Dārāb-nāma (British Library Or. 4615)
The manuscript Or. 4615 of the British Library is an illustrated manuscript of the Dārāb-nāma , which was created around 1585 in the studio of the Mughal ruler Akbar (r. 1556-1605).
Shape of handwriting
The manuscript is incomplete and breaks off after about a third of the story, at the beginning of chapter 14. The entire Iskandar story is no longer included. The manuscript comprises 129 folios, which are also not complete in themselves. They are numbered up to 160; consequently 31 folios are missing. The total of 157 illustrations are numbered up to 200. Of the original 200 pictures, 43 have been lost. The cover of the pure text pages is of European provenance. The pictures are framed separately. The paper folios have a size of 35.5 × 23 cm, the gold-framed writing field measures 23.5 × 14 cm and contains 25 lines of text in Nastaʿlīq . All handwriting, text and images, are digitized.
History of the manuscript
The Mughal ruler Jahangir personally noted on fol. 1r : “On the fifth of the month of Āzar [year 1] [1605] came to the library of this supplicant [at the court of God]. Written by [Nūr ad-Dīn Jahāngīr], son of Akbar Ghāzī. “There are no notes in the manuscript from the time of Jahāngīr's successors, either because there were none or because they have been lost with the pages missing today. Whether this Dārāb-nāma was ever complete can no longer be determined today. What is certain, however, is that the manuscript already ended on fol. 129 when it passed into the possession of the Nawabs of Avadh , because the new owners put a total of four seals on this folio. The two at the bottom of the page are the earlier ones. However, the data mentioned there are difficult to decipher. They are read either as 1244h (1828–29) or as 1250h (1834–35). Both dates fall during the reign of Suleyman Jah (r. 1827–1837), whose name can be seen more clearly on the seal. The seals on the right edge clearly bear the dates 1260h (1844) and 1263h (1846–47). The manuscript came to the Avadh library by the 1830s at the latest and was still there in 1846/47, as the latest seal shows. Nothing is known about the path of the manuscript to Europe. According to a handwritten entry on fol. Iir, the British Library purchased the work on February 15, 1893 from the famous bookseller Bernard Quaritch .
Classification
Jahangir did not hold the Dārāb-nāma manuscript in high esteem. In an entry on the first folio, he only classifies them as “dowwom” (personal second ). In the rating system that Shāh Jahān and Jahāngīr in particular used for the works in their library, this corresponds approximately to a medium rank. Even if the level of the illustrations was by no means decisive for the classification of the manuscripts, the noticeably uneven quality of the images in the Dārāb-nāma may have been an important reason for Jahāngīr's judgment. In addition to harmonious compositions by masterful artists, such as Basāwan , Dschagan and Miskīn, there are the simplest pictures by less experienced or inexperienced painters, such as Ibrāhīm Lahōrī.
Studio notes
We owe the fact that the painters are known by name to the bureaucratization of the Mughal library. As far as we know today, the present Dārāb-nāma is the first manuscript in which the court librarians have consistently labeled the pictures with the names of the artists so that they could be rewarded for their work. Even if such studio notes appear sporadically in the somewhat earlier Tutī-nāma in the Cleveland Museum of Art , they did not become standard until the Dārāb-nāma . Altogether there are the names of more than forty painters. Some are represented here with their first assignable works. Basāwan, Dschagan and Sānwala also mention Akbar's court chronicler Abū'l Fazl in his Ā'īn-i Akbarī .
Fol. 31r: Dārāb in a boat. Painter: Dschagan.
Fol. 34r: Tamrūsīya and Shapur on the island of Nigar. Painter: Basāwan
Fol. 47v: Four one-eyed men observe Sītārūsch and Mihrāsb. Painter: Sarwan.
Fol. 66v: Gifts for Dārāb. Painter: Sānwala.
Fol. 107: Humāy and Raschnawad at the house of a merchant friend. Painter: Ibrāhīm Lahōrī.
literature
- Abu'l Fazl Allami: Ā'īn-i Akbarī. Volume I, translated by H. Blochmann (digitized version); Volume II (digitized version) and Volume III (digitized version), translated by HS Jarrett.
- Jeremiah P. Losty: The Art of the Book in India. London, The British Library 1982. No. 59.
- Jeremiah P. Losty and Malini Roy: Mughal India. Art, Culture and Empire. The British Library, London 2012.
- John Seyller: "The Inspection and Valuation of Manuscripts in the Imperial Mughal Library." Artibus Asiae LVII ¾ 1997. pp. 243-349.
- Norah M. Titley: Miniatures from Persian Manuscripts. A Catalog and Subject Index of Paintings from Persia, India and Turkey in the British Library and the British Museum. British Museum Publications, London 1977. pp. 8-11.
- Som Prakash Verma: Mughal Painters an Their Work. A Biographical Survey and Comprehensive Catalog. Oxford University Press, Delhi a. a. 1994.
Notes and individual references
- ↑ The last sentence of the manuscript can be found in the edition of Ṣafā in vol. 1, p. 390.
- ↑ digitized version
- ↑ Losty 1982, p. 88
- ↑ digitized version
- ↑ Seyller, Inspection and Valuation , 1997, p. 335. The words in square brackets can no longer be recognized in the partly destroyed note, but they necessarily result from the context of the text.
- ↑ digitized version
- ↑ Losty 1982, p. 88.Seyller, Inspection and Valuation , 1997, p. 335.
- ↑ Seyller, Inspection and Valuation , 1997, pp. 274-75.
- ↑ See Losty and Roy, Mughal India , 2012, p. 32.
- ↑ Volume I, p. 114, translated by H. Blochmann (digitized version).