Paper short abstract:

This paper examines fifteenth century Persian manuscripts that underwent decorative and pictorial transformations in Mughal India. Later brought to England, these books and their paintings demonstrate the difficulty faced by Western scholars in the early twentieth century to identify them properly.

Paper long abstract:

In the field of codicology, it is not infrequent to encounter a manuscript whose production occurred through several remote steps of completion. As a very mobile object, the book indeed often travelled between distant centers of production. Thus hundreds of fifteenth and sixteenth century Persian manuscripts found their way to the Indian subcontinent. In many cases, unfinished copies were completed and/or extended in local workshops. Interestingly, the decorative and pictorial alterations gave the books another character. The object seems in a way to lose its own primary intrinsic qualities and could be seen and understood as a contemporary production of the addition.

By focusing on a few belletristic copies initially made in fifteenth century Iran, the aim of this paper is, first, to investigate the reception and transformation of these books in Mughal India. I will try to show how later addition of illustrations and changes in the overall aspect obliterated the primary aesthetic characteristics of these manuscripts, turning them visually into Indo-Persian books. At last, two Englishmen, Robert Munro Binning (1814-1891) and Robert Scott Greenshields (1858-1935), both East India Company's servants eventually gave a third life to these manuscripts as they brought them back to the British Isles. Binning and Greenshields were primarily interested in the text of the works they had acquired but the latter obviously favored illustrated items. This British encounter with "Mughalized" Persian manuscripts will provide the opportunity to re-examine how the Western burgeoning history of Persianate painting and arts of the book thrived in the first third of the twentieth century.