2 - The Royal Library of Bijapur

Summary

The second chapter charts the history of the Royal Library of Bijapur, today housed in the British Library in London, through the histories of circulation of its manuscripts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It highlights the entanglement of Bijapur’s courtly and scholarly elites with the world of transoceanic Arabic scholarship. By focusing on different manuscript notes as symbols of political power, scholarly authority, and textual soundness, it illuminates the changing functions and significances of the manuscript corpus. This manuscript collection constituted a royal library collection, made up of sultanic sub-collections, but it was also an Islamicate library that preserved stories of knowledge transmission in Arabic and Persian. Over the seventeenth century, shifting intellectual and political incentives transformed the manuscript collection from a courtly collection with its economy of gift-giving into a shrine library. It served as a textual entrepôt for scholarly communities. The chapter makes the broader argument that such textual entrepôts constituted crucial sociabilities and brought together learned individuals in their shared intellectual pursuits.