Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1911761
Parul Singh
ABSTRACT The paper examines the Windsor Castle ‘Ishqnama, an autobiographical account of the amorous entanglements by the last king of Awadh, Wajid ‘Ali Shah (r. 1847–56), as one of the strategies for projecting an image of an ideal masculine ruler through the control over the bodies of “his” women—the paris (fairies) in his Parikhana, an establishment of women singers and dancers, many of whom were his mut‘a wives, and the women of his zenana. The ‘Ishqnama revealed the royal harem both visually and textually. The paper contextualises this strategic revealment by a tangential viewing of the harem of the contemporary Persian ruler, Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar, who similarly revealed the women of his harem by photographing them at a critical period when his image as an ideal ruler was being eroded. Discourse surrounding Wajid Ali Shah’s association with the “fairies” was diverse, with reactions ranging from adulatory accounts, to severe criticism. The paper highlights these polemic narratives by the British on the one hand and a Persian traveller, Waqar al-Mulk Tabrizi who visited Lucknow in the 1870s on the other, to examine culturally diverse perceptions about what constituted the “right” exhibition of sexuality by a ruler and how this exhibition underlined his ability to rule.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1911758
A. Peacock
ABSTRACT This paper examines MS D. 92 of the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras/Chennai, which contains the works of ‘Iyani, a late fifteenth century Shirazi poet and historian. ‘Iyani had migrated to the Deccan, and wrote in Persian in the Bahmani sultanate (1347–1528), receiving the patronage of both Sultan Mahmud Shah (r. 1482–924) and Habib al-Din Muhibballah, a descendant of the Sufi saint Shah Ni‘matallah Vali of Kirman. The paper investigates ‘Iyani’s works, which comprise qasidas, ghazals, ruba‘iyyat and two mathnavīs, the Jangnama-i Shahrukh and the Fathnama-i Mahmud Shahi. The latter, recording the defeat of a rebellion led by the Abyssinian commander in Gulbarga, Dastur Dinar, sheds new light on the political and factional environment in the final stages of Bahmani rule. ‘Iyani’s works represent a new source for the cultural, literary and political history of the fifteenth century Deccan.
摘要本文研究了位于马德拉斯/钦奈的政府东方手稿图书馆的D.92，其中收录了“十五世纪末设拉子诗人和历史学家Iyani”的作品Iyani移民到德干，并在巴赫曼尼苏丹国（1347-1528）用波斯语写作，得到了苏丹马哈茂德·沙阿（1482-224年在位）和苏菲派圣人克尔曼的沙阿·尼玛塔拉·瓦利的后裔哈比卜·丁·穆希巴拉赫的庇护。本文考察了Iyani的作品，包括qasidas，ghazals，ruba'iyyat和两个mathnavīs，Jangnama-i Shahrukh和Fathnama-i Mahmud Shahi。后者记录了阿比西尼亚指挥官达斯图尔·迪纳尔在古尔巴尔加领导的叛乱的失败，为巴赫曼尼统治最后阶段的政治和派系环境提供了新的线索。”Iyani的作品代表了15世纪德干文化、文学和政治史的一个新来源。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1911759
Emily Shovelton
ABSTRACT The subject of this paper is a striking copy of the Sharafnama by Nizami dated 938/1531–2, made for the ruler of Bengal, Nusrat Shah (r.1519–32). This slim volume contains nine vibrant paintings that show the assimilation of both Indic and Persian artistic traditions: adaptations common to several fifteenth-century manuscripts from the Indian sultanates. However, there are no other surviving manuscripts that were produced in the court of the Bengal Sultanate, and no evidence of commercial workshops in the region. Therefore, it is a challenge to situate this Sharafnama. Since the manuscript was published some forty years ago, there have been only a few cursory mentions in general discussions. This paper aims to contextualise this manuscript within Indo-Persian pictorial and narrative traditions. The Sharafnama can be better understood in this context of both local traditions and wider Persianate culture.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1911731
Mahmood Alam
ABSTRACT There are 46 Persian manuscripts in the treasure trove of the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata, which are regarded as constituting an important part of the national written heritage of India. These manuscripts were painstakingly collected in between 1904 and 1984, and scholars like Edward Denison Ross contributed substantially to their collection. Manuscripts were either presented by dignatories such as the Nawab Bahadur of Murshidabad, the Begum of Bhopal, Mirza Sayid ud Din Khan of Loharu, the Board of Examiners or purchased through the Art Purchase Committee. Some of the manuscripts are rare and have never been published, and the catalogue published in 1973 provides only basic information. Scholars of Islamic manuscripts could greatly benefit from this collection, but very little is known about its holdings. A descriptive catalogue prepared more than a decade ago is yet to be published. The present paper intends to introduce some of the most important manuscripts and discuss the collection from a codicological perspective.
加尔各答维多利亚纪念馆的宝藏中有46份波斯手稿，被认为是印度国家文字遗产的重要组成部分。这些手稿是在1904年至1984年间精心收集的，爱德华·丹尼森·罗斯(Edward Denison Ross)等学者为他们的收藏做出了重大贡献。手稿要么由穆尔西达巴德的Nawab Bahadur、博帕尔的Begum、洛哈鲁的Mirza Sayid ud Din Khan、审查委员会等名人赠送，要么通过艺术购买委员会购买。有些手稿是罕见的，从未出版过，1973年出版的目录只提供了基本的信息。研究伊斯兰手稿的学者可以从这些收藏中获益良多，但人们对这些收藏知之甚少。十多年前编写的描述性目录尚未出版。本文拟介绍一些最重要的手抄本，并从法典学的角度对这些手抄本进行讨论。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1911760
Ursula Sims-Williams
ABSTRACT The library of Tipu Sultan of Mysore is one of the most important in the history of South Asian Islamic collections. Unlike many collections which can be regarded as dynastic libraries, Tipu’s was relatively newly-formed. Most of the books had not been acquired before the mid-eighteenth century but nevertheless came from diverse sources. This gives the collection an added importance in a specifically eighteenth-century context. Following his death in 1799 at the siege of Seringapatam (Srirangapatna, an island in the river Kaveri ca. 13 km. north of Mysore) the library was estimated to consist of about 2000 volumes. Of these the British Library holds 540 manuscripts which can be positively identified as part of the original library while others are in the Asiatic Society, Calcutta and scattered around the world. This article is based on a preliminary study of the collection as it exists today in the British Library, together with a few other volumes which have been examined personally. On the basis of paratextual information I attempt an analysis of the collection as a whole and in particular look at the smaller collections of which it is made.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1911762
James White
ABSTRACT Until now, the textual history of the poetry transmitted in Persian literary anthologies has solely been the concern of editors preparing works for print publication. This article contends that an investigation of variance is also of relevance for writing the cultural history of how anthologists encountered, manipulated, and published poems in the manuscript age. While a shortage of independent textual witnesses makes it harder to undertake this kind of study for the earliest periods of Persian literary history, such research can be conducted for later eras, including the seventeenth century, the time-frame covered by the biographical anthology of Muhammad Tahir Nasrabadi (d. ca. 1698). In order to sample the degree of variance present in Nasrabadi’s anthology, his recensions of the verse of twenty poets are compared here with the available manuscript copies of the same twenty poets’ collected works. Instead of judging Nasrabadi’s accuracy in reproducing each fragment, I evaluate what variance can tell us about paths of textual transmission between Mughal North India, the Deccan Sultanates, and Safavid Iran. The evidence presented here reinforces the supposition that anthologies are fundamentally shaped by the social networks out of which they arise.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1911733
Philip Bockholt
ABSTRACT Khvandamir’s general history Habib al-Siyar (Beloved of Careers), one of the major historiographical narratives of the Persianate world, was composed for the founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, Shah Ismaʿil, in the 1520s. Some years later, the author ideologically reshaped his work at Babur’s Timurid-Mughal court in Agra. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the book was widely copied across the Islamic lands and, judging by the number of extant manuscripts (c. 600), the Habib al-Siyar might be called a premodern bestseller. Interestingly, several chapters dealing with the history of India (Hindustan) were apparently added by the author later on and have not been included in the printed editions. Based on the examination of widely scattered manuscripts, this article examines the textual transmission of these chapters. Furthermore, it explores the question of how Khvandamir integrated information about India into the main narrative and which sources he relied on in order to situate the region within an overarching narrative of Islamic history. This approach gives further insights into the precise quality and quantity of knowledge about the Indian subcontinent available in Iran around 1500, as well as into copying processes of texts in premodern times.
{"title":"So Close and Yet Often so Far Away: The History of India as Told by Historians in Iran Around 1500","authors":"Philip Bockholt","doi":"10.1080/05786967.2021.1911733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/05786967.2021.1911733","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Khvandamir’s general history Habib al-Siyar (Beloved of Careers), one of the major historiographical narratives of the Persianate world, was composed for the founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, Shah Ismaʿil, in the 1520s. Some years later, the author ideologically reshaped his work at Babur’s Timurid-Mughal court in Agra. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the book was widely copied across the Islamic lands and, judging by the number of extant manuscripts (c. 600), the Habib al-Siyar might be called a premodern bestseller. Interestingly, several chapters dealing with the history of India (Hindustan) were apparently added by the author later on and have not been included in the printed editions. Based on the examination of widely scattered manuscripts, this article examines the textual transmission of these chapters. Furthermore, it explores the question of how Khvandamir integrated information about India into the main narrative and which sources he relied on in order to situate the region within an overarching narrative of Islamic history. This approach gives further insights into the precise quality and quantity of knowledge about the Indian subcontinent available in Iran around 1500, as well as into copying processes of texts in premodern times.","PeriodicalId":44995,"journal":{"name":"Iran-Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/05786967.2021.1911733","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46894550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-30DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1945421
Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina
{"title":"Purity and Polemics: Zoroastrian Women’s Bodies as Sites of Difference and Contestation in Early Islamic Iran","authors":"Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina","doi":"10.1080/05786967.2021.1945421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/05786967.2021.1945421","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44995,"journal":{"name":"Iran-Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/05786967.2021.1945421","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45306234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-20DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1911735
Charles Melville
ABSTRACT In around 1584, while based in his capital at Fatehpur-Sikri, Akbar commissioned a history of Timur and his successors, including his own reign up to that date. The result, the Tarikh-i Khandan-i Timuriyya, an impressively large and heavily illustrated manuscript, now preserved in Patna, with 132 full-page paintings on 332 folios, has not received the same level of attention as Akbar's other historical commissions from around the same period, notably the Tarikh-i Alfi and the Baburnama. In particular, little or no attention has been paid to the text. This paper seeks to put the manuscript both in its immediate historical and historiographical context and in its relationship with these other illustrated works, created to celebrate Akbar's political and spiritual authority and dynastic inheritance. It can be shown that the portion of the Tarikh-i Alfi that covers the same period – including the reigns of Babur, Humayun and Akbar – draws almost verbatim on the Khandan-i Timuriyya. This suggests that the same author might have been responsible for both works and is consistent with other indications that the production of the manuscript might have been later than generally supposed.
{"title":"Akbar's History of the Timurids","authors":"Charles Melville","doi":"10.1080/05786967.2021.1911735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/05786967.2021.1911735","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In around 1584, while based in his capital at Fatehpur-Sikri, Akbar commissioned a history of Timur and his successors, including his own reign up to that date. The result, the Tarikh-i Khandan-i Timuriyya, an impressively large and heavily illustrated manuscript, now preserved in Patna, with 132 full-page paintings on 332 folios, has not received the same level of attention as Akbar's other historical commissions from around the same period, notably the Tarikh-i Alfi and the Baburnama. In particular, little or no attention has been paid to the text. This paper seeks to put the manuscript both in its immediate historical and historiographical context and in its relationship with these other illustrated works, created to celebrate Akbar's political and spiritual authority and dynastic inheritance. It can be shown that the portion of the Tarikh-i Alfi that covers the same period – including the reigns of Babur, Humayun and Akbar – draws almost verbatim on the Khandan-i Timuriyya. This suggests that the same author might have been responsible for both works and is consistent with other indications that the production of the manuscript might have been later than generally supposed.","PeriodicalId":44995,"journal":{"name":"Iran-Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/05786967.2021.1911735","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48538867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-20DOI: 10.1080/05786967.2021.1911755
Vivek Gupta
ABSTRACT This article examines codicological evidence for the presence of an illustrated Persian cosmography (‘ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt) (British Library Add 23564) at the fifteenth-century Bahmani court (1347–1538) of Deccan India. It traces this manuscript's itinerary from the dating of its colophon 1441, to its place in Bahmani Bidar, to a subimperial Mughal library, to its move to ‘Adil Shahi Bijapur in 1618, and finally to its arrival at the British Library in 1860. It argues that distinguishing manuscript genre from textual genre when considering book production over a longue durée enables one to see books more clearly through the lens of their makers and readers. By establishing this cosmography's place in South Asia, this article enables it to be situated within the activity of this manuscript genre throughout the Deccan's early modern period.
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