsya gesture to the dancer – a gesture that was itself used in the Saṅgītaratnākara to signify “instruction” – certainly underlines that impression. Is he, perhaps, the dancer’s instructor? If so, is that not a little intriguing: a courtier embracing the Persianate styles of the ‘Adil Shahi court teaching the universal way of the Sanskrit treatises to someone trained in the regional dance forms of the South? The multilinguality of the codex that yields this image, too, is as complicated as the painting’s cultural mixture: choice morsels of Dakhni scattered through a weighty Persian dish poached in a Sanskrit reduction and seasoned with judicious pinches of Sufi-infused Arabic (See Aitken below). Added to which there is confusion over its date: the paintings have the unmistakable savour of the court of ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah c.1570 – based largely on the blatant similarity of the paintings to the Chester Beatty Nujūm al-‘ulūm completed in 1570 for ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah (Michell & Zebrowski, p. 162 and Flatt below) – but the codex’s Persian dedication is to his great-nephew, Muhammad ‘Adil Shah (r.1626-56). How might we make sense of this work?

For the past few years, I and my team on the European Research Council project “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean” have been compiling information about all the major texts on North Indian art music and dance produced c. 1600–1900. The British Library possesses by far the largest and richest set of materials on North Indian music we have yet encountered. These include hundreds of paintings of the melodic modes of North Indian classical music – the male rāgas and female rāginīs – as heroes, heroines, jogis and deities, alone or collated together into sets called “garlands of rāgas” or rāgamālās. The rāgamālā paintings that form the centrepiece of Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim bin Shaikh Farid Ansari al-Qadiri Jaunpuri’s masterwork, the Javāhir al-Mūsīqāt-i Muḥammadī, are quite possibly the Library’s oldest.

Bangālī, the third rāginī of Rag Bhairav (British Library Or. 12857, f. 76r)

The Javāhir al-Mūsīqāt-i Muḥammadī, the “jewels/essences of music belonging to Muhammad”, is not the British Library’s most beautiful Indian musical manuscript; its 48 miniatures have been deemed a crude, if charming, footnote to the productions of ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah (r.1558-80) (Michell & Zebrowski) and its calligraphy is somewhat slapdash. But it is undoubtedly one of the Library’s rarest – this is the only known copy[2] – and one of its most important, for several reasons.

In my next post I will talk about the Javāhir’s wider cultural resonances; here I want to focus on the manuscript’s literary and musicological significance. The codex is largely in Persian, but it contains within it the earliest known Dakhni work on music theory, c.1570, predating the famed Kitāb-i Nauras of Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II (r.1580-1626) by several decades (Haider). Until now, the Javāhir has only really passed under the eyes of art historians, whose firm dating of the miniatures to 1570s Bijapur has been confounded by the “perplexing dedicatory note on fol. 4a to Sultan Muhammad Adil Shah”, who came to power more than 50 years later (Michell & Zebrowski). A close examination of the codex reveals what I think is the likely process of this unique work’s construction:

1) Firstly, in c.1570 an anonymous author prepared a densely illustrated Dakhni translation of the 13th-century Saṅgītaratnākara probably for ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah of Bijapur, but with the replacement of its rāga chapter with a much newer iconic rāgamālā. All the miniatures have passages of Dakhni prose on the reverse. These do not correspond to the painting on the front, but to the next painting in the section.

Bangālī, reverse folio. The text describes the fourth rāginī of Rag Bhairav, Ragini Bairari (British Library Or. 12857, f. 76v)

By using digital images of the folios, it is possible to reconstruct large portions of the original treatise. The section on the seven notes of the scale (swara) – which has unique paintings of the swaras personified like rāgas – and the dance section are patently literal translations of the corresponding subchapters of the classic Sanskrit work of music theory, the Saṅgītaratnākara.

The first note of the scale, Sa (ṣadj), whose sound derives from the cry of the peacock, and its four microtones (śrutis) (British Library Or. 12857, f. 39r)

2) Around 1630 or so, Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim, a Qadiri Sufi whose family hailed originally from Jaunpur in the north, split the Dakhni treatise apart and reused its paintings in a more elaborate and refined Persian translation for Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, with a Suficate preface and six chapters: the origins of sound; the musical scale; the rāgas and rāginīs; two chapters on the rhythmic system (tāla); and dance. This essentially forms the manuscript we have now. Shaikh ‘Abd al-Karim calls the work he is translating the Kitāb-i Sangīt, the “Book of Music” (e.g. Javāhir, f. 69v). This designation may refer to the Saṅgītaratnākara itself; the more traditional sections compare almost exactly. However the remaining Dakhni is also followed very closely, though with key interpolations from the Islamic sciences (see my next post). Sticking my neck out I would suggest Kitāb-i Sangīt refers to the Dakhni text. Even what remains indicates its textual portions were originally much more extensive.

3) At some point comparatively early in its long history, through wear and tear the manuscript lost its colophon, and the first few pages became so degraded that a second headpiece was reused to replace the original – you can see where the previous text was cut out – and the first few pages were retranscribed on newer paper.

The retranscribed dedication to Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah (British Library Or. 12,857, f. 4r)

4) Finally, by the time the codex was bound in its current form, what is now the third folio ended up bound out of place (folio four runs on from folio two), and several pages in the middle – all the rāg-rāginī illustrations for Rags Shri and Dipak and the beginning of the fourth chapter – had sadly gone missing. Where the English pencil folio numbering (followed for citations here) goes from 123v to 124r, the oldest Persian numbering skips from 141 to 177. Suddenly, from enjoying a description of Shri Rag, we find ourselves in the middle of a sentence describing the Sanskritic notation system for poetical and musical metre.

The Javāhir is thus a multilingual palimpsest of three treatises layered up like an onion: a translation of the 13^th-century Sanskrit Saṅgītaratnākara into 16^th-century Dakhni, which was split apart and its paintings reused to form the central thread of a more elaborate and aspirational 17^th-century Persian translation.

This remarkable manuscript constitutes the earliest work of Indian music theory in Dakhni that we know of. But it is also the earliest music treatise in Persian that we still possess from the Mughal period. I will discuss the wider cultural and historical significance of this text in my next post.
 

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Our guest blogger Celia Fisher is an art historian and plantswoman who has written extensively on the history of plants in art. Her new book Magic of Birds is based on the collections at the British Library (published September 2014). Celia writes:

The Magic of Birds – my new book published by the British Library this month – ranges across time and continents, exploring the ways in which artists, poets, storytellers and explorers have depicted birds. Although the book is not entirely about birds from the East, they appear throughout. One chapter is devoted to the Eastern fables – including the search for the legendary simurgh – which gave Persian and Mughal artists the opportunity to depict gatherings of curious and beautiful birds. In the West the concept of the simurgh developed into the phoenix, but it was originally believed to be an inhabitant of the Far East, where it was depicted as an enormous pheasant. The techniques and mysticism of Chinese and Japanese album paintings are described at this point, and also spill over into other chapters. For instance ‘Decorative Birds’, as well as peacocks, includes a crane flying against the sun from a Japanese album, and a keen-eyed cormorant juxtaposed to those which twist around the pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Page from Tennen hyakkaku, ‘Tennen’s one hundred cranes’ by Kaigai Tennen, Kyoto, 1900. Orb40/964 vol.3 f.17r.

The first chapter, entitled ‘Creation and Diversity’, begins with God creating the birds, travels through the discovery of new continents, and ends with Alfred Wallace’s descriptions of birds of paradise, which had been traded across Asia for centuries before they contributed to his theory of evolution. The chapter on ‘Freedom, Hunting and Captivity’ features the Mughal Emperor Babur with the bird-catchers of Kabul, as well as his ancestor Tamburlaine hunting peacocks; and contrasts two fierce-eyed hawks from a Japanese album, one flying free across the mountains, the other itself a tethered captive. When ‘The Symbolism of Birds’ is discussed, the use of cockerels for divination as well as food – and cockfighting – proves a world-wide phenomenon, but all domesticated poultry are descended from the red jungle fowl of central South East Asia. Their spread towards Europe and America happened surprisingly early, while China became the centre for developing rare breeds. Another widespread phenomenon is a fear of owls as birds of ill-omen, and in the chapter on that theme Dürer’s owl is set beside two horned owls perched on a ruined palace, discussing the fate of the Persian Emperor Anurshirvan’s troubled domains. On a lighter note, the section on ‘Winged Spirits and Messengers’ includes the hoopoe which acted as a messenger between Solomon and Sheba; the varied messenger pigeons bred by the Mughal Emperors; and the Hindu god Garuda flying to the rescue.

The crow deciding whether the owl should lead the assembly of birds. A miniature painting from Anvar-i Suhayli, a version of the Kalila va Dimna fables, India, 1610–11. Add. Or. 18579 f.210v.

Added to this sumptuously illustrated background of South Asian and Far Eastern beliefs relating to birds, there are many images and descriptions taken from the early European publications on the natural history of birds. These include the wonders of the East, hornbills and kingfishers, parrots and dodos, not to mention the birds of Australia, and they provide the balance of scientific bird illustration, alongside fascinating descriptions of bird behaviour and – once again – their relationship to humans, including humour.  

The Magic of Birds is available now (hardback, £20, ISBN 978 0 7123 5742 5) through the British Library's online shop.

James Skinner (1778–1841) was one of the leading patrons of Delhi artists in the second quarter of the 19^th century.  The son of a Scottish soldier father and Rajput mother, Skinner was a born soldier and leader of men, but was denied a place in the East India Company’s armies on account of his birth; he became a mercenary working for the Marathas who controlled Delhi at the end of the 18^th century.  With the outbreak of war between the East India Company and the Marathas in 1803, he took advantage (as did others in similar circumstances) of the Company’s offer to come over to its side.  In February 1803, from the men who followed him, he founded a regiment of irregular cavalry, Skinner’s Horse, known as the ‘Yellow Boys’ on account of the men’s yellow surcoats, the first irregular regiment of cavalry in the East India Company’s army.  He raised a second regiment of Yellow Boys to assist the Company’s forces at the beginning of the war with Nepal in 1814.  It rankled with Skinner that he felt unacknowledged by the Company, which he had done so much to help, until the Governor-General Lord Moira in January 1815, when they met at Skinner’s base in Hansi, gave him the rank of honorary Lt. Col. with precedence over lower ranked gazetted officers (Hastings 1858, vol. 2, pp. 293-5).

Colonel James Skinner, attributed to Ghulam Murtaza Khan, Delhi, 1830.  19 x 12.5 cm (British Library Add.27254, f. 4r)

Skinner’s patronage of Delhi artists doubtless began on account of his friendship with the Fraser brothers, the commissioners of the Fraser Album of paintings from 1815-19 (see Archer and Falk 1989).  Skinner’s major commissions include the paintings in his album put together in the 1820s (British Library, Losty and Roy 2012 pp. 222-5), the three large watercolours he commissioned from Ghulam ‘Ali Khan in 1827-8 showing his regiments and his estate at Hansi and another two in 1836 marking his newly built church of St. James in Delhi (National Army Museum, see Dalrymple and Sharma 2012, nos. 58-60, and Losty 2012, figs. 102-3), and those illustrating his writings on castes and rulers (British Library and elsewhere).  This is a significant body of work that marks Skinner as the most important patron of the time in Delhi.  For overviews of Skinner’s patronage and literary compositions, see Losty and Roy 2012, pp. 222-8, and Dalrymple and Sharma 2012, pp. 32-9.

Skinner was a well-educated man and although his English was from all accounts never very good, his Persian was excellent.  This post is concerned with the newly digitised manuscript of one of the two texts that he wrote in that language.  His Tazkirat al-Umara (Add.27254, ‘Biographies of the Nobles’) deals with the history of the princely families of Rajasthan, Haryana and the Punjab, tracing their descent and including a portrait of the present head of the family (Rieu 1879, vol. 1, pp. 302-3).  The British Library’s copy is dated 1830 with 38 paintings and begins with a dedication (f.3v) in four baits of Persian verses to Skinner’s friend Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833), who had just retired as Governor of Bombay, together with an impression of Skinner’s seal with his titles Nasir al-Dawlah Kirnil Jams Iskinar Bahadur Ghalib Jang (‘Defender of the State, Colonel James Skinner, Lord, Victorious in War’) and the date 1830.  These were the Mughal titles which were given on 3 May 1830 to Skinner by the Emperor Akbar II and which are repeated beneath the portrait of Skinner himself on the facing page. 

Dedicatory verses to Sir John Malcolm, with Skinner’s Persian seal (British Library Add.27254, f. 3v)

The manuscript is beautifully bound and presented and rarely for an Indian manuscript is decorated round the fore-edge, top and bottom of the text block with decorations. 

Decorations on the top of text block (British Library Add.27254)

Another illustrated copy of the same work has a different verse dedication to one Watkin, again on a page with Skinner’s seal, and is now in the Chester Beatty Library (Leach 1996, no. 7.133, p. 726-41).  This is also dated 1830 and has 37 portraits listed but actually contains only 33 and does not include a portrait of Skinner.  Watkin is presumably the J. Watkins whose signature is on a flyleaf and is probably Lt. Col. James Watkins, who retired from the Bengal Army in 1838.  His regiment was based at Ludhiana during the 1830s and he must often have passed through Delhi or Hansi.  Another copy dated 1836 has recently appeared from the famous manuscript and early book collection of the Yates, Thompson and Bright families (Christie’s, London, 16 July 2014, lot 39).  This has 39 paintings; it lacks the opening portrait of Skinner, but has one of the Malcolm version’s double portraits in two separate paintings, and also has a portrait of Raja Balwant Singh of Bharatpur at the end, who is not noticed in the 1830 manuscripts.  The portraits are very much the same in each of these three versions except that the other two sometimes lack the beautiful architectural backgrounds of the Malcolm version or are in mirror reverse.  Unillustrated versions also exist (e.g. BL Add.24051, dated 15 April 1830).  The paintings would seem to have been added to existing copies of the text when needed for gifts.  The scribe of the Yates-Thompson-Bright version, Muhammad Bakhsh, is very possibly the unnamed scribe of the British Library version.

The paintings come from different stylistic backgrounds, some being new versions of older Rajput paintings in that style, others being newly minted in the latest style of Delhi.  The portrait of Skinner himself (above) is in this latter style.  Seated in a black japanned chair placed on a carpet and nearly full face, he wears the uniform of the colonel of his regiment as well as his CB star given him by Lord Moira in 1815.  It may be attributed with some confidence to Ghulam Murtaza Khan, to whom Skinner wrote in 1834 commissioning a portrait and describing the artist as the ‘counterpart of Mani and Bihzad’ (Losty and Roy 2012, p.227).

The iconography of Skinner’s portrait is somewhat different from the others.  The opening Rajput portrait (f. 8v), of Maharana Jawan Singh of Udaipur (reg. 1828-38), is more typical of the Delhi manner:  it shows the subject seated on a carpet smoking a hookah with bolsters and cushions behind him and a young attendant fanning him, with a background view out to a terrace and a garden (ibid., fig. 162).  This is very different from the sort of portraiture practised at this time at the Udaipur court.  The portrait of Raja Kalyan Singh of Kishangarh is similarly treated, but this is easier to explain.

Raja Kalyan Singh of Kishangarh (b.1794, reg. 1798-1832, d. 1839).  Delhi, c. 1830.  20 x 13 cm (British Library Add.27254, f. 63v)

Kalyan Singh succeeded as a minor in 1798, but after he came of age was unable to resolve disputes with his nobles and fled to Delhi where he spent most of his time.  Here he seems to be in his 30s and has obviously been portrayed taken from the life during his self-imposed exile in Delhi.  Here the artist has combined a beautifully detailed Mughal pavilion with a typically European curtain swag derived from the type of portraits done by British artists in India.  Many of the Rajput nobility, at least those who were not too far from Delhi, would seem to have maintained houses in the city and hence could be portrayed in contemporary fashion.  

Maharaja Jagat Singh II of Jaipur (reg. 1803-18).  Delhi, c. 1830.  2- x 13 cm (British Library Add.27254, f. 68v)

Typical of the more old-fashioned Rajput portrait (including those of Jodhpur and Bikaner) is that of Maharaja Jagat Singh II of Jaipur, showing him standing in profile, his jama flaring out at the hem, and holding a long sword.  Several of these portraits are of rulers already deceased in 1830, but in this case Jagat Singh had a posthumous son, Jai Singh III, born in 1819, so that perhaps portraits of so young a prince were not readily available.  Skinner follows his account of Jaipur with notices of fifteen of its thikanas or tributary states, an area of research yet to be tapped.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Punjab (reg. 1799-1839).  Delhi, 1830.  20 x 13 cm (British Library Add.27254, f. 176v)

Skinner’s text includes accounts of all the contemporary Sikh rulers, beginning of course with Maharaja Ranjit Singh himself.  By 1830, his appearance was well known and our Delhi artist has been able to produce a good likeness of him, albeit playing down somewhat his blind left eye.  He is seated on a hexagonal gold throne which may be an attempt to render the Maharaja’s actual golden throne now in the V&A.  This has the shape of two octagonal tiers of lotus petals, the traditional seat of Hindu deities, which our artist has perhaps attempted to suggest by portraying Ranjit Singh seated in one of the traditional postures of Hindu deities.  Instead of the divine attributes, he bears instead those of a warrior – sword, dagger, shield, bow and arrows.  Otherwise the setting is that of a refined Delhi interior with a view to the terrace and curtain swags.

Maharaja Karam Singh of Patiala (reg. 1813-45).  Delhi, 1830.  20 x 13 cm (British Library Add.27254, f. 197v)

Other Sikh rulers described in Skinner’s text include those of the major Cis-Sutlej states Patiala, Jind, Nabha and Kapurthala, all of which accepted British suzerainty in 1809 rather than risk be swallowed up in Ranjit Singh’s still expanding empire.  Karam Singh ruled the largest territory of the Cis-Sutlej chiefs as suggested perhaps by his large and sprawling person in this portrait.  As if to contain him, the artist closes the vista with an arcaded wall behind him.  Karam Singh was very helpful to the British in the Anglo-Nepal war of 1814-15 and received in reward a large tract of the Himalayan foothills below Simla.

Whereas the history of the major Sikh princely states is well known, many of the small ones disappeared in the first half of the 19^th century.  These include all those established in what is now northern Haryana, which in British India were in the Punjab districts of Ambala and Karnal.  James Skinner notices several of these small Sikh states, which were his neighbours to the north from his base in Hansi, including Kaithal, Kalsia, Radaur, Ladwa, Jagadhri and Buria along with portraits of the incumbent rulers.  These small states were founded in 1763 after Sikh warriors fled south across the Sutlej to escape the carnage wrought on the Punjab proper by Ahmad Shah Durrani.  When the land around Delhi was parcelled out after the British victory over the Marathas in 1803-05, these small rulers like their larger neighbouring ones were confirmed in their status and privileges, reinforced again in 1809.

Bhai Uday Singh of Kaithal (reg. 1819-43).  Delhi, 1830.  20 x 13 cm (British Library Add.27254, f. 204v)

Bhai Uday Singh (reg. 1819-43), as with others of the rulers of Haryana and the Punjab, appears to have been painted from the life, as the melancholy ruler sits amidst his cushions, a magnificent Kashmir shawl round his waist, holding his sword upright with his katar and shield on the rug beside him between two stylized vases of flowers.  The artist has absorbed enough of European portraiture to depict the carpets in perspective and to provide a standard column, but he also provides other more mysterious uprights and diagonals of undisclosed purpose.  Horizontal bands of saturated colour set off the whiteness of the Bhai’s gown.  Perhaps the Bhai’s apparent melancholy is owing to his childless state, since after his death in 1843 his state lapsed to the British.

Rani of the late Rup Singh of Radaur.  Delhi, 1830.  20 x 13 cm (British Library Add.27254, f. 227v)

One of the most striking of the pictures is the only female portrait in the manuscript.  Radaur is one of the small former Sikh states in the Ambala district, but its history is as yet very obscure.  Nonetheless, the Delhi artist has lavished his invention on the widow’s portrait, showing her seated in a richly ornamented window arch in the zenana with a bed behind her, and producing a sumptuous array of colours in the lower part of the painting contrasting with the cool grey of the decorated plaster work above.

Skinner ends his survey of princely families with four states under Muslim rule.  Two of these, Farrukhnagar and Dujana, are just west of Delhi and were established like Jhajjar (Losty and Roy 2012, pp.230-2) from land grants to Afghan military chiefs helpful to the British 1803-05.  The portrait of Nawab Zabita Khan, who held land round Rania now in western Haryana (ibid., fig. 163), is the only one in Skinner’s manuscript which is based on a portrait from the Fraser Album. 

Nawab Dalil Khan of Bahawalpur.  Delhi, 1830.  20 x 13 cm (British Library Add.27254, f. 262v)

Skinner concludes with the large state of Bahawalpur on the left bank of the Sutlej and Indus, although the portrait of the ruler labelled Nawab Dalil Khan is enigmatic.  The ruler should have been either Nawab Sadiq Khan II (reg. 1809-26) or Bahawal Khan III (reg. 1809-52).  The portrait’s composition seems based on one from earlier in the 18^th century, but no Nawab Dalil Khan seems known from that time.  The text of the Tazkira has never been published or translated and its on-line digitisation will surely be welcome not just to admirers of late Mughal Delhi but also to historians of early 19^th century India. Follow these links for the online digitised version and a complete description of the manuscript and illustrations.

Further reading:

Archer, M., and Falk, T., India Revealed:  the Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35, Cassell, London, 1989
Dalrymple, W., and Sharma, Y., Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, Asia Society, New York, 2012
Hastings, 1st Marquess of, The Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings, K.G., ed. by the Marchioness of Bute, London, 1858
Leach, L.Y., Mughal and Other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, Scorpion Cavendish, London, 1995
Losty, J.P., Delhi: Red Fort to Raisina, Lustre Press Roli Books, New Delhi. 2012
Losty, J.P., and Roy, M., Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire – Manuscripts and Paintings in the British Library, British Library, London, 2012
Rieu, Charles, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, London, 1879-83
McBurney, N.G., The 1836 Tazkirat al-umara of Colonel Skinner, London, Bernard Quaritch Ltd, 2014. 2 vols with 49 colour illustrations

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

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As a supplement to the newly digitised draft catalogue of Persian manuscripts in the India Office Library, I have uploaded sheets of a fascicle which was originally intended to be the first in a series,  but which never got beyond proofs. These can be accessed by following the link below:

Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts vol III: Qurʼānic Literature

These proofs were returned from the University Press Oxford at various times during 1926 to Charles Storey who was then Assistant Librarian at the India Office Library and was actively engaged in cataloguing both Arabic and Persian manuscripts. As can be seen immediately from the number of mistakes, the proofs fully demonstrate the complexity of the material and the consequent difficulties involved in printing. Although he received the proofs in 1926 it took Storey, according to his dated notes, a full year to revise them. What happened next I have not yet discovered, but nothing ever came of Storey’s wish, recorded at the top of the first page: “We should rather like to get these sheets printed off by the middle of March”.

The opening of al-Sūrābādī's commentary on the Qurʼān, one of the oldest Persian manuscripts preserved, copied in Rabīʻ II 523 (1129) by Maḥmūd ibn Gurgīn ibn Gurgsār al-Turkī (British Library IO Islamic 3840, ff. 1v-2r)


The fascicle is headed Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts Volume III and contains:

Qurʼānic literature:

A. Commentaries and translations (cols. 1-36)

B. Glossaries (cols. 36-7)

C. Asbāb al-nuzūl and al-Nāsikh wa’l-mansūkh (cols. 37-8)

D. The pronunciation of the Qurʼān and the variant readings (cols. 38-54)

E. Qurʼānic magic (cols. 54-60)

The titles of the works included in the catalogue, together with their correct manuscript numbers (some have been given new numbers since Storey catalogued them), can be downloaded from the following link:

Index to Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts Volume III: Qurʼānic Literature

Ursula Sims-Williams, Asian and African Studies

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