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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 August 2022
This article offers a new perspective on the relationship between manuscript production in Shiraz under the Timurids and in the Sultanate states of South Asia. During the so-called long fifteenth century, between Timur's invasion in 1398 and Humāyūn's return to India in 1555, there was a surge of creativity in the arts, despite the fractured political landscape of multiple courts. The resulting material culture is vibrant and diverse and belies prevalent historiography, which often portrays this period as culturally barren. The discussion will focus on an illustrated copy of the Shāhnāma of Firdausi dated 843/1440, currently in the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna, once owned by Muḥammad Shāh, Sultan of Gujarat. A study of this manuscript and its cultural context challenges the notion that ‘outmoded’ traits are the key criteria of a Persian manuscript's possible Sultanate origin. This article further aims to initiate a re-examination of the reception and dispersal of Persian manuscripts in the Indian Sultanates and the future lives of a particular group of manuscripts made in Shiraz.
I am delighted to dedicate this article to Barbara Brend, who has inspired me with her work and supported me in my research for many years. I am also grateful to Elaine Wright for her feedback and astute comments on an earlier draft.
1 Robert Skelton mentioned the Patna Shāhnāma in his article on ‘Indo-Persian style’ painting in The Dictionary of Art (1996), p. 572. It was this brief mention that drew my attention to the manuscript, and subsequent encouragement from Robert led me to visit Patna to study it; see E. Shovelton, ‘Sultanate Painting from the North Indian Subcontinent: Three Fifteenth-Century Persian Illustrated Manuscripts’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, SOAS University of London, 2009), pp. 218–304. It has not previously been published but has recently been added to the Cambridge Shahnama Project website: http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/cemanuscript:2143527318 (accessed 15 May 2020).
2 Key publications for fifteenth-century manuscripts include: Brac de la Perrière, É., L'Art du livre dans l'Inde des sultanats (Paris, 2008)Google Scholar; Orsini, F. and Sheikh, S., After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth Century North India (Oxford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Flood, B., ‘Before the Mughals: material culture of Sultanate North India’, Muqarnas 36 (2019), pp. 1–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Chester Beatty Library, Per. 124; see Brend, B., Perspectives on Persian Painting: Illustrations to Amīr Khusrau's Khamsah (London, 2003), pp. 73–79Google Scholar.
4 British Library, Or.1403; see Brend, B., ‘The British Library's Shahnama of 1438 as a Sultanate manuscript’, in Facets of Indian Art, (ed.) Skelton, R. (London, 1986), pp. 87–93Google Scholar.
5 While preparing for his 1967 publication on Persian painting from the British Isles, Robinson first addressed the possibility of an Indian origin for certain fifteenth-century manuscripts, see Robinson, B. W., Persian Miniature Painting from Collections in the British Isles (London, 1967)Google Scholar. Later the list he worked on was published in Ådahl, K., A Khamsa of Nizami of 1439 (Uppsala, 1981), Appendix IIIGoogle Scholar.
6 Fraad, I. L. and Ettinghausen, R., ‘Sultanate painting in Persian style, primarily from the first half of the fifteenth century: a preliminary study’, in Chhavi. Golden Jubilee Volume. Bharat Kala Bhavan, (ed.) Krishna, A. (Banaras, 1971), pp. 48–66Google Scholar.
7 The Shāhnāma in the National Museum in Delhi, 54.60 dated 831/1427–28, will be discussed in a forthcoming article by the current author following doctoral research in Shovelton, ‘Sultanate Painting’, pp. 279–283. This manuscript remains unpublished since its inclusion in Fraad and Ettinghausen, ‘Sultanate painting in Persian style’, pp. 48–66.
8 John Rylands Library, MS933 and MS9, see Robinson, Persian Paintings in the John Rylands Library, pp. 97–115.
9 1) Five folios in the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington DC: A1986.177, A1986.148–51; see G. Lowry, M. C. Beach, with Marafar, R. and Thackston, W. M., An Annotated and Illustrated Checklist of the Vever Collection (Washington DC, 1988), pp. 84–85Google Scholar, no. 96.
2) Widely dispersed, including five folios in the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery: S1986.135; S1986.139; S1986.144–6; see Susan Nemazee, ‘Appendix 7: Chart of recent provenance’, in ibid., pp. 403–404. There are 12 folios in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 20.120.238–49. See Welch, S. C., India—Art and Culture, 1300–1900 (New York, 1985), p. 131Google Scholar.
10 Historians often overlook this period, but recent reassessments reveal a remarkable time of invention and creativity in South Asia. See Orsini and Sheikh, After Timur Left, pp. 1–2.
11 The pages were trimmed when re-margined. They are on average 23 x 15 cm, and the text panels 19 x 12 cm. The binding dates to the twentieth century.
12 Manijeh Bayani kindly translated the colophon on fol. 561v as follows: ‘The book called Shāhnāma was completed on Monday, last day of dhi-qa'dat (sic) al-harām of the year eight hundred and forty-three’ (3 May 1440).
13 Peyvand Firouzeh sets out the four different preface types, see Firouzeh, P., ‘Convention and reinvention: the British Library Shahnama of 1438 (Or. 1403)’, Iran 57 (2019), pp. 49–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar (particularly pp. 10–15).
14 Also, see Brend, ‘The British Library's Shahnama of 1438’, p. 87.
15 I am grateful to Manijeh Bayani for clarifying the preface.
16 For example, the Ibrāhīm-Sulṭān Shāhnāma, see Abdullaeva, F. and Melville, C., The Persian Book of Kings, Ibrahim Sultan's Shāhnāma (Oxford, 2008), pp. 28–30Google Scholar, 125.
17 See those on fols. 8v and 85v. See http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:2147354539 and http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:2147354554 (last accessed 15 May 2020).
18 Wright, E., The Look of the Book: Manuscript Production in Shiraz, 1303–1452 (Washington DC and Dublin, 2012), pp. 48–52Google Scholar and 71–80, figs. 45–48.
19 Ibid., p. 80.
20 The illumination on fol. 8v has been trimmed and repaired; part of a further upper panel of decoration remains—comprising three medallions filled with gold leaves on a blue background—above the main ʿunwān. The ʿunwān on fol. 85v is less damaged and also has a decorative panel above the main cartouche.
21 These folios are damaged with holes in the upper half, particularly around the edge, and much of the colour has faded.
22 Wright, The Look of the Book, p. 106.
23 Ibid., p. 111. The frontispiece in a Khamsa of Nizāmī, 839/1435, now in the British Library, Or.12856 (see ibid., p.110, fig. 68), shares a similar page layout and colour scheme.
24 See Appendix A.
25 Twenty illustrations represent subjects frequently illustrated in fifteenth-century Shāhnāmas. The remaining 28 are less common, including two scenes illustrating stories that feature in both the Khamsa of Nizāmī and the Shāhnāma. The illustration of ‘Īlyās and Khiḍr at the Well of Life’ depicts the Nizāmī version (fol. 367v). See: http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:2147354576 (last accessed 15 May 2020). This version is illustrated in a small number of Shāhnāma texts, including an illustration in the Mohl Shāhnāma of 841/1438 (fol. 328r), a manuscript of possible Sultanate origin. For other illustrations of this episode, see the Cambridge Shahnama Project: http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/cescene:1361691785 (last accessed 15 May 2020).
26 It is unusual to have a seal impression repeated throughout a manuscript; more research may reveal a possible explanation and determine if there are other similar examples. Two other seal impressions appear: a diamond-shaped one in the margin on fol. 290r; and a circular one on fol. 283r, set just below the usual tear-shaped one. Both of these are now illegible.
27 Part of the seal impression has been lost on trimmed pages. However, I am grateful to Alexander Morton, who was able to decipher this seal impression, from the base to the top, as follows: Line 1) Bi-rasm khizanat; line 2) al-Sultān al-murābiṭ al-muj [āhid]; line 3) Ghiyāth al-Dunyā wa'l Dīn Abū’l-Maj[d]; line 4) Muḥammad Shāh ibn Aḥmad [Shāh]; line 5) ibn Muḥammad Shāh ibn Muẓaffar; line 6) Shāh khallada Allāh; line 7) mulkahu.
28 The title given on a silver tanka from Sultān Muḥammad's reign is as follows: ‘Sultan al-salāṭīn ghiyāth al-dunyā wa'l dīn abū’l maḥāmid Muḥammad Shāh ibn Aḥmad Shāh ibn Muḥammad Shāh ibn Muẓaffar Shāh khallada khilāfatahu’, see Goron, S. and Goenka, J. P., The Coins of the Indian Sultanates (New Delhi, 2001), p. 363Google Scholar, no. G40.
29 Muslim mercantile settlements in coastal cities in Gujarat are recorded since the ninth century, see A. Patel, ‘From province to Sultanate: the architecture of Gujarat during the 12th through 16th centuries’, in The Architecture of the Indian Sultanates, (ed.) A. Patel (New Delhi, 2006), p. 70. See also Lambourn, Elizabeth, Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 For example, Maḥmūd Shāh, Sultan of Malwa, Gujarat's close neighbour, received an emissary in 1468 from Abū Sa’īd Mīrzā (1424–1469), Timur's great-grandson. As Eaton points out, the gifts Maḥmūd Shāh presented to the envoy reflected the life of a connoisseur of Persianate culture rather than a conqueror; ‘a book of wisdom, a ruby cup, a carnelian plate…’. See Eaton, R., India in the Persianate Age 1000–1765 (Oakland, CA, 2019), p. 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Day, U. N., Medieval Malwa—A Political and Cultural History 1401–1562 (Delhi, 1965), pp. 213–214Google Scholar.
31 See A. S. Melikian-Chirvani, ‘L’école de Shiraz et les origines de la miniature moghole’, in Paintings from Islamic Lands, (ed.) R. Pinder-Wilson (Oxford, 1969), pp. 124–141.
32 For a study of commercial manuscripts production in Shiraz, see Uluç, L., Turkman Governors, Shiraz Artisans and Ottoman Collectors: Sixteenth Century Shiraz Manuscripts (Istanbul, 2006)Google Scholar.
33 Ibid., p. 64.
34 Sheikh, S., Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in Gujarat 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2010), p. 61Google Scholar.
35 Dar, M. I., Literary and Cultural Activities in Gujarat under the Khaljis and the Sultanate (Bombay, 1960), p. 58Google Scholar.
36 I am grateful to Manijeh Bayani for supplying me with notes on this manuscript, now in the Al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait.
37 N. Titley, The Ni‘matnāma Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu: The Sultan's Book of Delights (London and New York, 2005); and N. M. Titley, ‘An illustrated Persian glossary of the sixteenth century’, British Museum Quarterly XXIX (1965), pp. 15–19; J. Losty, Art of the Book in India (London, 1982), pp. 66–67, no. 40. For an example of a Turkman manuscript that relates to the Mandu illustrations, see a Shāhnāma in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, MSS838, dated to the 1490s, illustrated in C. Melville and B. Brend, Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi's Shāhnāma (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 76–77, no. 11.
38 The Iranian book illustration tradition may have been the catalyst behind many Jain manuscripts produced from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, see Losty, Art of the Book in India, p. 43; also Flood, ‘Before the Mughals’, p. 26.
39 Losty, Art of the Book in India, p. 57, no. 21.
40 E. Wright, ‘An Indian Qur'an and Its 14th-Century Shiraz Model’, Oriental Art 42.2 (1996–1997), pp. 8–12.
41 See Appendix B for an updated version of the appendix in E. Sims, ‘The illustrated manuscripts of Firdausi's Shāhnāma commissioned by princes of the House of Timur’, Ars Orientalis (1993), pp. 620–623.
42 Ibrāhīm-Sulṭān died in 838/1435 and was succeeded by his young son ‘Abdullāh, born only two years earlier in 836/1432–33, who governed Shiraz in name only until 851/1447. See Abdullaeva and Melville, The Persian Book of Kings. Wright dates the manuscript from the late 1420s to the early 1430s, see Wright, The Look of the Book, pp. 114 and 191. The entire manuscript is digitised and accessible on Digital Bodleian.
43 Sims, ‘The illustrated manuscripts of Firdausi's Shāhnāma’, pp. 67–68, Appendix B.
44 However, the latter is larger and there are 31 lines of text rather than 25. The text panels in the Bodleian Shāhnāma measure 22.2 x 14.7 cm, whereas the text panels in the Patna manuscript measure 19 x 12 cm.
45 S. Rettig, ‘A Timurid-like response to the Qur'an of Gwalior?’, in É. Brac de la Perrière and M. Burési, Le Coran de Gwalior (Paris, 2016), pp. 191–205.
46 Shahnama, circa 1430–1435. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ouseley Add. 176, fol. 63v, see Abdullaeva and Melville, The Persian Book of Kings, p. 73, fig. 44, and http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:-97568833 (last accessed 15 May 2020). Also accessible on Digital Bodleian.
47 Wright, The Look of the Book, pp. 198–208. Wright tells us, for example, that in the step immediately above the illustration of ‘Rustam Kills the White Div’ (fol. 71r), the text describes Rustam thrusting his dagger into the Div's chest, while the step below the text describes the Div's blood filling the cave. The first full line below the miniature describes Rustam walking away from the cave. Therefore, the two stepped areas are immediately relevant to the story, and the illustration has been inserted just before the pace of the story changes. The steps have a textual function, emphasising the verses relevant to the illustration, and a compositional function, helping the viewer to focus on the illustration. See Wright, The Look of the Book, p. 199.
48 Therefore, only nine paintings have no stepped upper edge or detached verse.
49 The ‘break-line verse or verses’ is a term coined by Fatan Mehran to refer to the line most closely associated with the image. This is usually the line immediately before the image. See F. Mehran, ‘The break-line verse: the link between text and image in the “first small” Shahnama’, in Shahnama Studies, Vol. I, (ed.) C. Melville (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 151–169.
50 Wright, The Look of the Book, pp. 120–121.
51 Present whereabouts unknown. See B. W. Robinson, ‘Persian epic illustration: a “Book of Kings” of 1436–7’, Apollo (September, 1982), pp. 154–157. Sold at Sotheby's, 11 October 1982, lot 214 and again 16 October 1997, lot 47.
52 The scribe of this manuscript was named Jahangir, who later added al-Sultani to his name in a Khamsa of Nizāmī, 1449, ex-Kevorkian collection; see Sotheby's, 7 December 1970, lot 186 and again 22 October 1993, lot 151.
53 The pages are slightly larger in size, measuring 26.4 x 17.2 cm. Shovelton, ‘Sultanate Painting’, Vol. II, figs. 3.67–71.
54 http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/cemanuscript:-1651814428 (last accessed 15 May 2020). E. Sims, ‘Towards a study of Shirazi illustrated manuscripts of the “Interim Period”: The Leiden Shāhnāmah of 840/1437’, Oriente Moderno II (1996), pp. 611–625. This manuscript was not collected in India, but in Istanbul by Levinus Warner, the Dutch ambassador to the Sublime Porte, who bequeathed it to the University of Leiden in 1665.
55 The Leiden Shāhnāma pages measure 18.1 x 11.4 cm.
56 See http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:1009798338 (last accessed 15 May 2020).
57 Although Ibrāhīm-Sulṭān's Shāhnāma did seem to provide the model, this particular composition can ultimately be traced back even further to the Epics of 800/1397–98, see Sims, ‘The illustrated manuscripts of Firdausi's Shāhnāma’, fig. 8.
58 The illustrations are listed in Richard, F., Splendeurs Persanes: Manuscrits du XIIe au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1997), p. 80Google Scholar, no. 45. Three other later manuscripts from this group are:
1) Shāhnāma, dated 845/1441, now in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington DC, lent by The Art and History Trust Collection, LTS1995.2.189, see Soudavar, A., Art of the Persian Courts—Selections from the Art and History Trust Collection (New York, 1992), pp. 71–77Google Scholar, no. 27.
2) Shāhnāma dated 847/1443, now in the Gulistan Palace Library, Tehran, Ms.2173, see Sharifzadeh, S. A., Namvarnama (Tehran, 1991), pp. 21–32Google Scholar.
3) Shāhnāma, dated 848/1444. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, Supplément persan 494 and Cleveland, 45.169 and 56.10, see Richard, Splendeurs Persanes, p. 81, no. 46
59 There are five folios in the British Museum and 25 in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The remaining text pages are dispersed and their current locations are unknown. The text panels and illuminated double-page are close in size to the Patna folios, although there are 23 lines rather than 25. The text panels measure 17.8 x 11.4 cm compared to the Patna Shāhnāma's measuring 19 x 12 cm. See Melville and Brend, Epic of the Persian Kings, pp. 66–67, nos. 6, 7, pp. 122–127, nos. 40, 41 and 42.
60 British Museum, 1948.10-9.049, see http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:-465791527 (last accessed 15 May 2020).
61 I am grateful to Svetlana Taylor at the Fitzwilliam Museum for verifying this measurement and Laura Weinstein for generously checking this for me on a field trip to Patna.
62 A case in point is the episode of ‘Rustam Killing the White Div’ illustrated in all the manuscripts discussed thus far, and more besides. The basic formula, which probably originated from the Bodleian version, is repeated in the other later versions, although none are identical. See Shovelton, ‘Sultanate Painting’, Vol. II, figs. 3.102–9.
63 For a more detailed examination of this topic, see ibid., pp. 259–267.
64 A. T. Adamova, ‘Repetition of compositions in manuscripts: the Khamsa of Nizami in Leningrad’, in Timurid Art and Culture—Iran and Central Asia in the 15th Century, (eds) L. Golombek and M. Subtelny (Leiden and New York, 1992), pp. 67–75.
65 Wright, The Look of the Book, p. 121 and p. 350, note 247 where Wright clarifies that she is not disputing Adamova's conclusion but that the ‘rules’ were probably less closely adhered to for commercial manuscripts, and repeated compositions could fulfil a more practical function.
66 The Patna set of illustrations contains only one that replicates an earlier work, 19 illustrating popular subjects, and 28 representing unusual subjects. The Patna Shāhnāma has between four and 14 subjects in common with manuscripts from Ibrāhīm-Sulṭān's lifetime and post-Ibrāhīm Shāhnāmas. See Shovelton, ‘Sultanate Painting’, Appendix D, pp. 340–346 for a comparison of subjects illustrated in the Patna Shāhnāma and nine Shāhnāmas dating from 1436 to circa 1450.
67 One example is ‘Jamshid Carried by Divs’ in the Cambridge Shāhnāma (http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:1733133005) and two other Shāhnāmas with near-identical compositions; see http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:2147348130 and http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:1862802853 (last accessed 15 May 2020).
68 A future statistical study of all manuscripts produced in Shiraz is needed to provide more precise information on their interrelationships.
69 See Appendix C for a preliminary list of illustrated Shāhnāma manuscripts produced in Iran but collected in India, along with those of possible Indian provenance and others of Indian origin.
70 Wright, The Look of the Book, p. 162. Wright goes further and points out that although Shiraz painting might appear stylised and rigid due to a lack of ability on the artist's part, more careful analysis shows that depicting the world around them in a more naturalistic manner was simply of no interest to them.
71 Sims, E., Peerless Images: Persian Painting and its Sources (New Haven and London, 2000), p. 54Google Scholar.
72 Wright, The Look of the Book, p. 291.
73 The current discussion is based on the dispersal of the Shāhnāma text in particular; numerous other texts of Persian origin were collected, written, and created in Sultanate India.
74 Interestingly, two of the three ‘royal’ Shāhnāmas commissioned by Timurid princes were brought to India, perhaps arriving not long after production. Ibrāhīm-Sulṭān's Shāhnāma, now in the Bodleian Library, was collected by Sir Gore Ouseley, and was likely to have been in India for some time before then, see Abdullaeva and Melville, The Persian Book of Kings, p. 11. The Shāhnāma of Muḥammad Jūkī of circa 1444 was owned by a succession of Mughal emperors, the first of whom was Bābur, founder of the dynasty; Royal Asiatic Society, Persian 239. The manuscript may have arrived in India before the Mughal dynasty was established. Brend remarks that the manuscript was ‘lost to sight during the second half of the fifteenth century but reappears in the sixteenth century in the hands of the Mughal dynasty’, see Brend, B., Muhammad Juki's Shahnamah of Firdausi (London, 2010), p. 148Google Scholar.
75 However, several early fourteenth-century Shāhnāmas feature this scene. For example, the first small Shāhnāma in the Chester Beatty Library (Pers. 104, fol. 22r, of circa 1300), see http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:29318919 (last accessed 15 May 2020) and an Inju Shāhnāma in the Chester Beatty Library (Pers. 110, fol. 17v, dated 1341), see http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:-788542070 (last accessed 15 May 2020).
76 ‘Death of Kāmūs’, Shahnama, dated 841/1438, British Library, London, Or.1403 (ex-Collection Jules Mohl), fol. 171r. See: http://shahnama.lib.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/card/ceillustration:-402111475 (last accessed 15 May 2019).
77 Brend noted the ‘slant of the animal's hindquarters and the rhythm of its trot’ in her argument for an Indian origin of this manuscript; see Brend, ‘The British Library's Shāhnāma of 1438’, p. 88.
78 ‘Rustam pulls the Khāqān of Chin from his elephant’, Shāhnāma, 840/1437, University Library, Leiden, Cod.Or.494, fol. 180r, see https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/view/item/2034887#page/187/mode/1up (accessed 15 June 2022). Sims notes that the text describing Timur's invasion of Delhi of 801/1398 in the Ẓafarnāma mentions the visual effect of the Indian army mounted on elephants, but the illustration shows no elephants. Sims pointed out that this may be because the artist had never seen an elephant. See Sims, ‘Ibrahim-Sultan's illustrated Zafar-nameh’, p. 188, fig. 14.
79 Victoria and Albert Museum, IM 89-1936, see Guy, J. and Swallow, D. (eds), Arts of India, 1550–1900 (London, 1990), p. 18, fig. 4Google Scholar.
80 ‘Marudevī mounted on an elephant on his way to meet Rishabhanātha’, Kalpasūtra, Mandu, dated 1439, National Museum, New Delhi, no. 49.175, fol. 50r; see K. Khandalavala and M. Chandra, ‘A consideration of an illustrated manuscript from Mandapadurga (Mandu) dated 1439 A.D.’, Lalit Kala vol. 6 (1959), pl. IV, fig. 14.
81 Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, Berlin, Or.fol.4181, see Shovelton, ‘Sultanate Painting’, pp. 155–217.
82 The elephant depicted in the foreground of the Mughal painting ‘The Maharana of Mewar submitting to Prince Khurram’ of circa 1618 also shares the same domed headed profile as those in the Patna paintings, and the Mughal elephant is also unadorned. See S. Stronge, Painting for the Mughal Emperor. The Art of the Book 1560–1650 (London, 2002), p. 125, pl. 90. Like the Mughal artist, the Patna artist depicts an elephant closer to life and, at the same time, refers to depictions from indigenous artists rather than Persian predecessors.
83 Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms.Minutoli 134, fol. 181v, dated 1830, made in Kashmir; see the Shāhnāma website: http://shāhnāma.caret.cam.ac.uk (last accessed 15 May 2020).
84 See Abdullaeva and Melville, The Persian Book of Kings, p. 87, fig. 56.
85 Many fragments of block-printed textiles from Gujarat, dating to the fifteenth century, have been discovered in Egypt; see Barnes, R., Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, 1997), Vol. I, pp. 78–84Google Scholar; and Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, p. 120.
86 See Barnes, Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt, p. 33, no. 123: This fragment displays the same combination of vine leaves and finials, or bodhi leaves, see also nos. 125 and 145 for other similar vine leaf designs.
87 See ibid., p. 34, no. 127. Although the colours of these block-printed designs are usually blue or red, the patterns resemble friezes found in Patna illustrations.
88 Fraad and Ettinghausen, ‘Sultanate painting in Persian style’ was the first attempt to publish a body of material of possible Sultanate manuscripts. For a condensed and more precise version of the main points, see the summary of this article in Robinson, B. W., Persian Paintings in the John Rylands Library (London, 1980), pp. 95–96Google Scholar, where he added a few more manuscripts to the corpus in his catalogue of the John Rylands Library.
89 Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, p. 73.
90 The Tughluq dynasty was founded in 720/1320 by Ghiyāth al-Dīn Tughluq. The two most notable rulers, with the longest reigns, were Muḥammad ibn Tughluq (r. 725–752/1325–51), son of Ghiyāth al-Dīn, and Fīrūz Shāh (r. 752–790/1351–88).
91 Prasad, I., History of the Qaraunah Turks in India (Allahabad, 1936), p. 311Google Scholar; see also K. C. B. Elliot and M. R. A. S. Dowson, The History of India as told by its own Historians: The Muhammaden Period/edited from the posthumous papers of the late Sir H. M. Elliot by John Dowson, 8 vols (London, 1867–1877), Vol. 3, pp. 235 and 580.
92 The exact date of this dictionary is unknown, but it was written around the turn of the fourteenth century. Siddiqui, H., Perso-Arabic Sources of Information of the Life and Conditions in the Sultanate of Delhi (New Delhi, 1992), p. 79Google Scholar. The author of another key dictionary from this period, Hājjib Khairat Dihlavī (or Ma ‘ruf), describes Firdausī's Shāhnāma as the most popular work of his age; see Siddiqui, Perso-Arabic Sources, pp. 78 and 82. See also Shovelton, ‘Sultanate Painting’, p. 123.
93 Shovelton, ‘Sultanate Painting’, pp. 155–217.
94 Ettinghausen, R., ‘The Bustan manuscript of Sultan Nasir-Shah Khalji’, Marg 12 (1959), pp. 40–43Google Scholar.
95 Brend, Perspectives on Persian Painting, p. xxi.
96 Titley, The Ni‘matnāma Manuscript.
97 Interestingly, Mughals rulers were less keen on the Shāhnāma, particularly by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see L. Weinstein, ‘Illustration as localization: a dispersed Bijapuri manuscript of the Shahnama’, in Shahnama Studies III: The Reception of the Shahnama, (eds) G. van den Berg and C. Melville (Leiden and Boston, 2018), pp. 347–372. See also Wright, E., Muraqqa': Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (Hanover and London, 2008), p. 240Google Scholar.
98 Seven illustrations survive from this manuscript, separated from their surrounding text. These loose folios form part of a distinct group of Sultanate manuscripts that display a mixture of Persian, Mamluk, and Indic sources. For a discussion of this manuscript, see Shovelton, ‘Sultanate Painting’, pp. 79–81. See also Brac de la Perrière, L'Art du livre dans l'Inde, pp. 270–271, no. 2, pl. 4.
99 This manuscript once contained at least 350 folios, 67 with illustrations. It is now dispersed, and the whereabouts of only 17 illustrations are known. For a discussion of this manuscript, see Goswamy, B. N., A Jainesque Sultanate Shāhnāma and the Context of pre-Mughal Painting in India (Zürich, 1988)Google Scholar.
100 E. Shovelton, ‘Remaking Persian narratives in the Indian Sultanates: A Khamsa of Niẓāmī in the British Library’, forthcoming.
101 A. Behl, Love's Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545, (ed.) W. Doniger (New York, 2016).
102 Q. Adamjee, ‘Strategies for Visual Narration in the Illustrated “Chandayan” Manuscripts’, (unpublished PhD dissertation, New York University, 2011).
103 Viewing this period in South Asia through the lens of religion and invoking a binary notion of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ overlooks ethnic groups, such as Turks or North India's martial clans, later called Rajputs. Society and culture under the Sultanates were far more nuanced and transcultural than scholarship has traditionally perceived. See Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, pp. 3–10.
104 Khandalavala, K. and Chandra, M., New Documents of Indian Painting—A Reappraisal (Mumbai, 1969), p. 23Google Scholar, pl. 3.
105 Islam first made contact with the Indian subcontinent when Arab armies crossed the river Indus in the early eighth century and conquered Sind. However, it was not until 1192 that the last Rajput ruler of Ajmer and Delhi was defeated in the Battle of Tarain by Muḥammad ibn Sām, son of the Ghūrīd ruler Ghiyāth al-Dīn, and the Delhi Sultanate began. While the empire grew rapidly, the southern region of the Deccan was only conquered in the early fourteenth century. The Bahmani Sultanate established independence after a revolt among the officers of the Delhi Sultanate stationed in the Deccan.
106 Ẓafār Khān, the son of a peasant who converted to Islam, was sent by Sultan Firuz Tughluq to restore central authority in the region, see Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, p. 119.
107 The most powerful of those in the northern subcontinent besides Gujarat were neighbouring Malwa; to the east, Bengal; and the north, Delhi and Jaunpur. Other states were Sind and Punjab in the Indus valley, and Khandesh between Malwa, Gujarat, and the Deccan. The three main areas that remained under Hindu control were the Rajput dynasties to the northwest, the Vijayanagar empire to the south, and Gondwana to the east.
108 Digby, S., ‘After Timur left: North India in the fifteenth century’, in After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India (Oxford, 2014), p. 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
109 E. C. Bayley, The History of India as Told by its own Historians: The local Muhammadan Dynasties (New Delhi, 1886, reprinted 1970), p. 129.
110 The scholar and grammarian from Egypt, Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Damāmini, came to the court of Ahmadabad and is known to have completed at least three works in Arabic, all dedicated to Aḥmad Shāh, see Sheikh, Forging a Region, p. 206. For examples of unillustrated manuscripts that survive with dedications to Sultan Aḥmad Shāh, see S. Azmi, ‘The glimpses of medieval India Gujarat through the pages of Mirati Sikandari’, in The Growth of Indo-Persian Literature in Gujarat, (ed.) M. H. Siddiqi (Baroda, 1985), p. 58.
111 One of many migrants from Iran who settled in Gujarat was ‘Abd al-Husayn b.Hājī, who wrote the latter part of the Ta'rīkh-i Maḥmūd Shāhi. Sultans of Gujarat were prolific patrons of literature and learning, including religious subjects and texts on music, medicine, farriery, philology, astrology, and astronomy. Sheikh, Forging a Region, pp. 206–207.
112 During this period, scholars and poets began to write in early Gujarati and Gūjarī, see ibid., p.6.
113 Ibid., p. 95, n. 6.
114 According to Firishta, she poisoned him to death on the initiative of some of his officers. See Firishta, Abū’l-Qāsim, Ta'rīkh-i Firishta, History of the Rise of Mahomedan Power in India till the Year 1612, (trans.) John Briggs, 4 vols (London, 1829; reprint Delhi 1981), Vol. 4, p. 76.
115 Samira Sheikh points out that of all literary genres, stone-carved epigraphs give a clear picture of the economic and political relations of the day; in the records of the construction of buildings, legal proclamations or religious donations, see S. Sheikh, ‘Languages of public piety: bilingual inscriptions from Sultanate Gujarat, c.1390–1538’, in After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India (Oxford, 2014), pp. 186–209.
116 Ibid., pp. 193–194.
117 This was the date that the text was completed. The illustrations were added after the text was written; it would have been unlikely to take two years to complete the paintings, so there is still a gap between completion and the addition of seal impressions. Of course, Muḥammad Shāh may have acquired the manuscript straight after its completion before coming to the throne and added his seal impressions later.
118 Alka Patel challenges the ‘centre-periphery lens’ usually employed when considering the multiple architectural traditions of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries in South Asia, see Patel, A., ‘From province to Sultanate: the architecture of Gujarat during the 12th through 16th centuries’, in The Architecture of the Indian Sultanates (Mumbai, 2006), p. 69Google Scholar.
119 Wright, The Look of the Book, p. 346.