Between the Foreign and the Familiar A Qurʾan Manuscript and Its Later English Annotations at the East India Company (original) (raw)

A Jewish Qur'an: An Eighteenth-Century Hebrew Qur'an Translation in Its Indian Context

Religions, 2023

This essay places the Washington Library of Congress Heb. Ms 183, a Hebrew Qur’an translation from eighteenth-century Cochin, in its South Indian context. After pointing out important general differences between early modern European and South Asian inter-religious cultures and attitudes to translation, this essay analyzes three salient differences between Ms 183 and its Dutch source. Then, the essay scrutinizes three relevant and interrelated contexts: the eighteenth-century Indian diplomatic culture of owning and exchanging scriptural translations; the social position of Muslims and Jews as ‘guests’ and diplomatic brokers; and the rise of Muslim military power in Malabar. On this basis, I argue that this Hebrew Qur’an translation was intended to be cultural– diplomatic capital for Jewish diplomats dealing with Muslim rulers, indicating that not only rulers translated the scriptures of their subjects but also subjects those of their rulers. In addition, by showing how the Mysorean rulers implemented Islamic reforms and how Jewish practices were attuned to majoritarian religious practices, the essay suggests that Ms 183 was also meant to serve Jewish religious purposes, making this manuscript possibly a rare instance of using non-Jewish religious scriptures for Jewish religious practice.

Patronage over Literature, Translation and Print: Some Remarks on 1809 Edition of the Dabestān-e mazāheb Published in Print with the Support of the East India Company

Cracow Indological Studies

Dabestān-e mazāheb is an interesting example of a 17th century text on various faiths and creeds of the Indian subcontinent. The present case study looks at possible explanations for its popularity claimed for it in the editorial note found in the first printed edition (1809) while simultaneously analysing reasons behind selection of this particular text for a print publication in the light of patronage extended by the East India Company to translation and printing of selected Indian writings. The process in this case is well documented in the correspondence of British officials such as Sir William Jones, but as to the reasons for the printing even more may be deduced from the highly ornate Persian peritext appended at the end of the 1809 edition by the book’s editor, Nazar Ashraf. The note provides an interesting testimony to the evolving fusion of the long tradition of manuscript writing and the advancements in printing which the paper explores.

Convention and Reinvention: The British Library Shahnama of 1438 (Or. 1403)

Iran Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, 2019

The geographic origin of the fifteenth-century illustrated Shahnama manuscript Or. 1403, held at the British Library, has been the subject of unresolved scholarly debate. Stepping away from the binary alternatives that have been suggested for the attribution of the manuscript in the past (Iran versus India, and Delhi versus the Deccan), this essay focuses on text and image and their potential relationships in its preface-frontispiece set and how these would have addressed the manuscript’s possible audiences. Evaluating the ways that the preface and frontispiece reimagine the established visual and textual conventions of Shahnama manuscripts in the fifteenth century, the study explores the manuscript’s engagement with a range of possible socio-historical settings, all of which reflect the complex circulation and reception of Persianate modes of culture between Iran and India in this period.

The Bohra Manuscript Treasury as a Sacred Site of Philology: a Study in Social Codicology. In Philological Encounters 4 (2019) 182-201

The Bohra Manuscript Treasury as a Sacred Site of Philology: a Study in Social Codicology, 2019

This article examines the social meaning of philology in Arabic from the perspective of a contemporary Indian Shīʿī Muslim community, known as the Alawi Bohras. Rather than approaching philology as a tradition of canonical texts, it considers philology as a social act: a set of practices that are imbedded socially in the community. We focus on the community's khizāna, or manuscript treasury, and investigate its social role as a sacred site of philology, its Arabic manuscripts being only accessible to the highest clerics. Even though inaccessible to believers, the khizāna manuscripts have rich social lives as objects of concealment, agency, and healing. These social lives precisely lay bare the encounter between the philological and the community. As a study in social codicology that explores this encounter, the case of the Alawi Bohras is an invitation to rethink the social meaning of philology and manuscripts in Muslim societies.

Book Review India and the Islamic Heartlands An Eighteenth Century World of Circulation and Exchange

Drawing on the chance discovery of a number of letters exchanged during the period, in India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange author Gagan D.S. Sood attempts to capture the lives of ordinary people to reconstruct the connective tissues of a world lived beyond the purview of the sovereign. While the nature of the source material occasionally limits the book's scope of analysis, this work successfully weaves together an insightful narrative to draw attention to a neglected arena and period, finds he calls 'tissues', of a series of letters exchanged among the people inhabiting this arena of circulation, whose interrelationships were governed by 'large distances and long silences'. Sood successfully weaves a narrative on the basis of these exchanges to point out the obvious lacuna in existing scholarship on the region. According to him, this has largely ignored the ways in which polities, authorities and the cosmic and temporal world were imagined or understood by those who lived mostly outside the direct purview of the sovereign. By demonstrating the unabated circulation and exchange of trade, ideas and worldviews despite the continuous political turmoils that the region had been undergoing in the eighteenth century, this book opens up a fresh line of enquiry about the ways in which people of the region engaged with their polities and networks of circulation, and how these shaped their world and worldviews. Developing the narrative on the basis of letters that the author found in the British Library and which did not reach their intended recipients due to the British seizure of the ship, Santa Catharina, that was carrying them, the book is divided into eight chapters as well as a very informative introduction and conclusion. The letters were written between 1745 and 1748 by the people – scholars and traders, partners and agents, men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, nephews and uncles – who inhabited diverse spaces, cultures and linguistic spheres from Basra to Bengal. The letters cut across the political and cultural boundaries of many empires and polities and are written mostly in Arabic and Persian, although a few are also written in Latin and Hebrew scripts. The writers of these letters were those who lived in the 'administrative, commercial, educational and spiritual centers of Islamicate Eurasia, and who actively participated in its arena of circulation and exchange' (24). However, they remained mostly, if not totally, outside the direct purview of their sovereigns, and thus together the letters provide glimpses of everyday lives in the region during this era in its various vicissitudes.

The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya: Persianate Knowledge Between Person and Paper

Modern Asian Studies, 2010

This paper addresses several questions that appear preliminary to understanding the circulation of knowledge in early modern India (circa 1500 to 1800): What work did writing do? What was the relationship between writing and speaking? And what can our answers to these questions tell us about cultural formulations of 'knowledge' in this period? After addressing these questions on 'modes' of circulation, this paper turns to the more practical issue of 'means' of circulation, looking at the intersection between religious and bureaucratic patterns of the production and consumption of books in the absence of printing in Indian languages. Overall, the paper argues for early modernity as a period of tension and transition between 'anthropocentric' and 'bibliocentric' attitudes towards the location and thence circulation of knowledge in a Persianate context. The issues are exemplified by reference to the various and, at times, perplexing uses of books in an imperial dervish lodge or takiyya.

The Oldest Manuscripts from India and Their Histories

Cracow Indological Studies

This essay examines a copy of the Qur’ān from India, now in the India Office Collections at the British Library. The manuscript, registered as IO Loth 4, belongs to the reasonably large group of early Qur’āns that date to the eighth and ninth centuries CE. While some of these manuscripts have charted histories, what is not widely known is that early Qur’āns also made their way to India. There they have their own special histories, meanings and associations. In attempt to address the long ‘after-life’ of these manuscripts, this paper will examine a single example that arrived in India in the Mughal period and was eventually presented to the Library of the East India House by Lord Dalhousie in 1853. While not the earliest of the Qur’āns brought to India, it nonetheless dates to the circa ninth century CE, making it older than any surviving manuscripts in Sanskrit or Prakrit in India proper.